The Wisdom of the Ocean and the Sky

As I type these lines, I'm perched uncomfortably on a high stool, with my usual mug of Americano at the Coffee Bean cafe. Sometimes the cafe is a bit crowded and you don't get the spot that you like--especially one with a power point. But I'm used to working from uncomfortable places everywhere. Once you get into the flow, you are oblivious of the surrounding.

There's a depth of mind which we only glimpse during periods of deep concentration or meditation. If you manage to tap into it, you get access to a wellspring of ideas. Which is why I often ramble on for a few lines whenever I start a blog post, just to get into the groove--an invocation to the inner world.

The most rewarding thing about meditation is that, you always get some new insights on the nature of your mind. These insights help you in many ways. For example, the other day, while I was struggling for a while with wandering thoughts during my meditation, I hit upon the idea that these thoughts are like the wind and rain that continuously lash at a flag-pole. But the flag-pole holds steadfast to the ground no matter how furiously the flag gets blown and beaten by the wind. By imagining myself as the flagpole, I immediately gain strength in my concentration. All spurious thoughts had no hold on me.

This reminds me of the famous Zen story about two monks arguing about a flag. The first monk said: "The flag is waving". The second one says, "No, it is the wind that is moving". And then the patriarch who happened to be passing by, commented: "It is your mind that is moving".

It is the mind that chooses to 'move' with thoughts. Thoughts come and go and if we follow them, the mind gets distracted. Allow them to drift into our consciousness like clouds in the sky (another useful mental model to adopt when meditating). You are the sky in the background--vast, immovable, ever-present, all-seeing, all-knowing.

But what is the sky? It is also not 'something'. It doesn't have a permanent colour or substance. It is the witness of all the activities that happen within and without. And even within and without is just an illusion. There's only incessant change of which we are a part of.

The ocean is another good metaphor for our existence. The waves--if you freeze it in time, looks like some perfect sculpture, designed by some unseen hand. But no wave has a single permanent existent and even to speak of a 'wave' is an artificial division of the expanse of water which we call the ocean. Each of our individual existence is like a momentary wave. We rise and subside just as swiftly, if we view our lifetime from a cosmic perspective. And here we are clinging so desperately to a wavelet in the ocean, sparkling momentarily in the sunlight, mistaking it for an immutable diamond.

If you remain on the surface, you'll always be thrown about like flotsam. But if you dive deeper into the depths of the ocean, you merge into the whole and the wisdom of the entire ocean is yours to tap. And like a diver of the deep, a hitherto unimaginable world of beauty is finally revealed before your eyes.