To Everything There is a Season
Varna, Bulgaria, January 6th, 2020
Salaroche

“To everything there is a season… and a time for every purpose under heaven”, or so the Ecclesiastes told many of us. Then, in 1959, Pete Seeger wrote a song based on those words and The Byrds recorded that same song in 1965, making it go up to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December of that year.

At my age of 71, and as the year 2020 takes its first steps on its journey towards December, I’ve been having short flashes of that song, to the point of looking for it in YouTube a couple of days ago and listening to it a couple of times too. Good overall sound and very good vocals, particularly considering they recorded all of it 55 years ago.

“A time to be born, a time to die…” says the song, which makes me wonder how often many of those old friends of mine who are about my age think about that fact, particularly the second statement in that line. The time to be born is long past and gone for all of us and the time to die remains as uncertain for most of us today as it has been since the day we were born.

By the way, as of January 6th, 2020, the oldest living person in the world seems to be Kane Tanaka, a Japanese lady born on January 2nd, 1903, in the small town of Kazuki, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. She is 117 years old. Can you picture yourself living that long? Certainly not me.

Actually, when I was about 18 years old, I used to think I wouldn’t live to be 30. I never knew why I thought so and, to this day, I haven’t figured out what was it that made me think that way. I do recall, however, as some of you probably do as well, that by the mid and late nineteen sixties we used to say “you cannot trust anybody over 30”, like meaning that by that age we were already supposed to have exhausted all of our dreams and ideals and from then on it would all be downhill in terms of genuine love, intellectual freedom, artistic inspiration and so forth.

Time, of course, has proven all of us who thought that way, quite wrong. Not much of the enthusiasm for life that used to move us in our youth has been lost in time. Some of us who are in our seventh decade, or even older, still write songs, travel a lot, love our girlfriends or wives wholeheartedly and ascribe to our old and new friendships the high value they deserve. In addition, some of us even have vivid hopes that humankind may someday attain higher levels of interracial, intercultural and international harmony.

In fact, some of us have even carried with us the mystic torch of transcendental philosophies we lit in the late sixties quite some distance into our present existence. I, for one, embarked on a three year-long practice of Jnana Yoga that spanned from 1989 to 1992 whose consequences have, to this day, kept constantly deepening my understanding of my own being and, by extension, that of everybody else’s as well, along with an increasing understanding of our existence in the realm of the afterlife.

The latter experiences are known in Yoga circles as the “Realization of the Self”, which means to have attained a level of consciousness that transcends the common daily consciousness we all use to perceive things through our senses, which is the same consciousness we use to think and interact with each other and with the world at large.

But nothing related to the Realization of the Self is supposed to be rosy-colored. To begin with, it requires very high levels of concentration and determination. Then, once Realization has been attained, the follow up to such experience can actually turn into a tricky endeavor, as it surely makes you wonder, in the deepest possible sense, why has such transcendental gift been given to you who in no way have ever in the past considered yourself, nor do you consider yourself today, to have any special or outstanding human attributes.

And the trick resides in making the right choice as to what to do with such overwhelming experience. Keeping one’s ego in check, therefore, is a difficult enough task for anyone who finds themselves in such realized situation, otherwise you could easily end up believing you are some sort of a chosen one or even some kind of guru or messiah. Not some of us.

Some people who go through similar experiences, even much lesser ones, bite the ego bait and end up making fools of themselves going around preaching nonsenses that not even themselves understand or end up exploiting others who fall prey to their “spiritual” rhetoric, which turns out to be just an expression of their unquenchable thirst for a constant and special recognition, i.e., ego, ego, ego.

Still, having experienced such strong transcendental realization leaves you with a certain sense of otherworldliness in your mind, which in turn can make you feel like you don’t belong anywhere, even as, at the same time, you feel like you belong everywhere too. It is a quite contradictory feeling, but not a really confusing one when experienced on the inside.

I cannot know exactly what John Lennon had in mind when he wrote the lyrics for his song “Strawberry Fields Forever”, but there is a stanza in those lyrics that defines with enough accuracy the feeling I’m trying to describe. The stanza in question goes like this:

“No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't, you know, tune in
But it's all right
That is, I think, it's not too bad”

As we all know, “tuning in” with our fellow human beings is not usually an easy thing to do. In my case, for example, I have really “tuned in” to only a couple of friends in my life and to only two or three of the women I have had the good fortune to meet, particularly my exwife. But most of the times I have tuned-in with anybody else has been through music. Music can be an incredibly effective means for tuning in with other musicians and with the audience too.

“There’s a time for every purpose under heaven…”, goes the song. Along those lines, there was a time for me to sing and play guitar at bars, restaurants and parties, just as there was a time for me to practice Yoga day and night in a very serious and dedicated way for three years. Then there was a time for me to stop doing it so intensively once I obtained the desired results. And then, there was a time… for what?

At that particular point in time, the seasons of my life were already evolving from summer to autumn, so, believe it or not, it was a time for me to go back to school, and so I did. At first, I just wanted to find out how western philosophers like some Greek, German and French philosophers might have contemplated any transcendental issues of the kind the Indians so masterfully have.

Then I looked with some interest into some psychological theories as expounded by Freud, Jung, Erickson and others. This I did because the practice of introspection required in Jnana Yoga definitely entails self-analytical aspects that pertain to the structure of the ego and the personality and the general mental processes as well. 

As a result of my short studies, and almost as if by chance, I ended up getting a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of California. That was the time for me to learn about the world at large and I was fortunate enough to gather enough info and discipline to develop up to a very good extent my capacities for logical analysis. Reading relevant books and participating in academic seminars of the first order was of great help too. In fact, ever since I graduated has been the time for me to be thankful to all those professors who pointed to me the way for obtaining a clearer perspective on the things of the world.

However, even as there are some very important constants in life, not all endeavors are meant to take all of our time, and as my autumn season slowly began to slide into winter some twenty years ago, I began once again to travel.

And so it is that at the moment I find myself sitting on a comfortable chair, writing these words on my computer, as the dark of night is perfectly visible through the tall windows of my studio, in a quiet quarter of the city of Varna, just a short walking distance from the shores of the Black Sea, in the Balkan country of Bulgaria.

“…and a time for every purpose under heaven…” So I guess the sole purpose of this moment was to write these words.

May you all be well.

Salaroche