Several times I have attempted -- and pretty much failed -- to convince readers of the value of surviving winter without a furnace. Very well then... one more try and then I'll quit. I'll be a good sport by consigning the readers to the fleeting shadows of perpetual unenlightenment.
The time for 'glory' was running out for this winter. A new warming trend was starting today. Just in the nick of time, the temperature inside my trailer went below freezing -- a magical place that can seem unattainable. (Once again, compare this to the beginning of the movie, "The Right Stuff," when the Air Force was trying to break the sound barrier.) I celebrated the occasion by heating water and putting it in the flexible water bladder (Platypus brand), and then inserting it under my parka.
But the real moment of enlightenment occurred yesterday. For a couple nights I had been sleeping in my insulated bib overalls. In the morning I simply got out of bed, threw the parka over the top of the bibs, flapped my arms, and made a cup of hot coffee.
How a person can hunger for the morning sun to finally clear the trees and hit the meadow and the trailer! I pushed myself away from the silly desk and internet to walk around in the first few moments of glorious sunlight, while my dog chased her detested ravens, nearby.
The bib overalls were left on for most of the day. Several times I walked in the sunny meadow. It was almost becoming a ritualistic dance. Eventually I felt what must be similar to the experience of religious mystics.
I had stopped bracing myself against the cold. I was at peace with it. I seemed to expand into the sunny meadow, no longer being able to tell where "I" left off and the sunny meadow began.
It seems contradictory to not have a high opinion of religious mystics if I value my own experience so much, and if the two experiences are so similar psychologically. Was my experience more 'real' or more 'natural' than the mystics?
Perhaps it is because it seems untruthful and unhealthy to visualize human experience as if it were nothing but psychology. It seems more balanced, real, and sane to watch the interplay between mere internal sentimentalism and the outside world of physical and biological reality. The internal needs the external to be validated.
But, you argue, people practicing yoga are using a physiological discipline to induce their psychological experience. Isn't my experience just a type of yoga?
You could think of it that way. I have thought the same thing of bicycling several times.
The time for 'glory' was running out for this winter. A new warming trend was starting today. Just in the nick of time, the temperature inside my trailer went below freezing -- a magical place that can seem unattainable. (Once again, compare this to the beginning of the movie, "The Right Stuff," when the Air Force was trying to break the sound barrier.) I celebrated the occasion by heating water and putting it in the flexible water bladder (Platypus brand), and then inserting it under my parka.
But the real moment of enlightenment occurred yesterday. For a couple nights I had been sleeping in my insulated bib overalls. In the morning I simply got out of bed, threw the parka over the top of the bibs, flapped my arms, and made a cup of hot coffee.
How a person can hunger for the morning sun to finally clear the trees and hit the meadow and the trailer! I pushed myself away from the silly desk and internet to walk around in the first few moments of glorious sunlight, while my dog chased her detested ravens, nearby.
The bib overalls were left on for most of the day. Several times I walked in the sunny meadow. It was almost becoming a ritualistic dance. Eventually I felt what must be similar to the experience of religious mystics.
I had stopped bracing myself against the cold. I was at peace with it. I seemed to expand into the sunny meadow, no longer being able to tell where "I" left off and the sunny meadow began.
It seems contradictory to not have a high opinion of religious mystics if I value my own experience so much, and if the two experiences are so similar psychologically. Was my experience more 'real' or more 'natural' than the mystics?
Perhaps it is because it seems untruthful and unhealthy to visualize human experience as if it were nothing but psychology. It seems more balanced, real, and sane to watch the interplay between mere internal sentimentalism and the outside world of physical and biological reality. The internal needs the external to be validated.
But, you argue, people practicing yoga are using a physiological discipline to induce their psychological experience. Isn't my experience just a type of yoga?
You could think of it that way. I have thought the same thing of bicycling several times.
Comments
Chris
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/opinion/this-cold-house.html