Compensation of ecstacy and anguish

From heaven to hell in a week. A week which seems like a month to my mind, which feels like a year to my body.

One week for the heart to fall in love and get itself broken to pieces.

I feel like I've been in a war, literally. So drained, not an ounce of anything left in my mind, heart or body. Just a knowledge that once again I've survived a hurricane.

What is left is silence. No opposites.

No desire.

No desperation.

No joy and no sadness. Pure emptiness.

Of course its so much nicer to get to the void by our own will, whether by letting go or meditation. But the madness that love and passion can be, the destruction it can do to us- will get you there as well. Crushed by my crush- but still ending up in the emptiness. Why not, I guess.

I also guess that the extreme passion I've just experienced perhaps has no other place to end. One extreme walks together with its counterpart. And the counterpart of passion is not heart-break- it's peace and complete stillness. From a point of view of how it feels- to be in love and to be in heart-break- doesn't really even have any difference. In its end it's still the same continuous heightened pulse, loss of appetite and sleep, obsessive thinking about only one person. Ok- so there is pain, where before was anticipation and longing- twins to my mind. Passion is perhaps just a form of pain, from beginning to end, and its certainly a type of madness. :) Where does it come from and why we have it from the first glances with some and thankfully very few... it's one of the great mysteries. I guess it has to exist in a world where the opposite also exists, in a world where most of the helloes already mean goodbyes. Passion is perhaps the epitome for this crazy world where we all drift by each other, rarely making connections.

Oh the hurricanes of the heart, the thunders of feeling!

When I sit right now on my balcony, and watch the sky, also silent at this moment, only one huge cloud suspended in stillness- I am at peace. I know that this is the true reality. Nothing is there to hurt us or to make us happy. We do this ourselves.
When for a change we are empty, our feelings silenced, our egos evaporated- everything is just there.

And its beautiful. It's all just there, we are just there.

Only a breathing.

Only some music.

And perhaps poetry...

Compensation- Emily Dickinson

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

The human experience, not escapism

Most people around me seem to have an almost identical dream these days. To leave and settle down somewhere in a simple quiet place, perhaps in Asia or South-America, but any place usually which is away from the manic rut-race we know and completely sheltered by nature. To run either a tiny business like a cafe or a little farm growing their own veggies. Some feature a commune, but generally the theme is- nature, peace, self-sufficiency, separation.

I used to dream of joining a nunnery of an eastern religion but neither my inner hedonist nor my inner individualist would allow it. So I adopted this dream also. Added a little river and a boat, reminiscent of the life of the boat-man from "Siddharta" :) - life seems peachy creamy indeed, paradise manifest, or so we may think.

Somehow most of my friends and myself have refrained from running away to buy their farms, and I do believe that its something more than the lack of resources, cause if there is a will there is a way and all of us keep fulfilling our other dreams. Yes we are totally overloaded in our lives of endless information and stress and separation from nature and it feels inherently wrong to live this way. I have experienced in my times away from the society that I am in constant peace, but for me there is a nagging thought- if peace would be constant, what would happen to the one thing that matters to me above all else- growth? If humans were meant to simply stay in bliss- would they still be human? Constant bliss does not seem to be a human state.

To be human for me means to learn and to know both the heavens and hells fully, totally, to be in-between, to feel the schism of our animal and spirit natures, to overcome duality, to overcome duality, to overcome duality- till, after time, we have become saturated with the state of human being and have reached the state of total non-duality, the heaven is always the same as hell and the lessons have all been learned. The human state for me is not a horrendous state of suffering either, it is what it is, and when we let it be that- we simply grow.

With this in mind, I prefer to be in the whirlwind of the modern society and the mad world. Some periods of time I might lose myself. I might get wrapped up and overwhelmed by the mundane, by tiredness, I might forget what I have remembered, but this is the hell for me now and as far as hells go- not too bad at all compared to what I remember hell can be and compared to the joys of coming back to the unity and peace and myself once more. Each time the remembering is just a tiny bit more stable and persistent.

With this in mind, I prefer to rise and fall in the winds like the birds, at times one with the wind, playfully sliding down a gust while sometimes shaken and stirred.
I gladly suffer the pains of yoga cause I know the pain means a deeper relaxation into the unity.

