I set my eyes, ears and feet on new ground as a way of life. I seek to feel home anywhere and nowhere. If there is a goal to it, it has to be generating a larger flow of emotions and thoughts, absorbing new visions into some universality that I know exist but must be constantly refreshed to be accessed by me. Cows never cease to chew grass. Charlie Chaplin said: A day without a smile is a lost day. Try an hour! a minute! I identify with these views.
The sense of wonder is hard to maintain given the extensive and constant reframing of my sensory experience into a protective multi–layer mind fabrication of mine. As is described by several mind experts, the mind keeps converting the sensory signals its nerves receive into its own–designed representations successively created by approximation and intended to be protective of the set priorities. The mind requires adherence to a hierarchy of layers. The layers start with low priority, rough identification of motion, object categorization, colors etc. It continues filtering according to transient priorities, for example, near term urgencies. It ends with adherence or judgement according to our highest existential priority, which I call L12 for convenience. An opposite deconstruction is required by me, if I want to disconnect from the mind-made representations and maintain closeness to a selfless, non–dual observation.
Because of traveling, I have now come to feel at home in a number of regions: America, Europe, Africa. Asia is missing given language barriers. New landscapes generate a higher degree of attention from my mind, if only for me to identify what they truly represent on a multi–level examination.
Equally, new sounds stimulate my ears in direct resonance. I am quite attached to music because of the breadth of sensory experience, starting with each instrument or voice, then continuing with its amplitude, rhythm, tonality, flow, without mentioning the words and underlying messages that can be carried. A fireworks of great beauty it can be! While listening to a good song, I mostly accept that its creation is a sincere rendering of the internal state of the author at an intense moment of life. With some luck, I can step into the singer’s soul and relive the travel.
Next come the so many encounters, vegetable, animal or human, that the path enables. Because we do not need to share the basics of our respective ordinary life when we meet, it turns out that we more rapidly share a higher level of our priorities, stripped, less noisy, on a larger time scale, measured in spans of years and decades perhaps. The term “more essential” comes as a description of these moments. Man meets dog or flower or man, categorically in the sense that exchanges are made only along the major, more meaningful characteristics, instead of along particular roles we might have. It feels good to breathe the same air, feel the same closeness brought about by words or expressions in some universal setting.
Wonder implies acceptance, a mutuality in every aspect of the exchange, if only for a moment. But life is only a succession of moments. What else is there?
