Strange Beautiful Musik

Strange Beautiful Notes
Room (i)

Encounters in Presence, Music, and Healing

Thisula

I would arrive at dusk,
cycling through the bustle
of Colombo eveningsMy destination a house just beyond the lane
its ivy-covered wall holding a kind of gentle secrecyA small gate, never quite closed
and beyond it, the garden dipping softly inward
a world just slightly below the rest of us.I rarely entered right away
Instead, I would pause
my bicycle leaning against the wallScattered clay lamps glowed in quiet, irregular constellations
their light trembling against leaves and stone.
the air warm, carrying traces of jasmine and temple flower
sometimes a thin ribbon of incense drifting unseen.And through that stillness
there it was
the sound of a nylon-string guitar
clear, unhurried,
finding its way into the nightA voice
gentle, unforced
carrying songs from another timeSoldier of Fortune
Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Harvest Moon
GreensleevesEach note made fuller by the space it lived inI would stand there
sometimes sit by the gateNot wanting to break the spell
by simply walking inSo I stayed
between lane and garden
between arrival and belonging
listeningAs the evening gathered around her music
and held it there a little longer

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

(yes — I "plagiarised" the the title from Carl Jung)

In 2014, I completed my training for the priesthood and then did not become a priest. I made a clean break with the spiritual teacher who had guided that formation. The cut was decisive, and it left me in India without any savings, a degree that had no financial or vocational utility, and with a calling that had nowhere obvious to go. Returning to Sri Lanka did not make sense either. In 2015 January, I moved instead to a small Himalayan village, largely as a survival decision.I began teaching English in a local school. The pay was less than a hundred dollars a month—enough to eat, barely enough to live, certainly not enough to imagine a future.About six months after arriving in the village, I learned that India had just completed its first postgraduate diploma in music therapy. The course was a year long—six months online, six months of hospital internship. A childhood friend helped cover the fee. The school where I taught English agreed to give me 3 months leave for the internship period. On paper, things aligned.But something else was stirring beneath it. That Christmas (December 2015), while visiting Sri Lanka, a cousin from Australia asked what I planned to do once I completed the training. I said, vaguely, that I hoped to work with patients in the village, though I had not thought this through in any concrete way. Almost immediately, she proposed starting a fundraiser to support such work. She was successful, well-resourced, and offered to circulate a proposal among her network.As the proposal took shape, I began to experience something confusing, a subtle resentment. I knew, intellectually, that I should feel thankful for my cousins push out of the boat, and support. But internally, something felt constrained, almost irritated. I did not yet have language for this, but I can see now that it was the first time something I had always known—but never been allowed to inhabit—was beginning to wake up.As I worked on the proposal, I began to sense the scale of my intuitive capacity, to both dream and do, long range vision and practicality. What initially felt like fantasy—imagining what could be done with real resources— slowly revealed itself as intuition that had not been given room to move. I did not dare speak about this to my cousin. On paper, I had not completed my degree. None of what I sensed matched my visible credentials.The fundraiser raised about five thousand dollars. Outwardly, this was success. Inwardly, the nagging resentment grew.

Within an hour of sending the proposal, one person replied asking to see the budget. I sent them my updated private budget. The next day, they responded to say they had exactly that amount—twenty-four thousand dollars—and had been praying to know whom to give it to.Even now, remembering that moment undoes me.With that money, the project took real form. I was able to build a team in the village, bring in a psychologist from outside, and work not only with individual patients but at a communal level. I couldn’t complete my music therapy exams. On paper, I had the money but not the qualification, and even more, minimal working experience.While at the internship site, I discovered Svaram, one of the foremost international therapeutic instrument-making organizations, located nearby in Auroville. A friend at the internship site, Bhuvana, lent me her scooter, and most weekends, I would leave in the morning, to cover the 20km ride to Svaram, spend a good portion of the day there. On somedays, I did this on the weekdays, waiting for clock out time from the internship site, rushing to Auroville before Svaram closed. The exotic instruments felt like old friends—things I had somehow known without having seen. I purchased what was needed, because the resources allowed for it.The trip back to the village was an adventure.I couriered the bulk of the instruments to a friend’s place in New Delhi and purchased tickets for two seats on the train from Chennai to Delhi — a forty- eight-hour journey. I assumed the extra seat would give me space for the instruments I was carrying, only to discover that a single passenger is not legally allowed to purchase two tickets. A visibly miffed conductor promptly reassigned my second seat to another passenger, and the next forty-eight hours passed with one eye open and the other closed.

Anyone who has travelled by train in India will know the risks that are invited when spreading one’s luggage across an entire coach.From Delhi, I hired a vehicle for the twenty-hour drive to the village. The driver informed me that carrying so much luggage on the roof was illegal.Fortunately, he was an ex-army personnel with a certain audacious relationship to risk, and suggested we take the back roads through nomadic country, and avoid the highway. What followed was a surreal drive through stunning landscapes, punctuated by the driver crashing cheerfully through the few checkpoints we encountered — leaving behind some very angry police officers, and bursts of victorious glee exchanged between us.

Back in the village, I began the work.I rented a few extra places, one of which I transformed in to a music therapy clinic, facilitated communal drum circles and worked directly with patients, despite having no recognized qualification. I kept this work hidden from the Indian music therapy community for three years, aware that I was breaking many textbook rules. And yet, even amid doubt, I sensed that something significant was happening.

Three years later, the founder of Svaram, Aurelio Hammer—an Austrian ethnomusicologist and shaman—saw videos of my work. He was deeply moved and shared them with his international network. I received
unexpected validation from practitioners at the cutting edge of the field, some of whom named the work as a standard they wished their university programs could train students to embody. Eventually, the Indian school caught whiff of my work and invited me to present at an international conference. The response was intense, and profoundly affirming. The school then offered me another chance to complete the exams.

A Note On Intuition, Risk, Moral Ambiguity, and Discernment Under Exposure

There is something I want to name here, because this part of the story can easily be misunderstood as reckless reliance on intuition, or as an argument against standards and safeguards in therapeutic work. It was neither.

The vision I carried—what could be done, how it could be done, and who it was for—could not be adequately translated into certificates, project proposals, or paper containers at the moment it arrived. Speaking it too early would not have made it truer. It would have made it incoherent, or worse, irresponsible. At the same time, waiting for permission would have meant not acting at all.Had I spoken openly, in advance, about practicing music therapy without
formal qualification, it would rightly have raised serious questions. On paper, it would have looked irresponsible. And yet, in practice, the work itself answered those questions more truthfully than any explanation could have.
When the work was eventually seen—through the videos, through the bodies of patients, through what actually happened—the questions that would rightly have been raised on paper no longer needed answering. Not because rules had been dismissed, but because something else had become visible.What lived in that in-between space was not carelessness. It involved a willingness to take responsibility without protection, to proceed without endorsement, and to carry the consequences if I was wrong. I did not act
from naïveté or spiritual bravado. I acted from deep familiarity with risk, constraint, and the cost of getting things wrong.

