Ink and Vein

“You are not this mind, you are not this body.”

Geeta’s voice came to us through the speaker, the laptop propped up on a stack of books, all of us seated around the large dining room table.

Several people nodded, accepting the words.

“Everything is one,” Geeta continued. “This illusion that we are all separate, it is illusion. We are all one, we all come from the same energy. We all are the same energy. It’s all one. We are not divided. It is all unity. It is the illusion that we are separate that causes suffering. We are all one. We are all one.”

This was one of many moments on the yoga retreat when I realized my thinking was at odds with those around me. It is not a new experience for me, and it wasn’t unpleasant, though it was isolating at moments. I didn’t feel the need to argue. I sat and listened.

Later when I was talking to Mary I said, “If we are all one, if it is all united, then how is it that my body and my mind are not also united, and also me?”

Geeta and I won’t agree on this point, and this is one of the philosophical points I will always, always get stuck on when discussing reality as an illusion. Does this mean that my brain somehow cooked up the entire world, and all the joys and the atrocities in it? Some would say yes, that because I think of the negative, the negative manifests.

Whether the separateness of our existence is illusion, for me we still come up against the reality of being energy encased in a skin suit, and that skin suit walks around and interacts with other skin suits. We have a bunch of governments, religious systems, centuries of history and life that those skin suits have been living.

Sure, we’re all just energy, but we’re energy living and bumping up against each other, and we have to navigate that world. This is where we cannot ignore what’s going on around us, or withdraw. Perhaps, at times, we need to withdraw and take breaks so we can tend to our well-being, so we can gain perspective, so we can learn, but permanent withdrawal, as some decide to do, disregards our reality and what we can do to alleviate suffering within it.

On my way home, driving through Colorado, sitting on highway 50 between Montrose and Gunnison, my YouTube playlist gave me a song I’d never heard before, and I listened to it almost every day for several weeks after I returned because it resonated with my reflection on Geeta’s words.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gAbqaW_xLlQ%3Fsi%3DhK0KgRM4y17ERGtT

I’m a long way from the land that I left

I’ve been running through life and cruisin toward death

If you think that I’m scared you got me wrong

If you don’t know my name, you know it now

I belong bodily to the earth, I’m just wearing old bones of those who came first

There’ll be many more flames when mine is gone

They will build me no shrines and sing me no songs

This song hit me in a way that I can’t quite describe or explain, though at the time it felt like perfect synchronicity with my experiences and with the concepts I’d been grappling with even before the retreat.

The idea of wearing bones that belong to the earth, bones that have been worn by others, is one that I can understand. All beings, human and non, living and non, came from the same source and we recycle that material with each new life. This is where I am not this body, I am not this mind takes me: I am not just this body; I am not just this mind because I am made up of so much more than my individual self.

In the next verse, we get the line “I’ve been unraveling since my birth/ gonna wander out there and see what I’m worth.” These words resonated with me as well, because I feel that my life has been a series of stumbling, tripping, that has unmade each successive version of me. People speak of becoming, but for me, unbecoming rings more true.

In the chorus, we hear, “Find me way out there/ there’s no road that will bring us back/ when you follow the strange trails/ they will take you who knows where.” And as I sat, stuck in traffic on that mountain highway, I felt hope and optimism in these lines. I felt I had made a shift, and that there was no going back to the person I was before. I experienced another unbecoming.

I’m not sure yet exactly where I’m going, but there is no going back.