Gurunistha’s life in a Northern Californian monastery.
And into the river they drown
the lucky ones
but my false ego makes me float
like a bloated bath duck
and I’m gliding on the surface of life
Let me sink forever
by the weight of the words of the wise
I will learn to breathe water
and never break the surface again.
A little over a week ago there was a lightning storm here (which happens almost every night now that the rainy season is advancing). One of the lightnings apparently hit the creek where our microhydro turbine is and the electric surge traveled in the cables to our inverter, which shut down. After about 10 minutes to the blackout Mayapur went to turn the invereter on, and it hit big spark and said “boom”.
So we were out of electricity. Not too bad, though, considering the climate. We read and did mantra meditation in the candle lit cabin in the evenings and mornings, and it reminded me of my family’s summer cottage in my childhood days. There was no electricity and in the evenings my dad would tell us some quite entertaining bedtime stories of his own invention, in the candle light. Now my bedtime stories are the events of Caitanya-caritamrta, quite entertaining as well.
The only real bummer was that the fridge didn’t work. We would just use up what ever milk we got the same day (by the evening it would turn into yogurt by itself) and didn’t buy anything that would get spoiled easily.
A self-sufficient lifestyle requires a real jack-of-all-trades attitude, which I don’t naturally possess at all. But when you get three electrical parts from the US that you have to replace in the inverter or otherwise you won’t have electricity for months, there are no options other than to figure things out. We did eventually fix the inverter, although there were all sorts of complications from heavy rainstorms to bad test batteries, and as we finally got the thing working long after the sun had finsihed her duty for the day, and in relief got to the cabin, ready to crash after an exhausting day, we find out that there’s no water…
We fixed that too this morning, but that’s another story.
A couple of months ago we were at some local’s land here in Costa Rica, looking for a cow we were thinking of buying. As we were hopping from a dry spot to another on a muddy path between two pastures, Vrindaranya, one of our monks, said how she had been thinking how everything in nature seems very beautiful from a distance but at a closer look is actually very brutal, soaked in death and killing. I remember hearing that when Charles Darwin fully came into terms with the idea of survival of the fittest, he completely lost his interest in the so-called finer things of life, like literature, philosphy and other arts, because he saw life for what it was.
Or at least what it is for the material mind. I see a lot of death here. The dogs fight and disappear, the cows are being cargoed to slaughterhouses in dirty trucks, our floors and window sills get filled with dead bugs in a matter of hours. Life is much more bare and basic here. Less polished. It’s more obvious how life really is a struggle for space, shelter, food and sex. Cities are made for humans, jungles are not. Here, instead of being the kings and queens, humans are a part of a bigger whole where they don’t only eat, they get eaten too.
Why does death feel so bad and cruel, although it’s an inseparable part of life as we know it? I’ve even heard of monkeys and elephants who fast themselves to death after their partner dies. That doesn’t make any sense biologically. I can only conclude in my own mind, that death isn’t really a natural part of existence, because we are eternal and we have an intuitive sense that death doesn’t fit the picture.
My teacher gave a great talk some time ago in which he said that we only die as much as we identify with our present body and psychology. If you identify with your consciousness and not with its external symptoms, there’s no death. The apparent death is just like waking up, and continuing your service from where you left off.
My elementary school teacher used to love to repeat the saying, “Only two things are certain in this world: death and taxes”. I have to disagree. Only taxes are.
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