In a way the paradox running through that period was humorous: a substantial financial windfall arriving alongside the absence of formal legitimacy. Resources without permission. Capacity without recognition. The moral ambiguity was not simply theoretical, it was lived daily, and I can assure you, it was not comfortable.I name this not to recommend such a path to others, nor am I attempting to claim exception. I name it because it shaped me in ways that later recognition could not. It taught me how to move carefully, shrewdly, and compassionately in spaces where intuition runs ahead of structure—and how to refuse both recklessness and paralysis when no clean option exists.I have seen how people with layers of protection—financial security,
institutional backing, social legitimacy—can speak easily of intuition, surrender, and freedom, while rarely having to absorb the consequences when intuition is wrong. In such contexts, intuition becomes performative, invoked without cost, and sometimes leaving harm in its wake.I have also seen the other extreme. I have seen how those formed by scarcity can develop extraordinary street intelligence, and how a sudden stroke of luck or unexpected opening can harden that street smartness into manipulation, distortion, or self-justifying cleverness. Resourcefulness, when combined with unexamined power, can become corrosive rather than liberating.What I was living did not belong to either of these worlds.It was not intuition exercised from safety, and it was not cunning leveraged for advantage. It was discernment practiced under exposure. Errors on my part would have had real consequences. The choices I made were not clean, but they were conscious. They were shaped by responsibility to real people, real bodies, and real outcomes.If there is any wisdom in that period, it lies in learning how to move without guarantees, without innocence, and without pretending that intuition absolves one from responsibility. It is a caution against both spiritual bravado and survival-based manipulation, and a refusal of the false binary between them.

Abandonment by Withholding (a)

A Prologue on the Difficulty of Naming

The title of this essay was hard to arrive at.*At first, the closest available term seemed to be affluent neglect.Because affluent neglect, as the term is often used, tends to describe a particular kind of wound: the child whose material needs are met, sometimes even lavishly met, while emotional presence, attunement, supervision, protection, or tenderness are absent. There may be money. There may be schools, holidays, clothes, rooms, activities, and opportunities. But the child is emotionally alone.That is a real wound.But it is not quite this one.The dynamic being named here is stranger, more difficult to explain, and in some ways harder to prove.It is not simply that material provision was present while emotional provision was absent.It is that both material and emotional provision were withheld, while the existence of the family’s capacity made the withholding harder to name.The word affluent keeps the matter in the neighborhood of money, class, and financial abuse. That is part of the story, but not the whole of it. The word neglect can sound too passive, as though something was merely forgotten or missed. Even deprivation, though closer, can still make the wound sound primarily material.There is surprisingly little language for this whole pattern.Pieces of it appear in different fields. Some literature speaks of affluent neglect. Some speaks of emotional neglect. Some speaks of economic abuse. Some speaks of child neglect where a parent had the capacity to provide and did not. But the fused reality — emotional abandonment, practical withholding, moralized scarcity, class-masked deprivation, and launch damage inside a family of available resources — does not yet seem to have a settled name.That absence of language is itself part of the injury.So this essay uses the phrase Abandonment by Withholding.

Abandonment by Withholding

There are some forms of neglect that are difficult to name because, from the outside, the conditions for neglect appear non-existent.There may be a house. There may be education. There may be resources, stability, and latent power. There may be parents who are socially respectable, morally serious, perhaps even admired for their simplicity or restraint. Nothing, at least on the surface, may resemble obvious deprivation.And yet the child may grow up, unsupported, anxious, and strangely alone.This is not simply strict parenting. It is not merely “not being spoiled.” It is not the ordinary discipline of a family trying to teach resilience. There is something more difficult, and more disorienting, at work here.A double-bind environment.Externally, there may be resources. There may be stability, property, education, reputation, savings, influence, contacts, or assurance that there is enough. There may be a family name, a house, a social standing, a bank account, a network of people who could open doors. There may be the kind of latent power that is never openly discussed because it is assumed and inherited. Yet narratively, the parents may perform moral superiority through scarcity:We’re simple
We struggle like everyone else
We don’t believe in handouts
Nothing was given to us
Life is hardOn the surface, this can sound noble. Perhaps even principled. But beneath it, something much more confusing is happening.The child is being asked to accept a story that does not correspond to reality, whereas relationally, they are treated as if those resources do not exist — or worse, as if they are not deserving of them.The child is then raised inside a contradiction.If there is money, why am I unsupported? Why am I anxious? Why does life feel so precarious? And if there is no money, why does everything contradict that?This is what makes the wound so difficult to name, because it is a hall of mirrors.The child is not only trying to understand what is happening. The child is trying to understand why their perception of what is happening is constantly being undermined. They sense one reality, but are asked to live inside another. They feel deprivation, but are told they are privileged. They experience lack, but are made to feel too much. They ask for help, and the asking itself becomes the evidence against them.That contradiction is what makes this a uniquely destabilizing way to grow.

Why this can be more confusing than actual poverty

In actual poverty, the problem is often visible. Not always simple, or dignified, and often not necessarily held well by the surrounding world — but still, visible. Suffering has a context. There may be an intelligible reason why certain forms of support are unavailable.There may also be solidarity. Not always, but often enough. There can be a shared recognition: this is hard for everyone here. The family may not have enough, but the lack is not denied. The child may suffer deprivation, but the deprivation is not necessarily turned into a private moral failure.But in abandonment by withholding, the problem is denied.The child is often blamed for their own lack. Any complaint may be met with:You’re ungrateful.
You’re dramatic.
You’re imagining things.The child experiences lack, but the surrounding world insists there should not be any. The family’s social position may suggest advantage, while the child’s lived experience is one of chronic insecurity. Others may assume privilege. The child may even assume it too, at least intellectually. And yet, when it comes time to be supported, launched, protected, guided, or helped, there is often nothing solid beneath the feet. The child is expected to accept the story, even when the story contradicts the atmosphere of the house, the behavior of the parents, and the evidence of their own body.This creates a particular kind of bewilderment, and produces an epistemic injury — damage to the child’s ability to trust their own perception.The injury is not simply just emotional. It affects their perception of reality. The adult child may spend years unable to say, with confidence, something was wrong. The evidence is scattered across contradictions.There may have been a nice house, but no warmth. There may have been school fees, but no emotional security. There may have been family assets, but no bridge into adulthood. There may have been gifts, but no reliable care. There may have been inheritance spoken of vaguely, but no support when support was actually needed.So the mind hesitates.
Was it really neglect?
Was it just strictness?
Was there really money?
Was the problem selfishness?
Was the problem weakness?
Were others simply stronger, smarter, better?Many adults from these homes say some version of the same thing:I didn’t realize anything was wrong until my thirties or forties.Or: I thought I was just bad at life.Or: Other people seemed to have invisible support I didn’t.That last one? It matters.Because much of adulthood is shaped by invisible support. Not only money in the crude sense, but buffers, bridges, permissions, introductions, emotional backing, housing stability, tuition help, quiet encouragement, the freedom to make a mistake without catastrophe. These things almost never jump up and announce themselves in obvious ways. They often appear, from the outside, as confidence, competence, maturity, initiative, or “good choices.”Over the years, a child growing up in an abandonment by withholding dynamic may find themselves compulsively (and privately) cataloguing the different ways friends and peers related to their parents.Some had both love and money. That was admittedly rare, almost unheard of, but not entirely non-existent either. Some had love, but little money. Some had money, but very little love. Some had one parent who offered warmth and another who offered practical support. Some had parents who were not especially loving, but who still provided the bridge: education, housing, networks, financial help, a way into adulthood.None of these arrangements are simple. Scarce love with access to resources carries its own kind of hell. To be materially supported but emotionally unseen can create its own distortions, dependencies, and griefs. But even these, in certain respects, may still provide a bridge. A person may suffer deeply and still have some path into the world.The more bewildering no-man’s-land is where love is scarce, support is scarce, and the family story insists that there was never much to give — while, over time, one begins to realize that the poverty being performed may not have been the whole truth.This creates a strange double exile.One may be fluent in the cultural language of the middle and upper classes without ever really inhabiting that world. One may know the codes, the manners, the references, the educational vocabulary, the way certain rooms speak. And yet one may not have had the material ease, the social exposure, the confidence, the networks, or the lived familiarity that usually accompany that language.At the same time, in contexts of actual poverty or survival, one may be perceived as “the educated one” — which often functions as shorthand for being relatively affluent. So the person is misread in both directions. Among the privileged, they may carry the anxiety and deprivation of someone who was not supported. Among the poor, they may carry the markers of someone presumed to have had support.It is a strange in-between: never fully belonging in either world, carrying traces of both, and often misunderstood at both ends of the spectrum.This forms the more invisible layer to the epistemic injury. The person is not only confused inside the family. They are also confused socially. They cannot easily explain where they are located. Their accent, education, vocabulary, or cultural fluency may suggest one story, while their nervous system, finances, launch history, and lived exposure may tell another. The result is a life lived across incompatible readings.In the world of privilege, the language of self-improvement, accountability, and self-responsibility can be necessary and legitimate. There are contexts in which those words have real meaning. But in the world of survival, that same language can become insensitive at best, harmful at worst.It is like volunteering in a refugee camp or after a natural disaster and telling people that mindfulness practice or “five simple steps” will change their lives. Most people would recognize the cruelty of that kind of advice in an obvious crisis.But the same mistake is often made more subtly with people whose abandonment is less visible. They are spoken to as if they are simply failing to apply the right principles.Across childhood and adult life, a person from this background may conclude that everyone else has some inner strength they lack.There is often a long period of private shame before the pattern becomes clear.The person may feel behind, ashamed, underdeveloped, anxious, or strangely unprepared. Not because they lacked intelligence or discipline — quite the contrary in fact, because these childhoods also create brilliance, creativity, and resourcefulness that other people have no access to — but because life required them to perform stability without having been given the conditions that produce it, the world sees the outer class marker. The nervous system remembers the inner abandonment.That split is profoundly confusing.

