Tag: Awareness

The Haiku Moment

Two things, I have for you this time: Haiku, and a moment.

Haiku is a seventeen-syllabic poetic form of Japan that came into independent being in the 17th century. Every single Haiku, thus, is a really tiny poem of three lines.

And, a moment is all you and I ever have…

Reading and writing Haiku is like having a personal door into the great continuum of bliss. Much like other forms of moving or still meditation designed to snap one into a direct experience of being, Haiku breaks through the cloud of the moment to reveal many paths to that one destination. Great Zen masters are known to use Haiku to knock the disciple out of his compulsive affinity to thinking. For the “peace that passeth all understanding” needs not understanding, but intense awareness of the moment. And Haiku is the kind of poetry that is made up of the writer’s graceful presence in and to the moment. Pieces of Haiku are whole moments captured in words, together with their tremors of birth and their bliss-giving arrangements.

A lot of pleasure-seekers (don’t we all begin there!) miss the point of Haiku, because they are accustomed to looking linearly for a tale. Once upon a time…to what next…to happily ever after. Whereas, a Haiku is a vertical dive into the moment. There is no next. And that is the thrill of both a moment and a Haiku; you do not have to wait for the euphoria to greet you at some point along the story. It is ready and served. It is a meeting that is already in process. Come, it says. And you, if you have thankfully and brilliantly failed by now at finding meaning in horzontal pursuits, for failure is a must, you are free to step into this Haiku moment, just like The Fool of the Tarot hall of fame steps trustingly into the void.

To understand the ingredients of a Haiku, you have only to look to those moments of your life where you have felt a sudden surge of radiance fill your body-mind. Where your being seemed to have expanded out of the mental straitjacket it habitually wears… You will find that those experiences sprung literally out of and as a contradiction of feeling in your heart.

Overwhelming joy that made you cry.
Startling awareness, when you became aware of being the singular ‘you’, but within the paradox of being ‘all of it’.
Wonder, when on the wings of the commonplace came the magnificent.
Deep Love, when you, as another, became the other.
Utter silence, which surrounded you in the heart of utter chaos.
Courage, which rose on the shoulders of stone cold fear in your heart.

One could go on listing. And it would be a sublime list. But more sublime is the fact that it is in opposition that harmony arises. Two notes struck against each other, at their height, create that ‘moment’ which we term as a ‘glimpse’ of rare beauty. Is beauty rare, though? No, obviously not. But we aren’t there at her feet constantly to know her presence her at all times.  

And that is what each Haiku is. An ever-extended invitation into beauty. An exquisite contradiction of feeling captured in seventeen syllables, set into three lines of 5-7-5 each. Further, to be able to capture the contradiction so necessary for the experience of the moment, Haiku has two ingenious rules. One, there has to be a ‘kireji’, a cutting (contradicting/contrasting) word. Two, a ‘kigo’, which is a seasonal reference, for what else would we dive into if not the flowing seasons from which moments spring forth? Thus, you are lulled in, and disarmed, mind you, by the first phrase depicting beauty. Next comes the cut-word, hidden amongst the grammar, which then takes you to the gorgeous experience hidden in the last phrase, crashing through a wall. The wall of your mind.

Portrait of Matuso Basho (Hokusai, Late 18th century)

For a writer to not only be able to write Haiku, but to be able to convey that kind of a satori-like effect, he has to exist in an intense Zen awareness himself. But to convey that impact, are seventeen syllables enough? To express an ‘unspeakable’ moment? Yes, if you think about it. It is not only essential for Haiku to be short, but the fact is that this is the only way. Sparks wouldn’t be sparks if they lasted. They would become rambling stories, and, again, linear. And then they wouldn’t pull us into ‘out of the blue’. It is so scientific a format for capturing something so fluid that, it seems, it could only have been intuited.

The four masters of Haiku, known as the “The Great Four”, are Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, Masaoka Shiki, and Yosa Buson. It is to them the students of Haiku turn to grasp the way. The first and the most sublime of them all, Matsuo Basho of the Edo period of Japan, travelled far and wide and often disappeared into the wilderness of the north to catch the fleeting light of the moments of plain rural life. The following Haiku are seeds fallen from his traveling sack, poitnig us to the path. You can enjoy them unaware, and find something growing on you much after it is all over, or you can open your eyes and look around into them as an initiate would, and find your own dirt paths.

Basho writes:

"It's not like anything they compare it to 
-the summer moon."

It is only when the mind tries to compare that true beauty escapes comparison, thus becoming unparalleled. The mind’s helplessness gives birth to wonder.

"In Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo's cry
I long for Kyoto…"

This urge, which only seems mad because the poet is in Kyoto and is longing for it too, is an urge for the essence of Kyoto – the scent, which can never be possessed. Hence, the longing. The cuckoo’s cry is perhaps the poet’s cry too. It is the poet’s longing for his own essence, clear of the wandering mind… Like a wave yearning for the ocean. These are all mirrors. All paths.

"Scent of chrysanthemums…
And in Nara
All the ancient Buddhas."

The ancient and the present, held together in one moment. Also, the wisdom of the Buddhas likened to the scent of chrysanthemums. Something so fleeting, wrapped in a moment. And yet, a continuum, like every flowing moment.

“A honeybee
Staggers
Out of the peony.”

Staggers… A word indicating loss of control. An unhinging. Feet that cannot bear the beauty of the fullness received. Thus sated, the bee leaves the peony flower, just as a drunken lover leaves a tavern or a disciple leaves the master, having partaken of bliss. The moment is the peony. Bliss is in the staggering out. You and I are the bee, leaving the tavern full and mindless in the most poetic, as well as literal sense. And the nectar is the essence of us all, and of this meeting.

