From Invisibility to Infinity
Companion music: Vajrasattva by Lama Dorje
āThere is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.ā - Charlotte Joko Beck
In my whole life, I felt perhaps the most peaceful when in the depths of Tamil Nadu in south India.
I had been cycling for half a year - I was in a new culture which to me felt inordinately exotic. Tamil Nadu is on the whole not on the international tourist trail - unlike Kerala, her neighbour. Itās filled with the roaring chaos of mega-cities like Chennai and Tiruchirappalli, the spiritual wonderlands of Tirivunamalai, Pondicherry and Kodikanal. Many of the towns I cycled through I found impossible to pronounce, let alone spell. I couldnāt decipher even the most accessible Tamil road signs. I was alone, and I felt whole.
But what was it in the dusty heat of Tamil Nadu that made my life so full? Why was I filled with joy? My cup was overflowing, but why?
I wrote at the time that āI had let go of it allā, and that I felt buoyant, cooly surfing on the unfolding of the universe.
Well the universe has not stopped unfolding since, but there is a shift in how I approach the world, a sense of lack, of gristled expectation, of striving and wanting for more/different/other.
It canāt simply be that this is what London does to the individual. London is a fabulous city to exist in. But what, at the essential core, do I feel I lack now?
This is the existential question thatās been nuzzling my subconscious recently. Was it the physical exertion of cycling that lit me up? I feel strong in the gym, but not high. Or was it the depths of the immersion into this exotic culture? I donāt feel the same for every place and every new culture. Maybe itās distance from the UK, and from the identity I had left behind? - yes this is closer to it. But I have traveled further, yet I was never otherwise quite so āoff-gridā.
In Tamil Nadu, I knew nobody, and I was invisible.
Like birds flying through the sky, I left no trace of my passing through. The people I met learned nothing about me; life was completely transient. In Zen they use the analogy of the moonās reflection leaving no mark on still water. This was me - hardly a reflection. Life was impermanent, and I was living out the impermanence I have spent so much time reading about and meditating on.
There I was - disconnected, uprooted and at home in a strange environment, writing the odd blog post, yes, but unplugged in every other sense, without a destination, with financial freedom; my clock might as well have stopped. I got younger I think. I try not to romanticise it too much (haha) but it was as transportive as a psychedelic experience. And, like having five grams of mushrooms, it was impossible not to Let Go in that environment. Here, in Tamil Nadu, in the heat and the dust I did let go; I let go of my ordinary life - and lived something radically different to my life today.
And now Iām holding on again - and it strains.
These feelings (the uprooted, disconnected, unplugged ones), are the surface level manifestations of this felt sense of Invisibility.
Invisibility soothed me. It suited me. I could live without the feeling of judgement. I was looked at, but seen through and forgotten instantly.
Everyone always says that there are a lot of people in India, and to be around such excessive crowds, there was for me a deep sense of loss of individuality - and this is the individuality which we hold on to so firmly in the West. For example, the swelling and crushing together of commuters on the trains of Mumbai and Delhi and Chennai squeeze out any sense of the individual - we become one with the tide of humanity.
And so, pickled in a culture of community and individual participation, and without my normal foundations, I let myself Be. I leant into the invisibility of existence.
This might all sound a lot like running away - and thatās what our culture tells us travel is. I never felt like I was running, though. But after being away, I felt an incredible resistance to being back. I loved being invisible, and I continued to crave it.
I took a flight to London from Geneva today.
Movement from travel shakes up fresh ideas within, and, while standing on the transfer bus, I reflected on who I essentially am, and on my time in Tamil Nadu, and this existential craving for invisibility.
Then I looked at the faces around me on the bus - occupied here, distracted there, grey, bearded, longhaired, quiffed, toothy, bored, impatient - but as they turned their gaze back towards me, I followed their eyes.
I imagined what they were seeing; surely they are not looking back at what essentially am.
From their perspective, sure, I look like a lanky 31 year old man from Worcestershire. With curly hair. Now, I strongly, surly, don't feel like I'm like that at all.
From my perspective, I am a wide open colourful space in which the world appears - filled with faces and animals and things. I am an open awareness, transparent, full and empty, a container of existence.
Glimpsing again back into myself I donāt find anything I can call Hector, although I root around. I am hollow, invisible and ungraspable.
Wherever I go, do I leave a trace? Not in the slightest. Do I age? Never. Does time make its impression? No! simply this bright happening, a bubbling over of experience that comes from nowhere and goes into nowhere.
The plane was delayed so Iām reminded of Time. Lenin once said of there being decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. But reflecting on these stranger times of life, there are quite literally afternoons when both nothing and decades happen at once - now does that make any sense? Does it need to make sense? There are times in our lives that sit beyond time.
I spent a week in Essaouira earlier this year, but it was so joyous could have been five years. I felt so at peace and at one with life. And in a similar way, I may have been cycling from Thirukkurungudi to Kanniyakumari for a lifetime, or many lifetimes, or just one solitary afternoon. Who cares? The impression it leaves is much too vague to define, too fuzzy to count up. In an ordinary sense, I have a stamp on my passport of course - I know when I entered the country. But how long does it really take to thread between rice paddies and arrive? Eternity? Itās not possible to remember.
Being back in London, everything is on the clock, itās as if there is a slow ticking - inescapable - a boom boom boom: I check my āhours sleptā in the morning. Eight. I am six minutes late for a flight. I divide life into excel columns: Aug-2027.
And yet, there is a space beyond time which permeates all of life. It comprises life! Can you count-up how in love you feel? Or how the rain feels against your face? Is it possible to forecast with any meaningful accuracy the excitement of a Christmas morning? So much of our lives are totally intangible - beyond estimation. Put another way - we only can name and number a sad minority of things - and I would say none of what matters in life should be counted.
I was not late for my flight, and I can see on my watch my stress level is 27, and my HRV is moderate at 76. None of these figures mean anything to me, they are nonsense and they are trying to make life more substantial - measurable and estimatable - than it is.
I return to myself in seat 13E and look inwards. Suddenly, I find the same invisibility I felt a moment ago ā or a lifetime? ā in Tamil Nadu. I discover the transparency of life passing through me or me through life, it's hard to say. This feeling never left me, but it was probably on the bicycle in Tamil Nadu that I truly grokked its ever-presence.
Do I forget it? Yes. All the time. Iāll have forgotten by the time I conclude this sentence. Already, I'll be straining over something totally inconsequential. Iāll be frustrated, or triggered, or caught up
And yet - if I'm lucky - Iāll fall out of the ordinary into the infinite again, for a flash.
And as we prepare to land in Gatwick, I spend a moment - as the invisible, transparent self that canāt be found nor grasped nor rejected - and I look at those around me: I again see the empty-nature-of-being that they actually are, but then I take them for the limby, hairy, skinned-up apparitions they present as and I get frustrated in the aisle as I gather my bags.
Inside of us we can find eternity, beyond the clock on our wrists; we are infinite, stretching far beyond the frozen portholes of this Boeing. So, what to do? Embrace our invisibility; love our transparency. When someone is looking into our eyes, recognise that they are looking straight through us, presumably at nothing at all. There is, after all, nothing to find.