I Am Not The Body: The Journey Beyond Life And Death

March 28, 2017

"We suffer when we are confused about the nature of our identity. We suffer when we believe ourselves to be our thoughts. We suffer when we believe ourselves to be our bodies. This distortion is only dispelled through clarity of true seeing."

Text by Caverly Morgan. Photos by Vineet Teames.

I am not the body.

Countless times on this trip my husband and I give each other that loving reminder. It's a playful way to remember what is true as I am vomiting. As he struggles with digestive issues and a fever. As my feet are blistered and covered in mosquito bites. As his knees ache and feet swell for unknown reasons. As we are overcome with bedbugs. It's good to remember:

I am not the body.

Nothing brings this truth more fully into the heart of direct experience than sitting at the burning ghats in Varanasi. Nothing.

I have been to India before. I know that the holy mother Ganges is a river used for bathing. For prayers and religious rituals. For receiving the dead. Until now, I haven't seen it. Until now, I have not been to Varanasi.

It's one thing to picture a funeral ritual in which a colorfully wrapped body is set to float down the holy river. It's another to be feet away from the dipping of the freshly deceased into the water. The ritual of then burning the body. To be present for the ceremony of pouring the holy Ganges water over a son's back after his father's form is gone.

My first visit takes place from a boat. Our Indian friend takes us to the ghat. It's night. We're told that once we reach a certain point, cameras must be put away. We oblige as the boat comes close to the shore. The boat stills. We listen. We see. We learn. Not through our friend's words as much us from our experience.

Pujus are underway. Fires hiss. Heat rises. Workers bustle about with purpose, as if choreographed.

A man with bamboo tongues bows and throws a dark object into the water. It lands so close I'm splashed.

We learn that the dark object is a chest bone. Those are given to the river. After the allotted three hours of burning a body, that is what's left of a man. "Chest bone. Strong. Can do hard work," says our Indian friend.

Another splash. A hip bone. Those are given to the river. After three hours of burning a body, that is what's left of a woman. "Strong, can bear many children."

To the chorus of splashing bones in the darkness of the night, we learn more about this ancient custom.

People need to have been dead less than twenty-four hours to be burned at the ghats. If you can afford it, you can be burned with sandalwood. Most people cannot afford that.

If you were murdered, committed suicide, had leprosy, or died of other "unnatural" causes, you are burned in a gas incinerator sitting above the piles of wood. Those who died of natural causes are given to the fires on the shore.

Between the wood and the gas stands a small building containing a flame. We are told that it has burning for forty-five centuries. It is the flame that starts all flames.

If you are a pregnant woman or a child under twelve, you are rolled in fabric, with rocks, and placed in the river. Children, we are told, have not had enough worldly experience to need to be burned.

Cows, dogs, goats, water buffalo. They all are offered to mother Ganges.

Man bathing as the body of a cow floats by.

Everyone is purified and prepared for the next life at the burning ghats. Hundred of bodies a day consumed by water or fire. Hundreds of spirits a day journey on.

My husband and I return the next day to be still and absorb the experience in a deeper way. This time from the shore. We sit on the stairs of the main burning ghat of Varanasi — there's more than one here — and become quiet.

The energy of the place is almost dizzying. A dislocation of body and mind and place. Death, so directly unfurled. So unabashedly exposed. Bodies hiss in the blaze.

There are at least twelve fires burning. We notice feet and legs protruding from some of the flames. A worker see them too and with bamboo tongues, flips the legs, presses them into the heart of the fire, adds more wood.

My husband turns to me and whispers, "That just happened."

On one level, for someone of our cultural background, it's almost too much to take in. Simultaneously, it's the most perfect and natural thing in the world. I notice a moment of relief even, as death is taken out of the shadows, only existing in the light.

Consider how much we fear death. Consider how happy we are to hide away what gets deemed as gruesome. Consider how our habitual tucking away of death feeds our conditioned denial of its inevitability.

There's no hiding here. There's no confusion. There's no pretense or erroneous notion that we're going to get out of this thing we call life alive. There's only the backdrop that we are not the body. There's only the truth that we are more than that.

Imagine throwing the chest bone of your father into the river. Imagine throwing the hip of your wife. Imagine, your son, tossing the last bit of your unburned body into the holy body of the Ganges.

Sadhus and grieving family members having their heads shaved.

We suffer when we are confused about the nature of our identity. We suffer when we believe ourselves to be our thoughts. We suffer when we believe ourselves to be our bodies. This distortion is only dispelled through clarity of true seeing.

