We tell ourselves that what we experience in a moment’s time, also passes in a moment’s time. We step out into the street, for example, and while crossing a car ignores the red light, and you are nearly hit: whew! That was close. And now it is history.

That is a mistaken impression, however. We have trained our eyes on our next paces, or we laughingly pick up the thread of conversation from before our scare, and move on as though nothing had happened; but something has happened, and we engrave the events of our physical lives in the same way a tree writes rings into its body for every hard winter, or an animal writes scars into its flesh and into its spirit for the threats it has narrowly avoided.

The grace of going away is that your eyes are refreshed for when you return. What you see once in your daily, then see again and again, gains a transparency, loses its edges, so that after a time it is no longer visible at all. This is to be expected: our senses are used to protect us and to bring us to food, and stimuli which have been identified, processed and cataloged need no longer occupy the mind, and are let go. Background noise that needn’t be listened to.

Ok. It has been less than 48 hours here in India, but true to any real travel, an hour might be a day back home. The gift of letting yourself move into a truly foreign environment is that you have chosen to be changed. It’s like diving into the surf on day with high seas… and the water is cold. You can’t inch your way in, of course: you run, you throw yourself into the next falling wave, get tumbled, rolled, hit the floor of the sea, pick up a suit full of sand, then stand up gasping and smiling.

Early yogic and other Asian traditions gave great attention to inner space. It was the science of that day, and like the science of any other day, it was a human attempt to understand the nature of existence, employing the clearest and most powerful tools available. The closest subject, and the one which yielded the greatest wealth of insight, was one’s own physical and psychic being; the experiments, rather than being humbled by what we might imagine a lack of powerful technology, resulted in empirical knowledge, which developed over time into philosophical and physical traditions which have lasted millennia.