A Walk Along the Broomielaw

 'You think you've seen the sun, but you ain't seen it shine'. Frank Sinatra, The Best is Yet to Come.

A walk along the Broomielaw reveals the river to be swollen like never before. Debris floats slowly and inexorably towards the sea. The ice of the hills has, evidently, melted in these past few days as the temperature, country-wide, has risen slightly. It can't be the rain here in Glasgow, because it hasn't been raining. It is thus, seeing this extended play at work, of the country, if you will, entering the city, that one becomes connected to a wider (and greater) Glasgow. The Clyde after all is simply a natural artery for the conveyance of the 'blood' of the land, sea and sky. It is thus that the mountain comes to Mohammed, or at least the blood that fed it. One travels, now, without moving. Maybe this is what Proust meant when he wrote, 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes'. When one attains clarity of vision (seeing is a cognitive phenomenon not retinal), there is no need any longer to journey. 

The slow flow of Glasgow, in effect, is, at a deeper level of reality and of seeing, the slow flow of the world. The slow flow of the world, in effect, is, at a deeper level of reality and of seeing, the slow flow of the solar field. The slow flow of the solar field... you get the idea.

For release from the bonds of empirical existence, the wise and learned person completely gives up all desire-motivated actions and commences an unceasing contemplation of the Self. So writes Sankara (c. 650-700 AD), one of India's most venerated philosophers and exponents of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, in the Vivekacudamani (The Crown Jewel of Discrimination). In other words, stillness is your destination. Stillness as an absence of seeking (agitation). Or, to put it another way, any seeking is a denial of the presence of the sought. As Kitaro Nishida remarks in his Enquiry into the Good, 'Because the self and things are one, there is no truth to be sought and no desire to be satisfied'. 

Curiously, building upon our remarks on doing (as activity/acting) and here, Nishida's 'Enquiry', Sankara writes:

Reality is attained through enquiry and never in the slightest degree by even a hundred million actions.

'Enquiry' as deriving from the Latin in + quaerere meaning to ask, or seek, in(wardly). As John Grimes elucidates in his commentary: When a person makes an effort or employs a method to achieve something, it implies that thing is not present now and will come into being at some future time. But the reality, according to Sankara, is ever-present. To obtain that which is already obtained, no effort is necessary... Actions can never get one to that which one already is... What one is does not involve what one does, doing something'.

The rope of seeking has got to be burnt to ashes, so goes the Indian proverb. 

Later, listening to Jazz FM, there's an interview with the 'Godfather of Swing' Ray Gelato. They play a few of his songs. In one I catch the rather cheesy lyrics:

No more will I go half-way round the world

For I have found my world in you...

('you' being 'that which is ever-present', 'what one is').