The emotional layer: money as a proxy for love and permission

In these families, money is often not about money at all. It becomes a stand-in for much larger things.For approval. For belonging. For permission to exist independently. Support is conditional, delayed, or dangling. It is always later. It is tied to inheritance. It is promised if the child does the right thing, becomes the right kind of person, performs gratitude correctly, remains loyal to the family narrative, or does not ask too directly.The child learns to wait.
They learn to appease.
They learn to second-guess.They may grow into adults who unconsciously live as if they are not allowed to land. As if rest, safety, and support must be earned through suffering. As if any form of ease is morally suspicious unless it has first been paid for by anxiety, self-denial, or collapse.This often shapes relationships. It may shape work. It may shape the ability to receive. It may shape the ability to ask clearly for what is needed. It may shape the nervous system so deeply that even when support appears later, the person cannot easily trust it. Help feels dangerous. Rest feels undeserved. Stability feels temporary. Money feels charged with shame, dependency, and exposure.

Career and “launch” damage — this is huge and often minimized

One of the most concrete harms is failed launch without explanation.Wealthy families usually provide forms of launch support, even when they do not name them as such. Bridging money. Housing buffers. Tuition support. Networks. Introductions. Help with first jobs. The freedom to take non-survival risks. The ability to try something uncertain for a year or two without falling through the floor.These are not small things.They allow a young adult to try. To choose a path before survival panic takes over. To make mistakes without ruin. To enter professions that require a slow beginning.To accept opportunities that do not pay immediately.To build a life around calling rather than merely around fear.When those forms of support are withheld without acknowledgment, the child is placed in a nearly impossible position. They compete in the marketplace as if poor, while being judged internally and externally as if privileged. They have no margin for experimentation or failure, but may still be expected to produce the outcomes associated with having had margin.This is a brutal combination, and the result is often chronic under-earning. Over-responsibility. Shame about “not living up to potential.” A life built around caution rather than calling.From the outside, this can be misread as laziness, lack of ambition, immaturity, or self-sabotage.But that is too simple.Often, what looks like under-functioning is the aftermath of having no bridge. What looks like caution may be the intelligence of a nervous system that learned there was no safety net. What looks like wasted potential may be potential that was never given the conditions to unfold.

Why parents do this — with nuance

This does not mean every parent who withholds support does so with conscious malice. There are nuances.Some parents are shaped by moralized scarcity. They confuse deprivation with virtue. They may genuinely believe that help corrupts. Somewhere in them lives the conviction:If I help you, I weaken you. If I make life easier, I make you soft. If I give, I spoil.Sometimes this comes from unresolved shame about their own wealth or privilege. The family may possess resources, but cannot bear to experience themselves as people with resources. So they construct an identity around struggle, simplicity, restraint, or moral toughness. They may need to believe they “had nothing,” even when they had far more than they were willing to acknowledge.In such a family, generosity may threaten the story the parents need in order to remain innocent. Withholding support keeps the child dependent, grateful, and less likely to challenge authority. Money becomes a leash, not a gift. It is offered as possibility, but not as freedom. It hovers in the background as a form of control. It can be hinted at, promised, delayed, threatened, or morally weaponized.The child is kept close enough to hope, but not close enough to stand.This is one of the cruelties of dangling support. It does not simply deny. It keeps the person oriented toward the denier.The future becomes conditional. The nervous system remains organized around waiting. The adult child may keep adjusting themselves, explaining themselves, proving themselves, or hoping that one day the parent will finally recognize the need and offer the bridge.But the bridge is always just out of reach.Another layer is identity protection. Admitting that they could have helped — and did not — would require grief. Guilt. Accountability. It would require the parents to face the possibility that the child’s struggle was not simply the child’s weakness. It may have been, in part, the result of choices the parents made, stories they protected, and resources they withheld.So the narrative must remain intact.
We had nothing.
You were fine.
You’re exaggerating.The child’s pain becomes a threat to the parents’ self-understanding. If the child names the injury, the parents may experience it not as truth, but as accusation. So the child learns to carry the pain privately, often with an added layer of shame for even feeling harmed.

Healing: what actually helps — beyond platitudes

Healing from this kind of background requires more than generic encouragement.It is not enough to say, “Move on,” “Be grateful,” “Think positive,” or “Everyone has problems.”Phrases such as these, often repeat the original injury.They minimize.
They spiritualize avoidance.
They bypass grief.
They ask the person to become peaceful before the truth has been named.This is why healing begins with naming the injury without minimization.Simply recognizing, I was unsupported despite available resources, can be a massive relief. It reorganizes decades of self-blame.It does not solve everything. But it changes the frame.This kind of naming can also be frightening because it may initially feel disloyal. Especially if the parents also gave some things. Especially if there was education, food, shelter, or moments of care. Especially if the family was not obviously abusive. Especially if others had it worse.Naming these can be destabilizing at first. It may bring anger, sorrow, nausea, disbelief, but it also begins to return the person to reality. Clarity is not cruelty. Complexity can indeed be named without erasing harm.And grief is part of this clarity.There is an unlived life that may need to be grieved. The career paths not taken. The risks that could not be risked. The safety that was possible. The earlier adulthood that never stabilized. The years spent trying to survive rather than unfold. The relationships that almost blossomed. The opportunities missed because there was no margin. The self that had to become careful before it had a chance to become free.Trying to positive-think past this usually backfires. The unlived life has to be mourned. Not so that the person remains trapped in it, but so that the nervous system no longer has to carry unnamed sorrow as private shame.This grief can be difficult because the loss is elusive and partly invisible. There may be no single event to point to. The injury may be distributed across years of non-help, delayed help, conditional help, and denied reality.And it is not only grief for what did happen. It is grief for what did not happen. What was possible but withheld. What could have been given but was moralized out of reach. What may have changed the trajectory of a life if it had arrived at the right time.Not all wounds are wounds of injury. There are wounds of timing. Support that comes twenty years late may still matter, but it cannot become the support that was needed at twenty.A person may need to grieve this without being rushed toward gratitude, forgiveness, or perspective.There may be a long season in which the most truthful sentence is simply:That should not have been so hard.Or:
There was help available, and I did not receive it.

