Sun

Couple days ago I was sitting in a bus traveling through English countryside. I had a book open, perhaps my favourite book of all times - the Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. I was reading it in small doses and every now and then I was looking outside from the window. Then "it" arrived. There was nothing but pure joy. It would be wrong to say that I smiled because “I” was not there. It lasted surprisingly long, perhaps longer than ever before. Finally it slowly waned away, like a sun being covered by the clouds. Later on I tried to analyze what was that - was it satori, sudden awareness? Was that uniting with the universe for a moment (meaning that one stopped imagining being separate entity)? Was that love? Was that true nature of everything and everyone? Was that total absence of fears and desires? Was it some of those, all those or none of those? In the end I stopped speculating it and realized that whatever it was, there was no need to categorize it.

Here’s a quote what I was reading when the clouds started to shift away:

"The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths . . . There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus, or "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid" . . . He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law . . . The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization - absolute and unconditional - of its own particular law . . . To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being . . . he has failed to realize his life's meaning.

The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao", and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things."
~C.G Jung

While I was wondering what to write about this incident I stumbled into this quote of Sufi master Rumi, which might express experience without experiencer.

Words,
I speak no words.
What can I say?
I left my voice outside the sama.
Feel, Dance, Whirl,
Love, Breathe,
Be….
I watch my bliss, from outside.
This body, that holds, my self,
Like the skin of a drum
Holds sound, reverberates.
Spinning in the arms
Of a presence,
Longing, longing
For sound and breath
And dance to be one.
Yearning, for there to be no I
No word.
Just the silence of the Universe
Spinning, whirling,
In slow kaleidoscopic motion,
Like the sun and the stars,
In the dance of love.