In seeing clearly, we recognize our true nature as that which contains the mind-body, and yet is not limited to the mind-body. From this place of clarity, there is no need to resist the ending of a human form. No different than how we tend to not resist the wilting of a rose.

From clarity, the perfection of life cycles — all occurring within the same vast field of awareness — are but shadows passing through the landscape of a dream. Each illuminated by the flame of the divine. Each dying into the flame of the divine.

All things arising and dissolving in the same flame of the divine. The flame that ignites all flames. The flame that burns beyond time.

The Silence That Holds It All: The Journey Within Arunachala

March 21, 2017

"Waking up from the delusion that leads to suffering is the greatest gift we can offer this troubled world. "

Text and photographs by Caverly Morgan.

He lived in that cave for seventeen years. He meditated there for seventeen years.

In our world of instant gratification, some are impressed by hearing that you've attended a ten day silent retreat. Others can't imagine even a full day without technology. Without distraction.

Ramana Maharshi had zero interest in distraction. His only needs were silence and solitude. His primary experience, abiding in universal, all pervading Self.

I enter the cave without expectation. Full of curiosity. It's dark and takes some time for the eyes to adjust. There's no ventilation and the heat of the day hangs heavily within the stone walls of the cave. Instinctively, I bow and settle in.

I feel a bit like a groupie at first. That falls away quickly. Not through will, but rather the immediate immersion into the stillness of this temple.

There are no words to describe the depth of the stillness. A silence so deep that all the sounds beyond the cave simply dissolve into it.

Nothing left out.

Like a vacuum of emptiness that absorbs everything without effort or attempt.

A silence that transcends a lack of sound. A stillness that transcends a lack of movement.

Silence within silence. Stillness within stillness.

I am home.

Time and space are irrelevant here and it's only at the tap of my husband that eventually I am prompted to leave. As I step into the sunlight I might have been on retreat for a month, or a year, or a decade. I am speechless as we make our way down the hill.

A sadhu who lives on the mountain pauses us on the trail to offer prayers. We gratefully accept his kindness and continue on.

This particular path takes us down to some backroads that lead into the town. As we step farther from the cave, the world continues to appear.

Bits of trash are to my sides. I bend to collect them as we decline. The trash thickens as we continue and soon it becomes obvious that there would be no way to collect it all without a truck. Several trucks.

We are greeted by a girl who has likely seen countless tourists in her life. Her dirty bare feet are thick with experience of the world and she begs for us to buy her some chocolate, trotting beside us as we walk. Her innocence blended with her depth of experience of the harshness of this world break my heart.

An elderly woman repeatedly brings her hand to her mouth to signify that she's in need of food. Lice-infested stray dogs weave from house to house, trash pile to trash pile. A mother bathes her child in the stagnant water that sits next to her. A man pees openly on the wall — seemingly unconcerned by passerbys.

One of the homeless dogs approaches the steps to a shop, which is doorless and open to the road. From the corner of my eye I see the shop owner reach for a stick and raise his arm. As I pass I hear the blow and the dog wince and cry. Without thought I physically cringe, deeply, feeling as though it is I who has been struck.

And I have been. Again and again, my heart breaks. Silently, I weep for the world. Recognizing its illusory nature and its realness all in the same instant, I silently weep.

Meanwhile, a young girl full of smiles waves and asks me my name.

Women and men sit chatting in front of brightly colored Kolams. They are drawn in the morning. Every day the Kolams get washed on, rained on, blown around in the wind. Soon a new day comes. They are drawn again.

Young boys helping in a shop express affection to each other as they ask me to take their photo.

Girls in uniform walk home from school.

A woman with her cows is off to sell the milk.

A mother carries her baby.

Those who know little of Ramana's life might assume that he fled to the cave to hide from the intensity of all this. That's not how I see it. All my spiritual heroes have one thing in common: they understand that ending the suffering of this world will never come from controlling the relative, material world.

The suffering ends when we learn to rest in the absolute — even amidst the relative. The suffering ends as we learn to recognize ourselves as the absolute.

As the changing world arises and disappears, comes and goes, there is only one thing that remains the same. Practice is a matter of learning to rest the attention in that which is unchanging.

Waking up from the delusion that leads to suffering is the greatest gift we can offer this troubled world.

The cave on Arunachala mountain is there to remind us of this. People like Ramana Maharshi have pointed the way.