Re-parenting around launch, not only childhood

Healing may also require a different kind of re-parenting than the kind often emphasized in therapeutic language. Traditional inner-child work can be valuable, but it may miss the specific injury here. What is needed is not only comfort for the child. It is launch repair for the adult.The wound may not be located only in early childhood. It may be located at the threshold into adulthood, where a person needed scaffolding, mentorship, financial steadiness, relational backing, and permission to build slowly. They needed someone to help them cross from dependency into agency. They needed a bridge.So healing may need to include very practical forms of repair.
Financial scaffolding. Adult-level support. Mentorship. Education around money. Permission to build slowly. Permission to stop measuring one’s life against those who were quietly supported. Permission to take seriously the fact that catching up after a failed launch is not the same as simply “starting late.”Separating money from worth also takes time.Many people from these families oscillate between extreme frugality, sudden risky spending, or chronic paralysis around financial decisions. Money does not feel neutral. It carries the emotional charge of the family system. It may feel like danger, dependency, shame, power, punishment, betrayal, or love.This is why education alone may not be enough.Somatic work may be needed. Nervous system work may be needed. New experiences of safe receiving may be needed. Practical skill-building may need to happen alongside grief. Budgeting may matter, but so may the body’s reaction to having enough. Earning may matter, but so may the terror of being seen as wanting too much. Saving may matter, but so may the old belief that safety must be earned through suffering.Mindset work alone often fails because the injury is not merely cognitive. It lives in the body, in the reflex to apologize before asking, in the inability to rest when things are stable, in the suspicion that support will later be used as evidence of debt, and in the shame of needing anything at all.

One final, important thing

People from these backgrounds often feel embarrassed to name this harm.They may say things like:Others had it worse.
My parents weren’t abusive in obvious ways.
We weren’t poor.And all of that may be true.But comparison can become another form of silencing. The fact that others suffered differently does not erase this form of injury. The absence of visible poverty does not mean the presence of support. The presence of resources does not mean the presence of care. And a childhood can be materially respectable while still being relationally bewildering.That silence is part of the injury.Because when the harm cannot be named, the person is left to interpret the consequences as personal failure.And sometimes the beginning of healing is simply this: to stop calling the contradiction normal.

Sibbu

I had decided to spend my thirty-fifth birthday in Raithal, a pretty village about 50 kilometres beyond Matli, with in-your-face views of some of the Himalayan ranges in this region. Panther, Ubuntu and I set out in Sibbu's taxi.If you spend enough time travelling with Sibbu, sooner or later you realise that reaching the destination is rarely the point.Sibbu always insists that I drive his taxi. For him, it's a break from driving (which he gets paid for regardless), and for me it's an opportunity to pilot his heroic old jeep that possesses all the grace and precision of agricultural machinery. The arrangement works well.There is no power steering.This means that on narrow mountain roads, where deft flicks of the wheel are required to avoid incoming traffic, wandering cattle, and occasionally the edge of existence itself, luck plays almost as important a role as skill.Though I book the taxi for myself, Sibbu invariably loads additional passengers along the way. This provides bonus income and, more importantly, opportunities to shout enthusiastically and gesture wildly at passing taxi drivers while proudly displaying his foreign chauffeur to anyone who appeared remotely interested.We left at 10:30am.Raithal is, at most, an hour and a half away.We arrived at 2pm.Sibbu has recently acquired a Bluetooth speaker. The sound quality suggested a lifetime of poor decisions. To the best of my musical ears it contains absolutely no bass whatsoever. The volume remains permanently fixed at 11, and the speaker itself sounds as though it has spent the last decade chain-smoking.About ten kilometres into the journey Sibbu decided it was an ideal moment to stop and replace the engine oil.The passengers, already somewhat bewildered by events, were less than impressed.Sibbu remained optimistic.Thirty minutes later, Sibbu not only persuaded the original passengers to stay, but had successfully recruited several additional passengers while the mechanic worked. His sales pitch, apparently, was that a foreigner would be driving.I could only admire the efficiency.

What Sibbu had not accounted for was that Panther and Ubuntu suffer from severe motion sickness.The first of four epic vomiting sessions began shortly thereafter.Unperturbed, Sibbu took this entirely in stride, and instructed me to stop at a butcher friend's shop and procured mutton bones for the dogs.The passengers looked incredulous.Ten minutes later came the second vomiting episode.Sibbu responded by stopping at a roadside stall and generously purchasing tea and aloo pakora for everyone on board.I watched with admiration.There are people who move through life according to plans. There are people who move through life according to opportunities. And then there is Sibbu, who seems to move through life according to some entirely separate set of principles.Remarkably, this improved morale.Soon everyone was eating aloo pakora while attempting not to think too deeply about the circumstances that had brought them together.Sibbu's son was accompanying us, and around the half way point, Sibbu generously decided that the occasion presented an excellent opportunity for his son to gain some driving experience. The proposal was delivered with such confidence and enthusiasm that by the time I realised it had been phrased as a question, it was already happening.For the next fifteen minutes, Sibbu conducted an energetic driving lesson from the passenger seat while the rest of us quietly adjusted our expectations.By the time we finally reached Raithal, every passenger had departed. Most seemed less angry than confused, uncertain how exactly one was supposed to feel about what had just occurred.Sibbu, meanwhile, appeared delighted.As always.

A video Sibbu's son took once the final passenger had escaped.

