I thought it would be a good idea to break up my journey home by stopping off somwehere for a night, and looking at the map I was instantly drawn to Yorkshire and it's wild Dales. After many a wet night I decided to go on a mission to find a dry spot to sleep in and lo and behold I found an old barn nestled between sprawling hills and without any sight of civilasation nearby. It instantly became home and I found myself making a mini-workshop to create keepsakes from all the feathers, wood, shells and stones I'd collected on my journey. I got so lost in the process that I was up til sunrise working at my table with a headtorch to guide me, and by the following day I was certain I wasn't ready to leave so spent another dreamy night sampling whiskeys I'd brought in Scotland and continuing to beaver away in my workshop.
It was during my final mediation of the trip that I awakened to another important truth about our misinterpretation of reality, which was perhaps the most valuable lesson of my journey. When contemplating happiness and suffering I kept coming back to this idea of opposites - be it beauty and ugliness, dark and light, joy and pain - and tried to reconcile this accepted view of negative and positive with the feeling of oneness I had experienced. It was Parmenides, whom in the sixth century BC classified the world into positives and negatives, that begun the greatest delusion that continues to blind us from seeing Reality as it it really is. By separating thoughts into good and bad, distinguishing ourselves from others and understanding the world through the notion of duality, we have prevented our mental development and have thus become ignorant to the unity of life in all its forms. By taking time to contemplate this notion of non-duality and experiencing it for yourself, the barriers to enlightenment will gradually fall away and there is hope that we will begin to treat others, animals and nature as we wish to be treated ourselves. And then we might start to witness real progress in this world.
Listening to: 'The Popcorn' - James Brown
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