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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Seeker: I don't know, I need mental order in my life. I'm so
disorganised.

Sitaram: I could use some of that myself.

Seeker: You could help me and that would help you or vice versa. How
about you find reasoning within Hinduism for that? Just to make me
feel more organised.

Sitaram: I am thinking about the movie version of Ursula Le Guin's
novel "Lathe of Heaven", when the alien says to George Orr, "Help is
available. Inquire within." The point being: there are many religions,
with many similarities, but they are something outside of us, so we
are looking for help outside.

Sitaram: But somehow, we must find help within.

Seeker: Have you ever visited India?

Sitaram: Never. Never been out of USA, (except once to Canada and
once to Bermuda)

Seeker: I think it's time for you to visit there. I get the feeling
you would love it. Are you up for the challenge?

Sitaram: I have no desire to travel anywhere. I travel in my mind, by reading,
writing, internet, television documentaries. I am in a routine which I know will
not last. Nothing lasts. For now, it is ok. I can cope with it.

Seeker: What routine?

Sitaram: My job, my family, my writing and reading.

Seeker: Oh I see. One day I'll go to India.

Sitaram: When I was 22, I planed to go to Greece. I taught myself to
speak Greek fairly well, and had a passport, and was going to stay
with a family that I had helped in the USA, but then, they became
unfriendly towards me, and I became disillusioned. I lost my desire
to go there.

Seeker: I see

Sitaram: But then, I became interested in Eastern Orthodox
monasticism, and entered a monastery for a year.

Sitaram: Robert Frost wrote: "Home is the place where, when you have go there,
they have to take you in" (in "Death of a Hired Hand"). The Greeks
were never "home" to me, nor the Russians, nor the Indians. I was
always on the outside looking in, an outsider. So many places we are
outsiders, aliens, and what we seek is home.

Seeker: No a trip doesn't make a place a home, that's why it's only a
trip.

Sitaram: True.

Sitaram: Take a look at this poem by C. P. Cavafy, "The City"

http://cavafis.compupress.gr/kave_33.htm

The City

You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart -like something dead- lies buried.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

- Constantine P. Cavafy

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