The Thief's Mother's House

I was about twenty-eight, home in Sri Lanka for a month during the end-of-year break from training as a priest.My mother asked me to post a parcel at the post office, two kilometres away. It was a simple errand.That day, I had been listening to a teaching. The teacher had been asked what he thought of dreams, and he said, “We all know stuff comes to us at night, when our defences are lowered."Something in that phrase entered me. A very strong feeling began to brew inside me. Like a pressure, or a summons. I knew that after posting the parcel, I had to continue walking. There was a house about half a kilometre beyond the post office, and I had to go there.I did not know what would await me there. The house belonged to my mentor’s best friend.For the previous year, I had been trying to maintain a boundary with this mentor, as the relationship had begun to have a traumatic effect on me. I was in a foreign country, studying to be a priest, in an environment of his choosing, where he had many friends, some of whom were my professors. He lived in India, where I was training. I had no cognitive or inferential knowledge of whether he was in Sri Lanka at that time.But something deeper in me knew. These knowings are strange. They do not necessarily come with explicit content. They do not say, he is there. They do not explain themselves.And yet the body begins to move as though it has received instruction. One finds oneself knowing.On the way to the post office, with my heart beating, a memory from school rose up.I was about eighteen. Nearing the end of school life, it had become fairly common for boys to bunk school. We had a strict, shrewd, humorous headmaster, Mr. Jayasena, who would walk by the classes after the interval to see who had disappeared.That day, my best friend Kalpika had bunked."Jayey" entered our class, saw that he was missing, and asked where he was. I played dumb. He knew exactly what was happening.While leaving the class, he remarked, in Sinhalese — almost like a sideways parting shot — ithin hora-ge amma gen hora koheda kiyala ahuwwoth, kiyaida? — (What is the point of asking the thief’s mother where the thief is? She is never going to tell you.)”At the time, it seemed completely random that this memory would arise.By the time I had posted the parcel and begun walking toward the house, the force in me had grown to such formidable proportions that it no longer felt like a choice. There are moments when something in us rises with such authority that obedience is the only honest word for what follows.My mentor was there.His best friend opened with a social pleasantry. They had not seen me for some time.And immediately, the school memory became an instrument of precision.The best friend could understand English, but his preferred medium of communication was Sinhalese. Sinhalese does not come easily to me in conversation. I can read it, write it, and speak it, but it does not roll off my tongue with native fluency.So when he made his comment in Sinhalese, I found myself replying, also in Sinhalese, with a variation of my headmaster’s line: ithin hora-ge amma-ge gedarata ævilla wedak thiyenawada? — “(Is there any use in visiting the thief’s mother’s house?)”I could never have produced that line so smoothly in Sinhalese on my own.If the memory had not come to me on the way to the post office, I would probably have been caught by the pleasantry. I might have softened, stalled, become polite, and lost the force of what was moving through me — the assertiveness, the clarity, the mood I needed in order to speak.But the sentence came.From the corner of my eye, I could see the best friend almost gnashing his teeth. Not in anger. More in surprise, perhaps, at how cleanly the line had landed. He had known me since childhood, and I got on with him well.Then I turned to my mentor.“Stop telling people I am still your mentee.”I had heard that he had been saying this publicly.He tried to deflect, but I could see that he was shaky. In spite of the age difference, in spite of the position he had held, something in the arrangement had shifted. Perhaps it was not even exactly me he was encountering, but the force that was moving through me.I said again:
“You are not my mentor.”Then I turned and walked the two kilometres home, on the railway lines that ran parallel to the sea.It began to drizzle.And then came the joy, welling up through me.I danced along the rail tracks, all the way home. Tears of celebration came with the rain. I took off my spectacles so they would not mist. I did not care how much I could see. Nothing seemed to matter.It felt like a trance, and yet also like lucid clarity.The next day, the best friend contacted my father and said, “I have a feeling I actually don’t know all the details, but your son is definitely right in this matter.”Later, when I went back to India, I found myself looking forward to my next meeting with Tommy. I wanted to tell him what had happened.There was nervousness too. Not because I thought I had done something wrong. I knew I had not gone too far. But some stories carry such force that even telling them requires courage.As I told him, his eyes widened.“Oh my goodness,” he said.Then again.“Oh my goodness.”And by the end, he literally fell off his stool, rolling in a circular motion, laughing.What struck me, even as it was happening, was the particular quality of his joy.Tommy was very funny, and sharply so. But he also carried himself with a kind of quiet bodily composure. There was something almost Zen-like about his posture, and presence. His humour usually had intelligence, precision, and containment in it.So when he rolled off the stool laughing, it was not merely that he found the story funny.He was still entirely himself. And yet, for a moment, I remember feeling a parallel astonishment in myself as I watched him: not only delight that he was delighted, but awe at the reservoir of his joy. It felt as though I was seeing something of him, and perhaps something of the cultural music carried in him, its dignity willingly undone, and released in its fullness.I do not remember what he said afterwards, if anything. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he did not.It was his delight.His complete sharing in my joy.It was the recognition.The rarest kind of witness — someone who does not shrink from your force, does not pathologize your joy, does not anxiously manage your freedom, but recognizes it and joins it in a sheer abandonment of self.

Audio Divina: The Song Beneath the Years

There are pieces of music which do not simply pass through us.Most of us know this, even if we have never quite put language to it. There are songs, melodies, voices, rhythms, and atmospheres that accompany us across years. We first hear them at one age, but they do not remain fixed there. They continue to travel with us, gathering meaning, holding memory. At times, they return at unexpected moments, carrying more than we knew they carried.It may have kept company with parts of us that was not yet fully formed. It may have held longing before we knew what the longing was. It may have accompanied grief, wonder, solitude, prayer, desire, or the ache of becoming. Over time, these musical companions become more than mere sound.We know what it is to wait for that moment in a piece of music — the arrival, the lift, the bass drop, the change of chord, the entrance of a voice, the sudden widening of the whole sound. And we most certainly as hell know what it is to rewind a particular section again and again, much to the chagrin of those around us — parents, siblings, partners — having to bare with our life, playing out on repeat (pardon the pun!)But something in us knows without language. That part of us wants to receive something we can’t put words to, again and again, and again.It’s one of those subtle things about music, isn’t it? The anticipation in it. It gathers us toward a moment. It can make the body lean forward before the mind has named why. It can quicken the pulse, deepen the breath, tighten the chest, release the shoulders, bring tears close, or awaken a kind of bodily recognition.It also carries us through ordinary life. We use music while cooking, cleaning, walking, driving, working, exercising, or moving through repetitive tasks. A strong bass line, a steady beat, a disco pulse, an electronic or trance rhythm, a chant, a drum pattern, a familiar chorus — these can organize the body. They give momentum. They help us cross a threshold from reluctance into movement. They lend their structure to our own.Consider those who drive trucks and lorries across long distances, transporting the ordinary essentials of our lives — vegetables, groceries, toiletries, hygiene products, maintenance supplies. There is often music blaring from these vehicles, not merely as background noise, but music as accompaniment for labour, distance, repetition, fatigue, loneliness, endurance, and momentum. Music helps carry the body through distance. It can turn repetition into movement, and movement into something almost companionable.Other music does something different. It slows us down. It opens interior space. It lets grief rise safely. It gives solitude a shape. It allows memory to return without forcing it. It accompanies prayer when words are not available.

This note is an invitation to listen to the music of our lives, contemplatively.

The Christian tradition has long practiced lectio divina — sacred reading — as a way of receiving Scripture not merely as information, but as encounter.Its roots reach far back into the contemplative and mystical life of the 3rd century Church, into the early monastic practice of praying with sacred text slowly, attentively, and with the whole self.In the twelfth century, the Carthusian monk Guigo II gave this practice a form. He described four movements: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. One receives the text, ponders it in the mind and heart, responds to what has been touched, and finally rests in God beyond words.Guigo imagined these movements as a ladder. That image remains beautiful. But in lived practice, the movements may feel less like climbing one rung after another, and more like a dance. We receive, notice, respond, rest, and return. Sometimes one movement leads naturally into another. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes the soul simply knows where it has been invited to pause.Audio divina draws from this same pattern, but turns toward music.This is not about forcing spiritual meaning onto a song. Nor is it about treating every piece of music as sacred in a simplistic way. It is simply a way of acknowledging something many of us already know: that certain music has become part of our lives in a deeper way. It has accompanied us. It has shaped an atmosphere around us. It has carried memory, longing, beauty, and recognition.Audio divina is a way of listening again — slowly, reverently, and with the whole self.

First listening: receive the whole

Arriving

Listen to the piece once without trying to understand it.Let the music arrive as a whole. Notice its atmosphere, its movement, its emotional weather. Attend not only to melody and rhythm, but to the space it opens in you.Notice what happens in the body. Notice whether images arise, or memories, or sensations. Notice whether a younger self seems to come forward. Notice whether the music feels familiar in a way that is more than memory.Do not interpret too quickly.Simply receive.

Second listening: notice what draws you

The Sweet Spot

Listen again.This time, allow yourself to be drawn to one element: a phrase, a melodic turn, a rhythm, a silence, a voice, an instrument, a shift in harmony, or even a feeling that cannot yet be clearly named.In lectio divina, one listens for the word or phrase that stands out. In audio divina, the “word” may not be verbal. It may be a sound, a texture, a pulse, a swelling, a break, a return.Let the music choose the point of contact.And as you listen, notice not only what draws you, but what begins to move within you. Allow yourself to ponder what you are hearing in both your head and your heart.Notice the thoughts that arise in response to the music, and notice the movements in your heart.

