Menoculayshunal; Looking At Thinking

Public Service Announcement; this is a wordy post. Grab a cuppa.

As I begin typing this just two hours before due publishing time, I acknowledge I have let time run away from me. Am a bit light-headed from lack of sleep. It's been a slightly odd 24 hours.

This morning (Sunday), the VERY early morning - the tiniest of small hours to be precise - I was staring out my kitchen window for the fourth night in a row in the hope of seeing some meteors. On Dec 30 and 31 there was cloud cover, yet I had the miracle of a gap right where the Quadrantids were expected to be showing. Amazingly on both those nights, I spotted three fireballs. Mind you, I stood for thirty minutes the first night and then forty minutes the second night. Given the prediction of around 50-60 per hour, that is rather a dismal showing - but it was way more than I personally was expecting as usually when anything exciting is happening in the night sky above the Hutch, it is a blanket of cloud. On the first day's night, cloudless and sub-zero, I saw precisely zero falls in the hour I stood at the window. Last night (early Sunday morning that is), again with the clear and sub-zero conditions, between 0215h and 0300h I saw four falls, one of them very clear indeed. 

Then I also saw two new stars burst into life. Lower on the horizon. Then they began to merge. Then they synchronised and moved in unison away from my window... do-dee-doo-doo-do-dee-doo-doo. I was mesmerised by the X-files moment but had to rationalise that someone was playing with drones. Either that or someone somewhere will see this post and know that I witnessed something I shouldn't, and you'll never hear from me again.

Anyway, after that excitement, there was no getting to sleep. For a couple of hours, I played around on my tablet. Then I got to thinking. It's a habit I have. Indeed, I often look at the process of thinking itself, which is part of Vedantic practice.

Now, let me bring in a question that Tigger placed in comments yesterday - "What is that in your blog banner, aunty?" The straightforward answer is that it is a doctored part of this image...

I could leave it at that, but I now go back to my thinking about thinking and so on and et cetera. It is part of my keyword for 2021, which is "RESET". As most of you are aware, my life has not been my own for the last 18 months. So much so that I almost don't recognise myself. I need to reset. 

Then this (Sunday) morning, at 0630h, still wide awake, I got up and came through to the front room, as the sky had turned as it must... and was rewarded after ten or so minutes with a most magnificent full fireball - so large I could hear it 'swooshing' through the atmosphere. It was bright, heart-lifting, mind-grabbing... and bold. On returning to bed to think some more, I turned my attention specifically to blogging. How to be bolder here? Is it possible to be bright, heart-lifting and mind-grabbing? I have been getting signals to write more deeply, more meaningfully - and indeed some such posts a couple of years past gathered good interest.

Then, opening emails, a blogpal pointed towards another blog I had not previously read. The particular article is not relevant here, but on looking around, I found that the author was someone like myself who had to embolden herself to talk about that for which she was supremely qualified.

What has that to do with this image?

That place is Saraswati Nilayam, the hall of learning on Sandeepany Ashram, where I spent the most incredible, intense, inspirational, immersive two and a half years of my life. I cannot convey to you within the scope of this post what that learning was about. In truth, it took lifetimes to arrive there... and I shall spend the rest of this life thinking about what was thought there (and maybe a few more lives, if the absorption is incomplete!) For the purposes of what I am attempting to say here today, and to assist the western understanding of study (which doesn't really relate but it's the best that can be done just now), the course of study was titled "Advaita Vedanta, Sanskrit and Indology." It is gurukula study-form, which equates to seminary for priests. It is PhD in scope, but in the Sanskrit tradition, one does not become 'doctor' but instead earn the appellation of 'Vedantaachaarya'. It quite literally means 'end-of-knowledge-teacher', or, if you prefer, professor.

Which looks very bold on the page... but fails completely in properly addressing the experience, so yet falls short of the bright, heart-lifting and probably the mind-grabbing also!

All this leads up to the announcement that 'Menoculayshunal' posts will become a regular feature (as long as I can keep my focus!) and the aim will be to try and share some small inkling of that experience. Part of the process will be an expectation that you will have questions and be encouraged to ask them. I can't promise entirely satisfactory answers. These posts will not be about 'teaching you' (that is over on Aatmaavrajanam blog)... they will be about revealing 'me' as a universal being... or at least, the little human doing her best to connect with that Higher Self. They will be about the process of thinking and then the application. They will be about the experience of uprooting from one tradition to another, adopting, and being adopted by another culture. Most of all, they will be about the process of being human.

Vedanta, you must understand, is philosophy. It underpins Hindu Dharma but is universal in nature, which is why everyone from nurses to physicists, Christians to Muslims and Atheists have undertaken and appreciated its study. Its purpose is to reveal us to ourselves, encompassing quantum theory and physics, psychology, and sociology... 

There. The first step of, hopefully, many more. What say you?