Stillness

I just got back after climbing a big mountain, really big, really high though may not be really difficult. This story is not about this mountain or about the climb but about a vivid dream that I dreamt one night in one of the high camps and then on waking up, remained so clear that I jotted it down in my diary (which incidentally has not even one line about the climb). So here is the dream verbatim as the way I remembered and recorded in my diary.

This is what I saw…

A wise man from a fair skinned nation once traveled to the great East, into the Himalaya and chanced upon a naked sage, who, it was reported, had remained stationary at one place beneath a towering peak for as long as one could remember. The wise man, full of wisdom and himself, drew level with the naked sage and asked, ‘why are you stationary, so seeped into stillness when everything within this cosmos is in motion?’

The naked sage smiled through his dense beard and muttered, ‘my honorable friend from far, you answer your own question; for tell me how can one study motion if one is not still himself! By moving with motion how will one know who moves; the observer or the observed?’

‘But then what about stillness, how will you study stillness by being still yourself?’ the wise man retorted, bent upon to demonstrate his superior learning.

‘My friend stillness doesn’t need to be studied. It is like the silent still water of a perfectly motionless pond across the distant hills upon which the cosmos is reflected in its entirety; the azure, the mountains, the flying birds, the sun and the moon and the rotating stars, even the passage of the seasons and the rainbows. And my friend if you can’t see it, feel it or grasp it then it is you who is still groping for stillness.

‘Life from the outside is like the rolling waves and tides of a great ocean where despite million collisions, upheavals and resistance within, they all move and flow in perfect synchronicity, in one smooth pre-designated patterned path; therefore there is life as there is death like the trough and crest of a distant wave. One cannot exist without the other and without them being together neither can the flow of events. We live inside therefore we see chaos, the collision, the battle, the turmoil, but from afar and without to an observer sitting on a distant shore, we all are moving in perfect harmony like the dancing Wu Li Masters.

‘And just like the waves when they strike the shore breaking up into infinite pieces of complete disharmony, so does life break its pattern when we urge it to stop flowing its cosmic unending cycle. For life is in ‘motion’ while harmony is in the ‘wave.’

That’s where my dream ended and I woke up. The above may be a garble or riddle or plain as day. It may mean nothing or anything… go figure!