It can be a difficult retreat from concept to understand that the self is not separate from surroundings, and with a step deeper the self is not separate from all causes and unseen or unknown forces supporting those apparent surroundings, and further into the mystery can take us into a bizarre world beyond even the mystery of imagination. This allows the mind to stretch beyond its concepts, beyond its fears, beyond its knowledge, and interconnects with all reality to form one.
The faded material world in which even the most enlightened soul may exists still holds us. But the journey of one foot in this world and the other foot in the vastness of the unknown gives us a perspective that can be quite extraordinary at times.
Colors and flavors explode. The scents become transcendental highways. Humor becomes a ball thrown through a window; necessary yet mischievous. Nightmares become jolting. Dreams become awake. The sounds of birds and the wind compete playfully with the finest strings of musical mastery. Nature becomes a loving deception with teeth that bite and fruits that sweeten the breeze. Passions become conflict and attachment. Passions become released and free. Pain becomes ever-present and ever-strange, like an alien world so disturbingly real and lonely.
Profanity finds creative and entertaining angles to pop holes of light into the darkness to remind us of the stars that had fallen. Moments become more than they once were. Anger rips by like a howling train in the night who’s horn blows louder and farther, only to fade away into the stillness.
The joke is on us, yet we are often not amused, and the jokes become funnier and frequent to allow us to laugh again. All the while the chains of rage must be offered slack. Love becomes so obviously present and accurate as to make us smile at how blind we may be. And sunsets finally become sunsets after all the years of reflections in our scanning eyes.
As it is said in the great parable of reality, the world sits on top of a turtle, which with a shell of concave strength can support the unimaginable weight of the world, and that turtle sits atop another turtle, and another, and another, and another. It’s turtles all the way down.
With yoga (union) as a unity of self-reality (Atman-Brahman) that extends into deeper and more sublime mysteries, this yoga, or union, can extend far beyond knowledge or answers. Mysteries may infinitely connect to supporting mysteries. It’s yoga all the way down.
Then we see that the great question is a foolish unanswerable inquiry, which was meant merely as a prank. Joy creeps its way into our windows like the soft rays of dawn bringing a new day with new adventures and new love and new pain. It then fades into night as reassurance of the temporary; waiting for a new dawn to repeat the new humor and horror.
Orgasms burst like meteors cutting through the night sky, and the new dawn again awakens us. The firelight settles into into a smouldering reminder to the morning dew that the dark night has again failed. Life and light continued through it all. Horus and Set continue their predictable struggle, the wheel of samsara turns gently in the trickling reflections of the sunlit creek, and the yin yang swirls perpetually into an eternal blur. But is the new day a repeating cycle or a whole new reality? Has it pressed beyond our minds or has it tethered us to our illusions?
Or is it simply turtles all the way down?