Manny asked: "What do you wish to gain from this travel?"

I struggled for a moment to find an answer — everywhere I looked inside of my heart I could find nothing that I wished to add to my life. How often do we fall into an old habit: the search for what is missing? When in fact, it is not something we hope to gain, but rather all that we hope to lose. All of the automatic and assumed attitudes, all of the activity, the movement without pause…

In my city we live with a fear of death. This fear is so great we stand with our backs to it, as though it did not exist, and cross our arms, and make ourselves so busy. Maybe if I am busy, Death will look at its watch and think, oh, I really couldn't bother him. Look how much he has to do.

This month I wish to live in the place between resting and sleep. Have you ever been there? You will know it when you have, it is like the park on Sunday morning, just when the sun is rising, and nothing before you except that sunrise. It is that place where you have fallen into your bed, yet your awareness hasn't yet been taken to the other side of sleep. All of the spinning thought slows down and down, the mind has surrendered its great efforts but not disappeared: a perfectly quiet emptiness into which anything could speak, or everything.

In stillness you discard the posing and the masks which, inadvertently, you had taken on.

Well. We have found ourselves on the doorstep of a master, and while the master is no longer among us, the wave that his life on earth created still washes the feet of the mountain he called his home. Amazing to sit in a hall of meditation where so many have come, from around the world, in pilgrimage. I am not a pilgrim, but a fortunate traveller. Tomorrow we climb the mountain, to the caves where Ramana Maharshi retreated in his inspection of the self.

Perhaps there is a grand view from the top…

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