Third listening: respond

The Heart’s Reply

Listen a third time, allowing response to arise.This response may take the form of prayer. It may also take the form of gratitude, grief, memory, recognition, confession, wonder, or silence. You may want to write a few lines. Or doodle something. You may want to speak inwardly. You may simply want to let the music name something you have not yet been able to name yourself.The response does not need to be impressive. It does not need to be complete.It only has to be honest.Honesty here is not simply avoiding lies. It is a bringing and opening of our full self. Rather than trying to fix things up before arriving, genuine prayer is turning towards the divine, in the midst of the reality that is our inner world.There is a kind of prayer that begins before words. Music often knows this territory. It can move beneath explanation and touch the place from which response rises.

Fourth listening: rest

Resting in the Echo

Finally, listen once more, or sit in silence after the music ends.Do not hurry to extract a lesson. Do not force the music to become useful.Let the impressions settle more deeply. Let the sound fall below explanation.Rest with what remains.Perhaps what remains is not an idea, but a quality of presence. Perhaps it is tenderness. Perhaps it is sorrow. Perhaps it is the quiet surprise of discovering that some part of one’s life has been held by sound.In this final movement, the music is no longer something to be analysed, used, or explained. It is allowed to be what it has perhaps always been:a companion.

Audio Divina in brief

Choose a piece of music that has stayed with you.Listen once for the whole. Receive the atmosphere without analysing it.Listen again for what draws you. Notice the sound, phrase, silence, image, memory, thought, or movement of heart that comes forward.Listen a third time and respond. Let gratitude, grief, prayer, recognition, or silence arise naturally.Then rest. Do not force meaning. Let the impressions fall more deeply into your being.

Travel Companion

Tommy (a)

It is nefariously difficult to write about Tommy.I could begin with the familiar cliches, like: it was not so much what he said.Though of course it included what he said.But the other extreme is too simple too: that it was simply who he was.This too is true, and yet it also falls flat.The difficulty might be, that what stuck me about him lived in the almost invisible relationship between the two.The distinct sense I have of Tommy is of a man in whom the gap between speech and action was unusually thin.That, perhaps, is what made him the most skillful human being I have encountered.His words did not seem to float ahead of his life, asking to be admired. What he said, how he listened, how he laughed, how he withheld himself, how he offered himself, how he responded to force, pain, absurdity, dignity, and joy — these did not seem to come from different compartments of a person.
They came from one place.It would be tempting to say, in order to make him seem more human, that of course he did not always know what to say.And perhaps that is true.But I struggle recollecting a single memory of Tommy not knowing what to say.And yet this does not mean he was always speaking.Quite the opposite.What I remember now, especially with the distance of years, is how much he did not say — and how exact that not-saying was. There were many moments when, I now sense, he could have said far more. But he did not fill the space simply because he could. He seemed to have an uncanny consistency, in not using language to prove perception.There was language when language was needed, and very little of it. Highly economical. Clean. Exact. And then there were other moments when no words came, because no words were required.A gesture, a posture, a facial expression, a slight change in the quality of his attention — these could carry what speech would only have burdened.Only much later did the skill of that begin to dawn on me.Not only what he said.But the precision with which he used language, or did not use it.While I could fill a few thousand pages with recollections of how his skilfulness played out, what comes to mind as I write now, is from our first meeting.Somewhere in that first meeting, he mentioned that if he and I crossed paths in public, we did not need to acknowledge each other.Once again, it was not only what he said, but how he said it.The words were clear. Almost sharply clear. And yet they left no trace of guardedness in me. They did not make the space feel secretive, anxious, or conspiratorial. They felt spacious enough for me to make of them what I would, while what I could make of them was also remarkably defined.It is a strange thing, this: language that is both precise and spacious. Clearly bounded, and yet somehow boundless.I cannot of course claim to know why he said that, and the intention behind it.I can guess. But the reality is, I do not know.The guess may still be worth mentioning. At the time, I was training to become a priest, in an environment where he was visiting as a guest or adjunct faculty member. Given what I had told him in that first meeting about my mentor, the mentor’s influence, and the traumatic effect the relationship was having on me, perhaps he sensed that concealing the fact that I was meeting him carried wisdom.But again, I do not know this.And perhaps that is part of the signature of his precision. He told me only what I needed to know, and nothing more. None of his inner process was placed on me. No explanation was added for me to manage. No anxiety (if any) of his was smuggled into the exchange. The interpretive space was left open, but not vague.A few months later, I saw him walking on campus with a very senior faculty member. They were in conversation.I was about twenty or thirty feet away. I waved and called out, “Hey.”What happened next is difficult to describe, because it took place in a fraction of a second.His attention did not split in the obvious way one expects when someone is called. He continued holding the conversation with the senior faculty member. And yet, while looking in my direction, he somehow created the impression that he might be looking just slightly to the side of me.I knew he had seen me.And I also knew that, to the other faculty member, it appeared that I was obviously gesturing at Tommy.In that instant, I felt two things at once.There was a small sting — strangely not painful— at not being acknowledged back.And simultaneously, there was astonishment.Because I could see the senior faculty member become mildly split in his attention, and a little confused. It was obvious that I had waved and called toward Tommy. It was also obvious that Tommy was looking in my direction. And yet it was not obvious enough to require acknowledgement. The situation had been held in that narrow, almost impossible band of ambiguity.All of this happened almost before thought could form.Tommy never brought it up when we next met.Nor did he ever bring it up later.That, too, stayed with me.The communication had happened exactly where it needed to happen. Nothing more was required. No explanation. No checking. No unpacking.Only years later did I begin to understand how precise that was.Not simply the precision of what he said. The precision of what he did not say.And the even rarer precision of allowing an action itself to communicate, without afterwards converting it into commentary.This is what I mean by the thinness of the gap.Speech, silence, gesture, posture, timing, action — in Tommy, these did not seem to belong to separate compartments. They did not arrive as techniques chosen from outside himself. They came from one place.That is what made him so skillful.That the space between perception and response felt unusually clean.

Tommy (b)