The Unlimited Ocean of Love: A Train Ride through India

March 13, 2017

"The love didn't fade. It swelled through me like the limitless ocean that love is. We'll never see each other again. And, we'll never be apart."

Text by Caverly Morgan. Photos by Vineet Teames.

It was a moment film directors live for.

I meet him on the train, though I never learn his name. To say, “I meet him,” doesn't do justice to how his presence affects me. For it isn't an introduction based on personality or identity. It is a meeting of presence. Of shared being.

For the first hour I witness him as he interacts with the moving world around him and within him. A plastic spoon held out the window. Watching it bend and rattle in the wind. Giggles with his sister. A seeming forgetting of his mother, who is always within reach. Bubbles of joy arising as he feels the wind tickle the hair on his arms, stretched beyond the cell of the train.

Later we interact. He doesn't speak English, yet through play we dance. The game of intrigue infused with darting shyness. Gestures, smiles. Laughs. Language becomes a crude clothing that covers the nakedness of presence.

We are in love.

The second class non-air conditioned trains in India are a perfect symbol of an important cultural difference between here and where I was raised. India is not the land of exhalted individualism. It is not the land of 'me' vs. 'you.' At least, not the India I experience.

I'm well aware that I'm generalizing — and the difference here does feel deeply palpable. In the western world, where it's easy to find comfort, our confusion easily thickens. In our privilege, we come to the faulty conclusion that we truly can avoid pain. If we just try hard enough. That seeking pleasure bears good results.

And the problem, on one level, is that we can. Perhaps just for a moment. Enough to whet the palate for sure. The cycle rolls on.

Confusion becomes the result of our erroneous belief that we are this body-mind. We identify with it. We protect it. We defend it.

And yet this doesn't match our direct experience. On some level, we know we're living a lie. On some level, we know the law of impermanence, no matter how actively we resist it. We know that we are going to die.

On the train, people are layered on top of each other. We're together, moving without hurry through the land, for hours. The seats face each other, bench style.

Your neighbor, who is physically connected to you, legs or arms pressing, talks to you. It matters not if you've met. You're on the train together! You’re part of the community. How could you not be?

The woman next to me gets up at a stop. For several moments, I don't notice her puffy, abandoned purse and bag. When I do, I search for her. No avail.

After many more moments she returns. Relaxed. Focused on her wrinkled sari. Finding her purse just where she left it. As expected, holding her seat in her absence. She lives in a world in which it didn't occur to her not to trust those around her. A world so foreign to many of us.

Later an Indian friend suggests that it wouldn't be wise for me to be so trusting. I do recognize the risk of romanticizing what was witnessed. Still, wise or not to our conditioned minds, she trusted.

Hours more pass. Wallahs selling chai, water, idli, dosa, vada pass through the crowded walkway. Calling out, almost chanting, what they offer. A man comes through selling 'magic books' full of images that move as you pass a transparent cover over them. For less than a quarter, I buy one for my new young playmate.

The train is so full at this point that I'm up on the sleeper bunk with our luggage, a herd of passengers between me and the boy. As we pull into the station, bags shuffle.

People help each other gather their things. Full contact pushing that lacks aggression, rather seems to be steeped in a lack of fear of 'the other,' begins. Bodies swim to the door.

There's no way to wiggle through to him. He's focused on carrying bags for his mother. No name to call out, I join the herd and do my best. I lose sight of him until I make it to the door.

I find him there on the platform laughing with his sister. I eagerly offer a wave which he returns with glee. The train begins to roll forward and my wave turns to the universal gesture for come. Come quick!

His little bare feet don't hesitate as I wave the magic book in the air. He doesn't know what it is, but he's clear about one thing: it's a gesture of love. His run turns to a sprint.

The speed of the train is starting to outdo us. His family's cheers for him from afar, as if he's only feet away from a finish line.

I hang onto the yellow metal bar on the side of the doorless car and lean out like a trapeze artist. The baton pass is made! His arms raise in the universal sign of victory. It didn't matter what he'd won. He didn't even know what it was yet. But he knew he'd won. About this he was clear.

What he'll never know is that I too won. Tears fell from my eyes as the adrenaline faded and as he too began to fade.

The love didn't fade. It swelled through me like the limitless ocean that love is. We'll never see each other again. And, we'll never be apart.

The train sped on. Flying through this ever-changing world with ease and in perfect alignment with life's grace.

Young workers greasing tracks with bare hands.

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