You can learn a lot from a computer, from its make-up, its workings, and how it's put together. The bodymind is a lot like a central processing unit for instance, except far more complex than any computer man could make. It has bandwidth, it has the capability of speed, of quickness and sharpness, and it can be infected with all manner of viruses that can slow it down and if not attended to eventually kill it. Yet, the bodymind is not a computer in the traditional sense, to think so is to lead yourself down a dangerous path; it is far more than that.
Broadbanding the mind is the key to understanding how much more the Mind is, and the best way, in my humble opinion, to do this is to 'space out', and literally free up space in (de-fragment) the Mind. Most people these days have a very narrow bandwith to their Mind, very little head-space to fly about in and contemplate. This is due to our over-reliance on analysis and calculations, planning and operational thinking, effectively un-presencing ourselves by focussing on the future. This metaphysical removal of ourselves from ourselves leads to 'action', and all action is karma. When we are fully immersed in the present, when our mind is disinfected from the future, our bandwith like our Being becomes broad and sharp.
But what, I hear you ask, is the best way to space out. Lots of youngsters immediately think drugs: ecstasy, after all, is offering you that ecstatic experience, to step outside of this manufactured ego-driven self and become your (real and true) self, and to a large extent it succeeds, but the problem with chemicals and psychotropic substances like ecstasy is that they necessarily affect your system in other ways, that the ecstatic experience you have garnered is predicated upon an equally un-ecstatic experience which drug takers will no doubt identify with the working week that follows the weekend, a week-long comedown. When, however, you glean that ecstasy not from some muppet in a jester's hat in a darkened discotheque but from the earth herself, there is no comedown. The ecstasy lives within you, albeit at times on a lower frequency. It accompanies life and enriches it, whether that life be your own, or other lifeforms that you encounter along the way. The ecstasy is, you realise, within you. You don't need a pill to unlock it; all you need is a little discipline, a vague outline of the way ahead, a pair of legs, and some gently rolling hills with plenty of space.
The shape of space shapes!
For someone living in Glasgow then, a valley-city surrounded by bucolic shires and slow undulating hills, the ecstatic experience is never far away.
The other day, upon watching a snippet of a television program, a youngster was heard saying that she thought 'hiking was pointless'. These are the same youngsters that seem permanently connected to their techno-prosthetics, and who have been weaned on a thousand flashing lights and noises. Of course, something like walking in a forest or on a hillside (for someone who has never even been introduced to one) would appear to the most boring thing imaginable. Yet, it is not the hillside or the forest that has become boring.... but one's brain and Mind. To call walking in wilderness pointless reveals the extent to which mankind has been removed from his own deeper self, that primal savage for whom walking in wilderness was a matter of survival and vitality. Now, we exist not in spheres of aliveness and organicity, but in boxes of concrete and polysterene. The whole 'pointlessness' of hiking is the point! Within that unoperational thinking, space appears, bandwith expands. And the bodymind reaches out to take hold of itself...
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