Another memory comes from later, after my own time with Tommy had ended.It was somewhere around the middle of my final year of training. A friend in my close circle had begun to go through a very difficult time, including several attempts to take his life. Another friend and I took turns keeping a close eye on him.After one or two attempts, I tried to alert the faculty. The response was strangely slow. Perhaps there was not much of a response at all.Later, after a particularly serious attempt, I communicated again with a senior faculty member. This time, everyone sprung into action. It was clear that the matter was grave.And yet, strangely, given the size and influence of the place, no one seemed able to find someone from within its large network who could offer my friend the support he needed.In retrospect, I still find myself mystified by this. How could such a networked place, with so many contacts, become so strangely paralysed?Eventually, I suggested that we ask Tommy.Even now, I cannot quite understand why no one had come to that conclusion earlier — Tommy, or surely any number of other possibilities that ought to have been available to the school.I called him.He agreed to come to campus.A meeting was arranged with a younger faculty member whose role had to do with student care and campus life. He struck me as an articulate person, but also a little full of himself in a way one had to look closely to notice. This is one of those subtle things: clarity of language can sometimes make a person appear similar to Tommy. But the felt sense was worlds apart.For me, at least.The meeting took place in the faculty member’s office. Present were the young faculty member, my friend who was in difficulty, me, the friend who had been helping keep watch, another friend, and Tommy.The young faculty member spoke at great length.I cannot remember a single word he said.I only remember wishing he would stop.And there was another part of me keeping an eye on Tommy. A curious part. To me, the atmosphere in the room had become almost absurd. There was an obvious expert present, and yet someone else was speaking.Finally, as the lengthy speech began to wind down, I felt the room arrive at the obvious next movement. Now it was Tommy’s turn.But the transition was not smooth.Tommy had not really been introduced into the room’s authority structure. And yet the atmosphere made it clear, without saying so, that he was now expected to speak. There may even have been that subtle movement of all eyes tilting toward him.His posture was noticeably uninterested.In fact, he was fully present. That was the astonishing thing. He was not drifting away from the room.And yet his body communicated something like a vague disinterest in the performance of the room.There was something profoundly funny about this, though of course the reason we were meeting was not funny at all. The situation itself was grave. But Tommy’s posture produced in me this strange mixture of awe, secret thrill, and sheer disbelief.How does he do that?One could almost be forgiven for thinking that he was extremely busy in that moment, while doing absolutely nothing.That is the part that still makes me laugh.In trying to describe it, I find myself forced to reach for analogies that do not actually apply. It was not that he had a phone in his hand and was scrolling. It was not that he was looking through papers, adjusting his bag, checking the time, or using some object to create the impression of occupation.None of that was happening.There was no prop. Nothing to hide behind. No visible task.And yet, somehow, he appeared entirely occupied.Occupied, perhaps, with not participating.Or more precisely, occupied with the exactness of his non-participation.He did not oppose the young faculty member. He made no attempt to correct him. There was no signal of contempt. He simply left the room to flounder in its awkwardness, with no attempt at rescue.The bodily refusal was so clean that it almost disappeared into posture.The expectation became physical.You could feel it gathering around him.The room seemed to know that it was now his turn. The eyes, the silence, the subtle shift in attention — everything began to move toward him.Tommy simply sat there.Eventually, the young faculty member had to take up the reins again. He spoke. The meeting ended.Tommy never said a word.Later, he met privately with my friend.My friend asked me to accompany him, so I was present for some of the meetings, sitting off to the side.They were mostly quiet. So quiet, that I found myself dozing off at times.After those four meetings, something in my friend had changed so deeply that it was difficult to describe. A lifelong struggle seemed, almost literally, to lift. From then on, as I remember it, he was no longer suicidal.Only later did I begin to understand the force of the contrast.In the official meeting, Tommy said nothing.In the private work, very little was said.And yet something happened.That, too, was part of his skill: the refusal to spend language where language would only become theatre, and the capacity to use presence, timing, and a few exact movements of attention where they could actually matter.

Tommy (c)

It was Tommy who introduced me to Centering Prayer, in our first meeting.I say this as though it were a major event, and in one sense it was. Centering Prayer became my core practice. It became one of the central spiritual rhythms of my life.But that is not how it looked when he gave it to me.He did not present it as a major event.There was no grand announcement of, I am now giving you something important.There was no long lecture. No solemn handing over of a great contemplative tradition. No elaborate explanation of its history, stages, safeguards, or theological grounding.He simply introduced it.Almost casually.That was one of the strange things about Tommy. Some of what he gave most precisely did not arrive dressed as precision.Naturally, being twenty-seven and newly entrusted with a contemplative practice I barely understood, I did the next obvious thing.I taught it to five people.Or at least, I thought I did.They lost interest fairly quickly, which may have been a mercy to all concerned.At our next meeting, I told Tommy this.He paused.“Wait," he said.And then, with the faintest widening of comic disbelief:
“You taught other people this?”As always, it is difficult to describe these fraction-of-a-second moments with Tommy, because the humour was not merely in the words. The whole teaching was in his body.A smile began to appear on his face.It was sly, wry, kind, and devastatingly humorous.It was the smile of someone allowing reality to become visible without needing to name it.The absurdity entered the room.I could feel it immediately.There I was, barely knowing what I was doing, already distributing the practice like a travelling contemplative salesman.And Tommy, without saying any of that, somehow said all of it.He did not need to explain that to me. He did not need to warn me about spiritual inflation, premature teaching, or the dangers of passing on what one had not yet embodied.That was the genius of the moment.
His humour was delicious, but it was not merely funny. His body communicated the whole teaching with such precision that explanation would have ruined it.I began to smile at the absurdity of the whole thing.We both began laughing. At me. With me. It was wonderfully freeing.And then it was over.He never brought it up again.Perhaps that is what made it so effective. Nothing was added after the teaching had already landed. No extra explanation. No residue. No management.Just the practice, given lightly.And the correction, given even more lightly.

Centering Prayer (a)
The Boat Watcher and the Scuba-Diver

Two Analogies That Seem the Same

In the classic analogy for meditation, the meditator stays keenly tuned to the passing parade overhead, watching each boat as it emerges into view, its wake rippling through the waters, and then passing out of sight.In the not so well known analogy, it likens the position of the meditator to a scuba diver sitting on a rock at the bottom of the riverbed. Thoughts float by like boats on the surface of this river of consciousness, but the diver simply continues to perch there on their rock, allowing the thoughts to pass by overhead. But with one twist — the diver simply wakes up to discover that somehow he’s managed to sleepwalk into the hold of one of those boats, at which point he simply climbs off and swims back down to his rock.At first glance, these two analogies seem to be describing the same thing.In both, thoughts are compared to boats moving along the surface of a river. In both, the meditator is not supposed to climb into the boat, row the boat, chase the boat, sink the boat, decorate the boat, or argue with the boat. The boats come and go. Thoughts arise and pass. The practitioner learns not to be carried away by them.So on the surface, the teaching appears simple: thoughts are not the enemy. Let them pass.But the two analogies are actually pointing toward two quite different forms of meditation. They share a vocabulary, but the interior gesture is not quite the same.

Watching the Boats

In the classic analogy, the meditator is invited to remain keenly attentive to the passing parade of thoughts. Each boat emerges into view. It sends its wake rippling through the waters. It passes out of sight. The practitioner observes this whole movement. A thought appears, develops, creates an emotional or bodily after-effect, and then dissolves. The meditation consists in watching this process clearly, steadily, and without being swept away.This is a meditation of witnessing.Its intelligence lies in observation. The meditator learns to see thoughts as events in consciousness rather than as commands, identities, or final truths.One notices:
here is a memory
here is a plan
here is resentment
here is fantasy
here is fear
here is the little wake fear leaves in the body after the thought itself has passed.There is great value in this. Much human suffering comes not simply from having thoughts, but from being unconsciously fused with them. The classic analogy gently introduces distance. It teaches that a thought can be seen. And if it can be seen, then it is not identical with the one who sees it.This kind of meditation develops clarity, steadiness, discrimination, and non-reactivity. It refines the faculty of attention. It allows the practitioner to become less hypnotized by the contents of the mind. One begins to see the mind’s patterns: its repetition, its seductions, its fears, its rehearsals, its dramas, its little boats constantly coming and going.The meditator remains near enough to the surface to observe the boats carefully. The boats matter, not because they must be followed, but because they reveal the activity of the mind. Their arrival, their movement, their wake, and their disappearance are all part of the field of practice.

Beneath the Surface

The second analogy is subtler.Here the meditator is not stationed on the bank of the river, watching the boats pass by. The meditator is a scuba diver sitting on a rock at the bottom of the riverbed. Thoughts still pass by like boats on the surface. But the diver is not especially concerned with tracking them. The diver does not need to watch each boat emerge, identify it, study its wake, and observe its disappearance. The boats are above. The diver is below.This changes everything.The centre of gravity is no longer the surface movement of consciousness, but the depth beneath it. The practitioner is not primarily cultivating the skill of watching thoughts. The practitioner is learning to remain seated in a deeper place.The rock matters more than the boats.This is not a meditation of keen observation in the same sense. It is more like a meditation of returning. Or even more deeply, a meditation of consent.The thought-stream continues. Boats still pass. But they are not the main object of attention. In fact, to keep looking up at the boats too intently would already be a subtle movement away from the rock. The diver does not need to inspect every boat. The diver’s task is simply to remain where he is.

