Excursion

Here the word Excursion implies a sense of adventure, to move, possibly, beyond the confines of habit, of the well known, of established patterns. In the dictionary, it speaks of "short journey, as for pleasure." Here we're not dismissing the pleasure aspect, not at all. However, we are de-emphasising a return to the some celebrated edifice or patch in the woods, where those that came before us brought their breads and wines, and had a moment of joyful rest afterwards. Can we continue from there, not negating their experience?

Since we're steeped in language, it's tricky in any case. Words like Awareness can mean a thousand things, large outlooks are built up around them. Breath and Gravity will not make it any simpler. So the words can but point us.

But also we're trying not to depend on words. In other words, to use Awareness to discard the beaten tracks of conceptuality, to move outside the woodpaths: into a sensing, of where we are, of how we breathe, of how we stand (being pulled by energies and forces, from below, from above, from inside).

And having said "above, below, outside, inside" then, possibly, to not only understand but also to experience, realize for oneself, the considerable challenge it takes to make them come together harmoniously, or even more so: as inseparable, from the very beginning.

(Concerning these last few lines, see for instance Herbert Guenther in his book on the yogic songs of Saraha, Ecstatic Spontaneity, Asian Humanity Press, Berkeley 1993, p. 34, where he addresses inseparability in relation to the two Tibetan terms zung-'jug and dbyer-med: "Loosely speaking, zung-'jug and dbyer-med are interchangeable, but there is a subtle and logical difference between the two. Dbyer-med refers to the indivisibility of Being in the sense that Being itself is prior to all differentiation of opposites, while zung-'jug refers to a dialectical synthesis of opposites that have already been constituted.")