At night I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language door and open the love window. The moon won’t use the door, only the window.

(Rumi)

Last night I placed the moon between my eyes, thin veils of grayish gauzy-cloud materials enveloped her so gently. She dissolved gradually into my brain like a sweetmeat in a hungry mouth. My neurons glowed in moonlight soft and started to process impulses in a more romantic and reflective way. The signaling to faraway operational stations was now moon-mellowed. Image receptors in optic nerves interpreted everything in tones of bluish texture, and passersby glowed in an eerie otherworldliness. There was a sense of tropical breeze, of sandy beaches, of songs of forest, amid the dry city pavement, when the moon lozenge dissolved in my scratchy brain last evening.

That day I had been playing my usual mental word games. Logical interpretations and what was knowledge all about had been assaulting me all day long, I had been wondering how meanings, reasonings relate to actual experience. And pondering on how many words are there in the languages we think and speak on? What are really the things they describe? I remembered my musings, as I drove in the heavy traffic, now under the influence, of a moon-drunk brain.

I visualized one-hundred-mile-long lines of words, like elephants catching their tails in procession, that were contained in the recesses of one’s mind. And then I thought, a trillion times more words are contained in the bookshelves of all libraries, book depositories, and forgotten attics.

“They are all packed”, I said to myself- in neat bundles of black and white, waiting to be brought to life, legend, and conviction, by the gazing beams of light from somebody’s eyes. They are all classified into different categories; things that measure and predict –science; a collection of thoughts about whence and whither –philosophy. And everything is of course subcategorized. There are manuals of all sorts: for cooking, business, sex, etiquette, and car repair. For everything conceived in space, there are words, books, different schools, different opinions, prevailing and minority trends. Infinite cogitations captured in the so many words that buzz around our minds, like wild mosquitoes in a swamp.

I kept on musing in the slow traffic, about the many books there are on the inner worlds non-measurable, the books of symbol, those that chart the subtle, the ineffable. Metaphysical explanations in mythological rhymes, which use the stars and the planes of consciousness in woozy poetic language, to describe, our placement in the cosmos, allowing for each of us casting and a role that is enchanting or scary. “A beautiful content”, I thought- that helps counterbalance those arid word chains of the describers and measurers, who fill bookshelves with life’s procedures and prevailing norms. Then, - I sighed - there is the news, the daily short-lived cacophony of words, describing the last tragedies and gossips, in repetition, to saturate our minds and feed the curious nature of our human condition.

Yes, I concluded there are so many books, titles, words, definitions, that we all embrace with so much passion and conviction, but then really, it is like grasping clouds with desperate hands to feed a hungry child, in an unsubstantial and impossibly futile way, while creating the illusion of nourishment.

Now I really do not know much, beyond being aware of this body sac and its accompanying consciousness, I do not know what else to say. And yes, of course, I am no doubt also under the influence, of many of these books of different types and inclinations and have enrolled myself in many of those schools of thought, that mean so much at any one moment in our lives.

But after this evening, with this moon tumor growing in my brain, I cannot explain why, I have become word shy, except for basic words. The neurons seem to have become engorged and fluffy, hypnotized into a trance of yellow, and cannot handle long sentences or conversations.

Now, this can be very embarrassing, as people do write and call me on the phone and stop me on the road to talk and converse. I just look at their bluish contoured figures or listen to their vibrating voices, that reveal secrets behind their word chain repetitions, and sometimes I see the poetic when it enters a screen of phosphorescence somewhere in my mind, like an apparition, or opens in letters of antiquity written with pen and ink and feeling.

I react to their communications, but avoid long definitions which anyhow escape my understanding, and just feel the hidden undertones, which somehow are quite clear for my moon-infested brain cells.

And I answer in kind - with a moon response - and tell them all, no matter what they say to me, an old story that I lived and accumulated like vintage wine in my soul, and that now emerges all the time spontaneously like a morning song influenced by the moon.

“I went there traversing a long distance of water and land to the place where they lived, the ones who knew the most about everything. I prepared myself for a final entrance exam to a top university. I reviewed all the schools of prevailing thought on the things conceived in space, I read mystic, astrological, Vedanta, Sufi, and Rosicrucian treatises.

For years I was under intense absorption and meditation in all poses, preparing to join and understand this secret society of the knowledgeable. My forehead was bursting with contents and symbols, as I saw myself in a mythological presence, traversing long valleys confronting dragons, guided by stars and glorious signs and numbers in magical combinations. Elves, fairies, angels as well as the spirits of my ancestors, were all summoned to help me prepare, for the encounter with those who knew the most about everything.

Finally, I arrived at a simple beautiful countryside, across narrow roads and pleasant peasants of time immemorial, with their usual sheep and cows and crops. At the end of a dusty white road, there was a small compound. My heart was in a flurry of anticipation and expectation, how would they look? With long white robes, svelte, magnificent like Gandalf the wise, radiating eerie lights from their auras, their words soft and mysterious?

I walked in and found, an old bespectacled man, chubby and strong with a T-shirt and a pair of ordinary pants, who looked at me like an uncle I had not seen in a long time and embraced me so tenderly, as he said ‘welcome home’. The towers of words, collapsed with my imagined characters, I became a child again in my being, there were no more symbols in my brain, gone were the universal categories, the myths, the complicated orders, and paths.

I just sat by his side totally relaxed, bathed in an atmosphere of certainty and knowledge. Then I heard his response to somebody, about something or other, about a particular corner of the path, about a particular school of thought ‘about that’ he would smile a smile of oceans- and say ‘I do not know, I am sorry, I do not know anything about that.’

I then realized that there is nothing to know, except to abandon all the “knowledge” and surrender to love. I have been trying since to lose all these accumulated words, to get rid of these age-old habits of explaining things. To just sit down and take the hand of the One inside who in Silence accompanies you, and just follow. It is so impossibly hard.”

But it is becoming slightly easier after the moon metastasized in my brain.