mi hermano juan-
i lost a long-time friend last week. 50 years old. he had a family history of heart disease. he and i both never expected to live to retirement age (or to age 21 for that matter) and it was always a challenge between us as to who would bury whom. he never lived a traditional lifestyle, instead choosing to live an artist's life... usually broke but never broken. i found a story on the internet yesterday that you might enjoy reading. don't wait too long to do what you want to do.
Geoffrey, My Friend.
© deeshan 1999
We are all unique.
We all have inside of us tremendous possibilities.
Very few people live up to their potential.
Geoffrey was one of those few, he died recently with a
smile on his face, happy to go to see this new side of
life ignorant people call death. For him death is just
the next adventure after life, life being the
preparation for a good death. If you live your life to
the fullest then you can go fully conscious into the
new dimension of death. The experience of his body
departure was so beautiful that I sat there next to
him in awe, the atmosphere was full of joy and light.
It took me a while to come back, I was lost and did
not know what to do, where to go. I walked for a long
time and Geoffrey's life was unfolding in my mind,
everything was so clear that I had to go back to my
house to write the whole story down on paper; his life
was worth to be told.
Geoffrey had been my friend for the last fifty years,
we had been always so close, so intimate, always
sharing our own experiences with life. We had been
quite often on different ways but it did no matter we
would always meet again as if we had never been apart,
always eager to share and listen.
To be with him was magical, he was like a child,
always in wonder, always so alive. We would laugh so
much, he was not serious, he continuously told me that
one of the main key to a good life is not to take
thing so seriously, we are so small in this vast
universe.
NOW was his time, before was gone and later does not
exist. He would always insists that NOW is the only
time there is, yesterdays and tomorrows are just words
we created for conveniences but they do not have any
realities, it is always NOW.
Here and now contains all.
Simple is truth.
Truth is simple.
Geoffrey arrived on this planet Earth at sunrise in
1950.
He was the fifth child of a family of nine.
His family was poor financially, they were simple
people and did not belong to any religion.
He grew up a bit apart from the rest of the family,
he was the only child to be able to go to junior high
school.
That's where we met.
We started junior high school the same year in the
same class and from the first day we became friend. We
became inseparable. We played together, we studied
together although he never needed to do much homework
as he had this tremendous capacity to remember all
what the teacher had said during classes, he would
read one more time the subject and he was through, he
had a very good memory.
My family was more wealthy than his, my father was
running a small business and we were living in a
beautiful house outside town.
He would come sometimes at home to listen to music, to
play drums - this was my passion.
He enjoyed to come to my place, I had my own room and
only one sister.
This was a big contrast to his situation, he was
sharing his bedroom with his other brothers and my
house must have been more quiet than his.
I invited him often to come with me after school to my
father's shop. My grand parents lived right above the
shop and each time they prepared for us a sumptuous 4
O'clock snack, with hot chocolate and lots of cookies.
He was always free to go out, I could not move so
freely as he did. I had to go to church on Sundays, he
never went and he had no idea about Christianity..
Later on I realized I had much more problem to feel
free, to let go of all this religious conditioning
that prohibits you to enjoy yourself. Somehow feeling
miserable is religious, feeling happy and blissful
always brought to me a funny feeling of guilt! Why?
I realized that this feeling of guilt came from all
those early years at church and from catechism.
We both were good in learning languages and we went
into this direction. We also liked very much to play
table tennis and twice a week we joined a club where
we learned the skill to play.
With the club we had to go and play tournaments during
week-ends and he was enjoying it very much, he liked
to be away and meet new people.
In whatsoever he was doing he was good quick. If he
liked it he would learn real fast.
We spent four years at junior high school and then we
had to take different ways, but it was during those
years that we laid the foundations of a friendship
that would last forever.
He went to Technical school to learn accounting and I
went to high school as my parents could afford it.
He was happy to go to that school because he chose it
himself, he was ready to go into the world and the
sooner the better, that's where you learn real life,
that's where you experience, that's where you grow up.
At school you learn the art of memorizing, the more
you can memorize the better you are.
So for the first time in four years we had to
separate, to go to different schools.
