“Who, having cast off the world, would desire to return again? He would only be there.” it is written in the Upanisad. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come marching back to knock on your door.
We were being pulled back by society and so an important aspect of this trip is the gentle and dignified reintegration into the society in which we inhabit and are part of. This is, after all, our world.
For me, I spent the afternoon writing notes, mainly to capture the fleeting thoughts and impressions before they disappear like dreams into the mind’s recesses, gone like scent of coffee by mid-morning.
The brain is a mainly eliminative machine – discarding almost everything that it deems to be unnecessary – only noticing things that are relevant. But do we really know if we’re only eliminating things we don’t need? What if there are things that are relevant to new quests and the machinery hasn’t yet updated? What if we’ve been too distracted to notice new relevant things, or become accustomed to an ill-fitting cause?
What does it take to find the magic rock in the bubbling stream, the foxglove in the misty pink hay, the clue hidden in the chapter – what does it take to spot it, grab it and to bring it back?
The basic problem here, writes Joseph Campbell, is to enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Not everyone has destiny to find such things – only those that take the plunge.
For a few hours, when we plunged into that world, nothing obstructed our view, nothing was elimated: the ego crushed, the pupils dissolved, but as we walked very same path that we had come up, the personality returned, the perspective narrowed, and the mundane world returned with its impatient jealousy obstructing the relevant clues and pulling us along familiar paths.
We needed to reintegrate so that we come back with clues, and cherish them before they’re lost. We needed to reintegrate so the mundane wasn’t a shock, depressing us or encouraging us to get lost again.
It was important that we recognise this world and integrate the clues to make this a better place.
We wrote, reflected, did our own thing for a while, then ate together.
We were now brimming with new experiences, overflowing, bubbling with creative energy.
To refine and distill all of this energy and ultimately harness it, we had pre-prepared some frameworks to guide, constrain and direct our creative force which flowed from the chaotic towards something new.
The frameworks, which was designed to help us write our vision, would work in the same way a structured villanelle helps the poet, or how a picture frame constrains the physical space for an artist to work in.
It was all the more important since we had opened our pupils to everything, and we can only a bring back a few things with us – but what were they to be?
We now needed to constrain that creative force to extract the relevant and meaningful clues.