Selections from "The Joruney OF The Fool"

The Journey of the fool is Copyright © 2006 by Fady Bahig

I was so confused that night. Lauren came late and kissed me, then she went straight to bed. Quickly she was fast asleep; the long tour was too tough for her. I lay next to her and couldn’t close my eyes. I kept on thinking of my feeling, of Hans’ analy-sis and of the questions. I kept on thinking and thinking till I was very tired and feebly slept.

That night I had a very strange dream. I dreamt that I was a poor villager who traveled and traveled, who passed endless realms in his quest. Finally, I reached a huge black mountain. I fell exhaustedly to earth. I slowly raised my head and looked before me. I saw him. He was wearing a black veil to hide his face. As I tried to approach him and take off his veil he took a step backwards and pointed to a chessboard on earth. I had to beat him to see his face. I sat and we started to play. He defeated me. I tried again and again and I kept on twisting my mind to solve his riddles but in every time I was beaten. I got mad. I threw the chessboard violently away and all the pieces scattered on earth. Quickly I threw myself on him, opening both hands to catch him. He melted and slipped from between my fingers then solidified again far from me, still retaining his veil. I ran after him. I chased him. I tried to bypass his divine censorship and strip him off his veil. But I failed. I lay on earth closed an eye and kept the other half opened. I knew his love would fool his wisdom. He slowly approached and as he leaned towards me I suddenly threw myself on him again, and again I was holding air. As I chased him I asked him if he knew the impossible, if he could create an empty full glass or draw a circular square. As I did he laughed with cut voice, tired of the chase and responded with an old man’s voice “Oh, Faust! You are still too far from knowing me! I am that empty fullness! How can I draw that cir-cular square when it is nothing but the very shape of my heart?”

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Immediately I felt so bitter and walked away from that place as fast as I could. I walked for a long time, and was starting to despair, but I could see large buildings from faraway, so I re-called my strength and marched on.

It was a very decent quarter. Everything was neat and clean. It was not a commercial quarter so the streets were empty. I liked that place. After a while I wanted to talk with anybody to know how to go back to the hotel. After a while I found an ex-pensively decorated shop. I didn’t know what it sold, and I was not sure that it was a shop; there were no windows, just a closed fashionable door. Perhaps it was a hotel. The label was written in Indian so I didn’t know. Finally I decided to knock on the door.

Nobody opened. The sun was making the empty street very hot, and I thought nobody was there. I stood for a couple of min-utes then I walked away. As I did, I could hear somebody walking feebly and opening the door.

As I looked backwards I saw a girl in her early twenties, she looked Russian or from Eastern Europe. She had heavy makeup on her face that melted hours ago and resolidified in a horrible manner. Her hair was untidy and she looked very drowsy and drunk.

“Yeah?” she said with half of her mouth wide open and the other half almost shut, “Is it uncle the milkman?”
“Milkman? No. I am a tourist, I want to know how to go back to my hotel.”
“What? She asked as she was staggering.
“Where are we?” I cried at her as people do with a half-deaf, “What is the name of this district?”
“I am Melina,” she said with her tremendously funny tilted mouth, “Wanna get in and do me?”
“Damn!” I cried as I walked away, “I am in no need of a prostitute. I came here seeking someone to reveal to me the hu-man nature.”
“Then you came to the right place,” she said as she stum-blingly made a step or two extending her arm towards me, “I see them all, Boy, I see them veilless…”

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As I left the ashram and walked away I saw a poor Indian practicing self-mortifications. He was sitting cross-legged under the burning sun. A large fire was set all around his bruised body.

“Oh, what a poor creature,” I thought to myself as I walked past the poor man, “He is mercilessly torturing himself as if the truth would see him and feel all the pain that is devouring his flesh. He is tearing his body so that the truth would reveal itself to him out of pity. Doesn’t he know that the truth is at farmost from being sentient?”

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Down came the heavy ice balls like a bomb rain eating what-ever had the courage to stand in front of them. I miraculously escaped my doom. As I looked backwards I saw no Raji, no jeep, just an endless white field.

I walked wearily on the ice. I was afraid that the earth was brittle. Just one wrong step and I would find myself buried alive in an icy cave.

Hours passed slowly, I was walking without a destination, marching towards the unknown.

Soon my poor legs could hold me no more. I fell on the earth in despair. My bag fell off my back and all my possessions were scattered on the ice. I knew it was the end.

The seconds passed slowly, I remembered Keiko, I remem-bered the kindhearted Matilda and I remembered how my father looked like saints the last time I saw him. Then I saw the smiling face of Hans. I saw Mom and remembered how I felt warmth in the hug of my beloved Lauren. I remembered how it felt the first time we practiced Tantra together and I remembered how I stood weeping next to her as I blew air towards her face without a re-sponse.

My weak eyes moved slowly till they saw something half buried in the endless Himalayan snow; it was Blanky, my moth-er’s puppet. Immediately I remembered how I felt on the night I dreamt the mannequin dream. Hot tears fell on my frozen face.

As I looked at the horizon I saw the beautiful mountaintops from faraway. And I started to think about the gurus, the true gurus who didn’t act like clowns for the westerners but instead celebrated the beauty of being in this place. Can it be that in this very spot in which I was to die one day a holy man walked? Can it be that he then saw this same picture that I was seeing, of those beautiful distant mountaintops? That was destined to be the last picture that I saw before I died?

As I was diving in my turbulent thoughts suddenly I felt that my eyes were ‘opened’. Everything around me started to appear as if it had an ‘inside’, a kind of ‘internal nature’ just like the one I had. Everything appeared as if they were alive. As if they were internally alive, but they were more than alive, they somehow were ‘conscious’ but their consciousness was so faint, perhaps they were ‘preconscious’. As if they were striving with their lim-ited ability of expression to tell us that they were alive inside, for our realization of this fact would further bring them to the light of consciousness and being. Seen in this manner, everything ap-peared to be exceedingly beautiful and precious. Those moments were the most precious moments of my whole life. I was seeing everything as totally new and vivid. I was certain that my eyes were penetrating directly to the deepest depth of truth, that all is alive, sharing one universal essence. I was not Blanky, but Blanky and I shared a common life, a common inner spark of being. My heart was full of emotions that I wept as hard as I could, I was deeply grieved that all this beauty surrounded us without being noticed. We humans were miserable indeed, to live amidst all this beauty without being aware of it. We made things ugly with our ignorance of this certain ‘approach’ or vi-sion to the world. I had seen all what was there to be seen. I saw how absurd had been my expectations of a vision of God. I went here and there seeking him. Now I was sure that I had seen God, and he turned out to be nothing but the world that I looked at everyday.

I came to India seeking enlightenment, and now I found it. I didn’t find it through following a guru and I didn’t find it before a holy text or a statue. I found it amidst the forgotten snow of the Himalayas.

For all my life I have been crying my heart out for nothing, driven by unexplainable anxiety towards something that I didn’t know, feeling suffocating thirst to that one more missing piece in the puzzle of life.

I have been fighting windmills, chasing shadows, desperately seeking meaning in the meaningless…

And now I have found it!

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More Selections coming soon

 

what the hell is this a book or somethn?

il read this later man.......all that looks a little overwhelming right now tho

 

Interesting to say the least