We would see each other on Saturdays as he was in a
boarding school, he was away the whole week and would
come back only at week-ends.
This had been for him the beginning of his
independence, the beginning of taking life into his
own hands.
From what he told me this is where it all started,
where he learned the art of being himself, to listen
to his own intelligence, his own inner voice, his own
intuition.
He had such a great time in this boarding school, he
would tell all the stories of how the boys would
manage to go the girl's dormitory at night, how they
would escape over the fence to go to the city, how
nice it was to be with a lot of different people.
He bought a guitar after working during Easter
holidays washing windows in a primary school.
I was so happy to see him with a guitar because we
could play music together, I loved music so much but I
could not play so much time, my father wanting me to
study medicine.
Later I realized that I wasted ten years of my life to
learn something I did not like at all.
Music is my passion, it is vibrating inside of me,
nature gave me the gift of music not of medicine, but
parents rarely listen to their children, they want to
make them according to their own ideas and they often
destroy the natural talent of their kids.
We all have a talent inside, life consists of
discovering it and then living it. That's the only way
to be happy, to be in tune with yourself.
The problem is that too many people think they know
better what is good for you, what is appropriate for
your life, what will make you earn a lot of money,
what will make you respectable etc...
Well the hell with money, with fame and
respectability, they cannot give you happiness. This I
could say much later when I finally dropped all what
my father had built for me and did exactly what I felt
was good for me, music.
And what a change, what a gift, what a blessing this
has been, no money, no fame, no respectability could
have brought this feeling of being in tune with
myself, this feeling of completion.
To be happy one has to live what feels good to him and
it does not matter what it is as long as it brings
joy.
In wanting to help their children parents just do the
opposite. Help is not such a great act as we think it
is, it is often done to impose an idea, to convert
people into a certain ideology.
We could finally play music together every
Saturday,the only day I was allowed by my father to do
so.
This went on for a year, the first year Geoffrey was
at boarding school.
The second year he was not coming back so often
anymore, he was having his first romance.
Love love love.
He told me how he had sex for the first time. The boys
dormitory was connected to the girls' dormitory by a
footbridge closed with doors. By measure of security
the doorkeys were hanged in small red boxes fixed on
the wall near the doors. Few students had made a copy
of the key and it was a frequent night-trip done by
the most courageous and depending on who was the night
attendant.
So that's how Geoffrey had his first sex experience,
sneaking into the girls dormitory and finding one who
was willing to do the act.
It's a shame that boys and girls are not allowed to
know the pleasure of sex, they are instead forbidden
to do it and when they do it is never in the best
conditions due to the interdiction. The sex energy is
at its best between the age of 14 and 21, and it is
precisely the time when it is most forbidden. What a
pity! We are missing the most beautiful years of our
life by being hold, by learning how to repress our
basic sex energy.
Sex is our basic energy, it needs to be explored and
experienced to be understood.
To be free from it one has to go through it but
instead sex is repressed and condemned.
What is the outcome? Perversion, pornography, rapes,
insecurity, ugliness, frustration, a never ending lust
for sex, etc.
Sex is the foundation of life; we come out of sex.
Why are all the religions against sex? What are they
afraid of?
We can see today that the repression of sex has not
brought any good to society. All the moral codes and
religious abstinence has contributed to more
perversion and more lust for sex. It has also created
an unhappy human being.
Of course a happy man does not care about religious
dogmas, about God and Jesus and Mohamed, he is too
busy living, loving, creating. That's why religions
are against sex, they want man to remain unhappy, they
want man to feel miserable so that they can sell him
beautiful dreams, a future great life in an
hypothetical paradise, in an imaginary heaven.
In short they want you to be miserable in this life to
gain happiness in the other life.
The problem is that we have never heard about the
other life, nobody has ever sent a postcard!
We know about this life, it is real and the
intelligent will live it fully and forget all about
this imaginary heaven which does not exist, even if it
existed, just for the fun of argumenting, I would not
want to go there, it must be really boring, full of
miserable people who have not lived life, how can they
know now how to enjoy? You need some practice, some
experience, they must be lost, they don' t know how to
flirt, how to dance, how to celebrate etc.