I prefer to be where I am even if its chaos at times. To live in the times I have chosen to live in. Fully. Regardless of what we all suffer with. I prefer to learn fast and to play out all my karma. And I am guessing that many of the people around me, even if its not conscious, feel the same.
I also do believe that we chose to be born now, and namely now, when the evolution of consciousness is happening more rapidly than ever. The dissatisfaction is part of that, the shadows calling forth the light.


I have no doubt in my mind that our human energy will eventually come to a state like in this scene, from one of my favourite movies "Waking Life".
I felt glimpses of that total readiness of moving on when I had my labour pains of the rapture of awareness, yet soon I saw that all of our human souls have many many stories to tell.
 


Some quotes from the master of telling the human story honestly- Hermann Hesse. "Gertrude" 1910

"That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized. I now had further cause for serious reflection. Right up to the present I have never lost the feeling of contradiction that lies behind all knowledge. My life has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others, and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.

But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other. And sometimes, when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us.

We cannot evade life's course, but we can school ourselves to be superior to fortune and also to look unflinchingly upon the most painful things."

Will our kids be a different species?

Its amazing for me to completely agree and disagree with something at the same time. Yes- we are becoming and some are already a new species. No- this has nothing to do with science-which for all its best intentions we cannot keep up with cause of our tunnel vision and ignorance of the importance of consciousness. Its amazing how many know the whys and how many know the hows and how big the unnecessary wall still is between them for no reason. Science is daily confirming the ancient spiritual knowledge. Yet it refuses to take that leap. I am waiting patiently.. It is looking like a scarier future all the time without that leap.

Some Estonian songs and memories from our Singing Revolution

Just a little tribute to Estonian music. We are a tiny singing nation, music and singing is part of our culture so much that when other nations had revolutions, we had a Singing Revolution, starting 1988 to when we got our independence in 1991. I was 8 years old at the time, when my family took me to the secret nightly song sessions on our song festival ground. We didn't really know how to fight against the monstrous width and power of the Soviet Union. So we gathered in the shadows, holding hands, lighting candles, singing national songs in our language which had been forbidden for almost almost half a century. In my life I have yet to feel again the power of emotion that ran through us then, the unity in our voice, heart and longing. We embodied one wish, one will and one dream.

Estonian music is mainly lyrical and poetic hence only a few songs have been translated, its not an easy task to capture the simple yet mystical nature of the Estonian song. The same way as our family names have all to do with nature, my own means tulip for example, the songs mainly talk about the wind and mountains, silence, forests and flowers, the mystic, life, death and of course love.

So here's a couple of songs I found with translation and a clip from the movie singing revolution.

My lesson from that time was this-
No matter how dark the times.
No matter how small and seemingly powerless.
We have each other.
We can find our common voice.
And heart.
The Universe will do the rest. :) 

A musical interlude- Elgar and du Pre

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.”
― Edward Elgar, Edward Elgar: Letters Of A Lifetime



"I love the physical thing of being on the earth that bore you, I have the same feeling when I walk in a very beautiful place that I have when I play and it goes right. Playing lifts you out of yourself into a delirious place . . ."
― Jacqueline du Pre

Two poems by Doris Kareva

Two poems by Doris Kareva

(translated by Tiina Aleman)

That Which Is Can Be Expressed

I don't know if all roads lead to truth,

but every truth is a road.

The sea is salty from the glad tears

of the rivers, when they meet.

Into that apocalyptic water

I throw all my delusions,

into the clean water dregs of the times,

black pepper into the golden honey.

Suddenly there's lightness. Suddenly it's clear.

Everything is still and separate.

Idleness Is Often Empowering...

Idleness is often empowering,

recreating oneself—

just as the moon gradually

grows full once again,

a battery surely and

steadily recharges,

so everything, everyone

must have time for the self—

for mirth and laziness

time to be human.