This is what Haiku does. It takes you into a timeless presence. All you need to do is to be there at that edge of the moment, awake. And reading Basho is to slip knowingly to that edge…where moments don’t stand out, but turn into a river of awareness. And it is a life-skill. To be able to merge with your own direction, instead of being hurled about by circumstance, is grace.

To this grace, to this dazzling way of Haiku, we kneel and kiss the ground.

The Preferred Rebellion

In these times of rippling uncertainty, when all seems to be afloat in the great sea of the unknown, I have for you the only ground of surety there ever was: This expanding moment, and the energy inside it.

A moment is all you have at any given point in your experience. It is where you always actually are, no matter where the mind maybe. When entirely in sync with that energy, it is where you feel so deeply alive so as to need nothing further. No assurance, no ambition, no security. I see it. And I have been seeing it for some years now, and so have you, but we let the knowing slip because we have been taught otherwise. (Teaching is the biggest, most fragile responsibility, I realise.)

Wooden Voices (Desh Deepak, 1980)

And that ‘otherwise’ is the dictum to keep your eyes on the future, not in the present. And, thus, to make an extraordinary and unnatural effort to ‘exist’, but not here, not now… It always felt like a double bind. Like adding legs to a snake (which already has a different way of moving!). Like turning around to catch your shadow. Like tying your bootlaces together so as to be steady.

For how does one ‘work at it; and not ‘be’ it? Existing, I mean.

On day one of your semi-maturity, you were let into the serious secret that life is a struggle. Not only were you expected to accept it, but to go on wisely without ‘wasting time’ to amass skills in order to amass wealth to, ultimately, at the end of your creative years, find a shred of happiness. Perhaps in the form of a sailboat or a fancy house, or a cottage in the hills… And when you realised that you have been cheated out of your bliss, because there was really no need to go at it in such a roundabout manner, you were told that you cannot have it all.

Thus, we plan and prepare, wait and anticipate, build and climb our mountains, or else retrospect, regret and repair, so that everything we do is designed to push away the living moment. Waves of bliss rise and crash against the rocks of our folly. And the opening available in the moment continues to sink below the shores of consciousness.

And how did our civilization get here, I ask for the umpteenth time, befuddled. And why? It seems that the obsession with the future is just fear in operation: Fear of death and for survival, both of the ego and of its carrier, this physical being. All the preparation, and the expectation that always rises entwined with it like a serpent, is nothing but a grand miscalculation made in the interest of mere continuance. And that is how we were wasted, not time, as we learned to be at war with our own natural presence.

Do you see that the fight now is against our own DNA still carrying and processing the wrong information? And now, when the accumulated fear has come to pass, we-the-half-living, the schizophrenoids, need to turn to methods, to meditation, to self-help literature, to psychiatry, to ayahuasca, to yoga and tantra, to what have you, so as to help the conscious and subconscious make peace with each other?! I turn around to look for someone to yell at. Someone whom I can give an earful. But there is either nobody, or this whole.

So then, am I despairing? I am. I am despairing and angry, for look what our structures of conditioning have brought us to. And yet…when things gets so bad they create conditions for a breakthrough. For, look, we now have the right key. We are being reoriented, correctly at long last.

And it is not as if we did not have the right directions before. But so often were the visionaries and poets and artists badgered. So often the Sufis and mystics and prophets and alchemists pushed to the fringe. So often the natives everywhere were rubbished and removed. So that even though they went pointing to the moon, our monolithic, self-obsessed and self-propagating rational fear built a wall around it. A scientific wall. A reasoned wall. A political wall. A cultural wall. A method wall. A money wall. Another and yet another…and with such lightening speed we built (for the speediest thing is the mind) that we hurtled further and further away from the door in the moment. It is as if we boarded a train that would never stop going away. If it did, it would explode in our heads.

The Answer (Rakhi Varma)

But now, we have been made to stop. And how. And I celebrate it. The walls around the moon are crumbling. And I feel tremors of life in my heart. Reason has cracks in it and compassion glimmers on blades of grass all over the Earth. And now I am born. There is huge hum of returning to natural farming, of sustainable living, of restoring ancient wisdom, of reining in not just our use of plastic, but blind desire itself. Finally, there is real work to do. Birds and animals, forests and rivers and mountains are walking into the center of our days and hours. And I begin to find love flowing through my veins hitherto dulled by homogenization. The values ascribed to ‘the market’ are up in the air and we are thinking of gift and gratitude once again. There are crashing sounds in the newspaper everyday. And the gap, the limbo has brought us rest. All the lives that we collectively lost have turned into messages of another way of being.

If we do it right this time, for there were opportunities many other times in history, we can begin to live a full and natural existence. We wanted this experience, isn’t that why we are here? And even if we cannot stop thinking, we can at least think right. If we are still confused and angry, we can also be inspired. This chaotic energy is good at last. This is the preferred rebellion, as opposed to the ordered one against our very own presence. So, I am clamoring and raising an energetic din wherever I am to drown out the voice of conditioning, whether inside me, or outside. And I ask you to join in.

As news flashes across changing screens and evening prayers sound out in temples, churches and mosques, the quiet sky reflects shifting patterns of light in a moment. A koel continues to sing deeply into the darkening evening. What prayer is that? The last bright orange of the sky is soon going to be no more. An eagle enters it in this split between being it and wanting it, and soars… And, here, I stand at the same window, which only yesterday looked out into the future. I am here in this moment now, full of rejoicing. And you are invited. Will you come? For once, let us do this together. We must walk back into the present and kiss the ground…and make home here. Not in fear. Not in the future. Not in conditioned happiness. But right here, in the watershed this moment is.