Waking Up in the Hold

And then comes the brilliant twist — the diver wakes up and discovers that somehow he has sleepwalked into the hold of one of the boats.This is a much more precise description of ordinary thought than we may first realize.We do not usually enter thoughts consciously. We rarely say, with full awareness,
“I am now going to climb into this anxious narrative and live inside it for the next seven minutes.”It happens more mysteriously than that. One moment there is sitting. The next moment there is a whole interior movie playing. We are planning, defending, remembering, explaining, accusing, desiring, regretting. Not only has a boat passed overhead, somehow we are inside it.And not merely on deck, either. The analogy says the diver wakes up in the hold of the boat.That is wonderfully exact. A thought does not merely carry us along on the surface. Once we are identified with it, we are enclosed by it. We lose the open river. We lose the depth. We lose the wider field. We are now inside the thought-world, moving according to its logic, breathing its air, accepting its atmosphere as reality.In the classic analogy, the meditator watches thoughts go by.In the second analogy, the meditator may not even know he has been taken until he wakes up inside the thought.That single difference reveals two different understandings of meditation.The first emphasizes sustained conscious observation.The second emphasizes awakening from identification and returning to depth.The first might say: “Watch the thought arise, move, ripple, and pass.”The second says: “When you discover you have been carried away, come back.”This distinction is not as minuscule as it first appears. It changes the whole flavour of practice.In the classic form, attention has a certain brightness. It is alert, lucid, tracking. It watches the mind with interest. There is a disciplined quality to it. The practitioner is learning not to be fooled by mental content. The practice sharpens awareness.In the second form, attention is quieter and more surrendered. The practitioner is not trying to maintain a perfect observational stance toward the contents of the mind. In fact, the repeated discovery of failure is built into the practice. One will wake up in the boat. Again and again. The important thing is not to prevent this from happening, nor to analyze how one got there, nor to scold oneself for having left the rock.The important thing is simply to climb out and return.

The Humility of Returning

There is enormous humility in this.The second analogy assumes that the meditator will be taken. This does not indicate the meditator is bad at meditation, but rather, that this is what the mind does. It sleepwalks. It identifies. It drifts into the hold of passing narratives. The practice is not the heroic maintenance of uninterrupted awareness. The practice is the gentle, repeated act of coming back.And here, “coming back” is not merely returning to attention. It is returning to depth.The diver swims back down to the rock. That descent is the meditation.This is why the second analogy points toward a different kind of interior movement. The meditator is not trying to become a better observer of mental events. The meditator is learning to yield again to a deeper ground beneath mental events. The surface may be busy, but the bottom of the river remains. The boats may pass, but the rock is still there.In this sense, the second analogy is especially close to forms of contemplative prayer or apophatic meditation where the central act is not analysis, visualization, or even sustained mindfulness of thoughts, but a simple return to a chosen depth — to presence, silence, consent, or God.The practitioner is not indifferent to thoughts because thoughts are worthless. Rather, thoughts are not the deepest place from which to live.This also means that the two analogies have different relationships to self-knowledge.The first gives self-knowledge through observation. By watching the boats, one learns the habits of the mind. One begins to recognize recurring vessels:the boat of grievance
the boat of self-justification
the boat of fantasy
the boat of dread
the boat of spiritual ambition
the boat of old shame.One sees their shapes and their wakes. The seeing itself liberates.The second gives self-knowledge through the repeated experience of being found elsewhere. It reveals how quickly identity relocates itself. One discovers, sometimes with a kind of rueful tenderness, “Ah, I am in the boat again.” But the discovery is not an invitation to observe the boat. It is an invitation to leave.This is a different knowledge. Less analytical, perhaps, but more existential. It teaches not only, “These are the kinds of thoughts I have,” but, “This is how easily I abandon the depth. This is how quickly I become enclosed in a story. This is how mercifully simple the return can be.”There is also a different understanding of effort.In the first analogy, effort is directed toward staying awake to the passage of phenomena. The meditator practices continuity of awareness. There is a kind of disciplined seeing.In the second, effort is lighter, almost paradoxical. The diver does not strain to hold the bottom of the river in place. The rock is already there. The depth is already there. The practice is not to manufacture the depth, but to return to it whenever one notices one has left.This is why the second practice can look, from the outside, almost too simple. One sits. One is carried away. One notices. One returns. Then one is carried away again. One notices again. One returns again.But inwardly, this repetition is profound. Each return weakens the old enchantment that says thought is home. Each return quietly re-educates the whole being: the boat is not home. The surface is not false, but it is not final. The movement overhead is real, but it is not the ground.The classic analogy may produce a beautifully clear witness.The second analogy may produce a quietly rooted person.Of course, these two forms of meditation are not enemies. They can enrich each other. The capacity to observe thought can help one recognize when one has been carried away. And the practice of returning to depth can protect observation from becoming too mental, too managerial, too fascinated with the passing stream.But they should not be collapsed into one another.If the first is misunderstood, it can become a subtle form of mental surveillance: the self watching the self, endlessly monitoring the weather of consciousness.If the second is misunderstood, it can become vagueness or passivity, a drifting away under the name of surrender.At their best, both are beautiful. But they are beautiful in different ways.The first says: see clearly what passes.The second says: return quietly to what remains.The first trains the eye.The second trains the consent of the whole being.The first helps us discover that we are not the boats.The second helps us discover that even after we have found ourselves inside the boat, the way back to the rock is still open.One simply climbs out.One swims back down.One sits again on the rock.And overhead, the boats continue to pass.

Open Mind, Open Heart, Thomas Keating

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Part 1 of 4, Cynthia Bourgeault

Two Forms of Coherence

Love, Self-Will, and the Moral Physics of the "Higher" Worlds

There is a certain image that makes the whole question suddenly intelligible: waves moving across a dark field.At first they appear as many lines, many motions, many intensities. Some cross, some cancel, some reinforce. But then, when they begin to align, something happens that is more than addition. The field does not merely contain several separate waves. It begins to amplify. A stronger signal emerges.This is the simple physics of constructive interference. But in the context of Cynthia Bourgeault’s redaction of the Ray of Creation, it becomes something far more sobering — an image of consciousness itself.What if spiritual development is not primarily the acquisition of experiences, beliefs, powers, or states? What if it is the gradual movement from fragmentation into coherence?And what if coherence itself is not automatically "good?"Yep. You read that right. Stay with me.

The Wave as a Map of Consciousness

A wave pattern gives us an unusually precise metaphor for inner life.At ordinary levels of consciousness, the human being is rarely one thing. We are a mixture of impulses, fears, desires, loyalties, memories, wounds, longings, and contradictory intentions. One part seeks truth. Another part seeks approval. One part wants surrender. Another wants control. One part loves. Another protects itself from the consequences of love.The result is not lack of energy. The result is incoherent energy.The problem is not that the human being has no force. The problem is that the force is divided against itself.This is why the wave image becomes so powerful. Multiple waveforms may all have amplitude, but if they are out of phase, they cancel or distort one another. The field becomes noisy. Signal is present, but it cannot stabilize.In contemplative terms, this is the condition of scattered attention, mixed motive, partial sincerity, emotional reactivity, and sleep.But as consciousness becomes more gathered, something begins to change. The waves do not vanish. Difference is not erased. Rather, the separate centers begin to enter relationship. Attention stabilizes. Intention clarifies. Love becomes less intermittent. The field begins to carry more meaning.This is the beginning of coherence.

A Few Things to Get out of the Way