"The vagabond is rapping at your door"- Love IS

Love comes and love goes. Well that's not exactly right. Attachment comes and goes. At least in my case. Love comes and love stays. But lasting physical togetherness has never been necessary in my case, so all through my life I have been a serial monogamist, and at this moment I am at the end-stage of another beautiful lesson through a perfect mirror.
I have been blessed with many loves in my life, and I will continue to love each of my temporary companions for a life-time. I've often wondered how one measly heart can hold so many different loves and even feared that maybe one day this capacity will run out, how many rooms does one heart have to rent out to all the travelers of love?! What a tireless builder is love to have so much energy to keep on building relationships... It is born. It dies. It is BORN! It DIES!!
And then it is born again. And it is perfect for that time again. It seems there is no limit to how many times our heart can love.
Many won't understand. Aren't we taught, wasn't I taught- to find a life-time companion, that one and only?
But then I never followed anything.
Perhaps I was born a rolling stone.
Perhaps I have sold my soul to freedom. No- that is for sure.
I have never minded that, I have rather felt the luckiest person to have experienced so much love and loss and growing and withering, and passion- that too.
In my experience there is never a more painful experience than that of true passion being torn away from you, its a violent ripping apart that has no equivalent. But with each of these experiences of unbelievable passion I have known from hindsight that the ripping apart was the best thing that could have happened- passion comes without lessons other than that of impermanence, it isn't a contract of souls to enlighten each other in specific moments in our path, there is only one goal to passion- and its the purification through its death.
And then there are those partings, like this one- which are more peaceful and more loving than the time you spent together. When two people have actually come to a realisation about their mutual influence, when the message has been shared and understood and both sides are grateful and are simply moving on.
Its strange, but I have come to love ALL parts of love, the coming together and the falling apart. The yin and the yang, the ever-turning wheel and the multitude of teachers on the way..
Love is an endless rainbow.
Love is an ever-filling spring.
Love is.

Alex Grey- CoSM. A mind-blowingly beautiful sacred journey.

CoSM The Movie is a magical new kind of documentary experience, leading audiences on an enriching and sense-heightening journey into the visionary art cosmos of world-renowned painter Alex Grey.

Grey is our guide on a cinematic pilgrimage through the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors gallery in New York City, where his vividly rendered depictions of human anatomy and transcendental imagery reflect the universal human experience with birth, death, family, love, and enlightenment as the unfolding iconic narrative.

Fusing the power of music with stunning cinematography, director Nick Krasnic channels the raw power of Grey’s art into a potent film odyssey that captures the essence of this unique sacred space, and offers rare, personal insight from one of the most significant artists of our time.

The desert tales

I was very moved by a concert I saw recently by Tinariwen- a band of Tuareg-Berber musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. 

It reminded me of the few encounters I had with people from the Sahara when I was in Morocco. I remember their piercing cunning eyes which were clear and full of both sorrow and humour, in an equal measure, their movements flowing and gentle, yet doing every action in an optimum precise way. These people had a presence which has left me till this day dreaming about the Sahara.

It reminded me of my own brief 2 day trip to the desert in the western part of India- Rajastan.

It was probably the most magical, fairy-tale experience I've ever had. My camel was a bit older so I stayed behind the rest of the group, really making me feel it was just me and her, the sand and the sun. Being in awe of the never-changing landscape as far as the eye can see, respecting the scrubs, every little insect and the miracle of life- growing out of the most inhospitable ground. Falling under the spell of the gentle sound of bells when a herd of goats or sheep were passing by, the tune of the shepard whistling along. You're in another world. A simple, natural, enchanting world you don't want to leave. Life is hard in the desert. I guess we are all living in it in a way. Trying hard to survive and at the same time trying to live without effort and to remember life's magical tune.

Terry Pratchett wrote, “Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads the have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.” 

Yet there is another way the soul of the desert emerges, it is through music and through stories..

Here's two wonderful desert stories I found online.

"Friends in the desert" 

(author unknown)

Two friends were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey, they had an argument and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand:

"Today my best friend slapped me in the face."

They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him. After he recovered from the near drowning, he wrote on a stone:

"Today my best friend saved my life."

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone, why?"

The friend replied, when someone hurts us we should write it down in sand, where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."

The Tale of the Sands - A Spiritual Sufi Story

By Awad Afifi

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.

It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: "The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream."

The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.

"By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination."

"But how could this happen?"

"By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind."

This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?

"The wind," said the sand, "performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river."

"How can I know that this is true?"

"It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream."

"But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?"

"You cannot in either case remain so," the whisper said. "Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one."

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. 

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust. 

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. 

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water. 

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. 

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. 

Dare to breach the surface and sink.” 

― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.” 

― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.” 

― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Ozymandias- Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away". 

Visionary art

A small slide show that I made of some of my favourite visionary artists and paintings.