I loved so much to listen to Geoffrey when he was
speaking like that, he knew what he was talking about,
it came from his own experience, it would give me such
pleasure and strength to go on with my own search for
happiness, to move on with my own life, to have the
courage to be my own self.
During his second year at boarding school I did not
see him much, only very occasionally to play music. He
was too busy with girlfriends and the good fun he had
with his school mates. That was the beginning of a
long period where we started to live our own life
apart from each other. We would be in touch only
through letters and rare meetings.
I admired his life, the way he went wherever he wanted
to go, the way he did all what he wanted to do. I was
forced to go to university to learn to be a doctor, I
did not like it, but my father was so insistent that I
could not argue with him. For him I was a boy, I did
not know what life was about, he knew what was best
for me. Children's opinions account for nothing in
most families, they are not taken seriously, children
are not trustworthy, and they are not allowed to
follow their feelings. It is one of the biggest
crimes, the foundation of a miserable society.
Children know what they like, what they want to do,
why are the parents always interfering? Trust your kid
if you really love him.
I have been a victim of such crime and I know first
hand what I am talking about. I have been fortunate to
have Geoffrey as a friend so I could gather the
courage to finally follow my own liking. Today I do
not earn as much money as a musician as I would have
by being a doctor, but my happiness has no price, this
feeling of being in tune with myself is priceless,
such contentment, such simplicity, such harmony, it is
impossible to feel that if you're not doing the things
you like.
Geoffrey had a terrific time in his second year at
boarding school. First love affairs, great meetings
with different kind of people, it had been the
beginning of his journey, the beginning of knowing
that there is much more to life than what we generally
think.So it was no surprise that when he finished
school he worked only few months in a bank to see that
this was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his
life. He started traveling around the world, working
here and there, coming back once in a while to say
hello to his family and to me. What surprised me most
is that his parents never forced him to find a job,
never told him to stop traveling and that it was time
for him to settle down. They accepted that he was
doing the right thing and as long as he did not bring
troubles to them everything was fine. This was such a
contrast with what I was living. How many times have I
hoped to have such parents? Today I can understand
that anyway I had to go through my own life, that my
family was okay, they gave me the opportunity to
realize that we all have to go through certain
difficulties to learn.
Geoffrey would do many jobs to make some money,
newspaper delivery, waiter, fruit picker, and banking
employee, anything for a while and then he would go
again. He went a bit into politics, through an
ecological movement he created with some friends, he
also went into therapy while living in community with
other people. Well it was the time of free sex, great
parties, communities where sharing was the rule not
possessing, he went through all aspects of life
totally.
The main thing that really changed him is when he went
into meditation.
He met in India what he called a master and from then
on he learned intensely the inner science of knowing
oneself.
For him it worked really well. I can never forget the
day when I saw him back from India. He was the same
yet so mysteriously different. He would joke the same
way, he would talk with more quietness in his voice
and there was something coming out of his being that
touched me so much, I cannot say what it was, he had
simply such a presence, such coolness, so much light
in his eyes.
He went on with his life as normal, he was never in
trouble with anything, he would deal with life so
easily, so playfully, it was a joy to be with him. He
became my master because I learned so much from him.
He taught me meditation the simple way, the easy way.
No need to sit in the lotus posture or sit for hours,
watch yourself as much as possible, your thoughts,
your feelings, your emotions. Be a witness in whatever
you do or do not do. Watching is the key, nothing else
matters, slowly slowly an understanding start growing,
a witness arises and this witness is the bud of our
being, the miracle that transforms, the miracle that
heals, the miracle that gives birth to your authentic
self.
Watching is the best transformation tool there is,
nothing else is required.
In all methods of meditation, watching is there,
watching is the main part in all methods.
Watching?
You can do it anywhere,
no special place is required,
no special posture,
no special ritual,
just be
but be total
and watch.
Thank you Geoffrey for being
for being in my life
for giving me the courage to be myself
for giving me the watching key
thank you
THANK YOU.
The End
deeshan.com |
