Arambol Beach

My room: very big, airy, with a huge bed and a fan just as huge on top; access to individual bathroom and a hall where I can dry clothes. I did not ask for all this comfort but they don’t have a lot of guests and they hope I’ll stay longer. It is, actually, the first place where I sleep for two nights in a row. 🙂

It is the perfect place for a junkie (drugs user). You can laze for many days, weeks, months… The largest LSD amount in the world was not used in Los Angeles, London or South America but here, in Goa. One can buy 10 grams of hashish with less than 10 euros.

For over 400 years, until 1961 Goa was under Portuguese domination. The time of the Portuguese domination has marked architecture, religion (the vast majority are Catholics), even table manners! Goa is one of the few places in India where cutlery is being used. The occidentalization takes nothing out of the excellent Indian cooking. In the menus in Goa there are many occidental elements, but I prefer the local dishes. There will be a distinct article on this, stay tuned! 😀

There are very few people, that’s because the season is closing. Now you can only find here Indian tourists and people in love with the place. The scenery is amazing, like in the most beautiful dream. There are majestic cliffs, sweet-salty water (“The sweet lake”, 10 meters away from the Ocean), friendly people and tranquility. Nonetheless, Goa being a tourist destination, people are more commercial-oriented. Arambol is the north-most of Goa beaches as well as the wildest. This sounds weird to any European: the season is closing because of high temperatures! Although the Ocean breeze make the temperature bearable, this time of the year is considered to be off-season. To me the weather is perfect: there is very little difference of the night-day temperatures; the sea is always warm and welcoming; the monsoon (the rainy season) is yet to come.

Is not such a welcoming place for who doesn’t look for drugs: I cannot find my place in this small society where the vast majority are drug users. I finally find compatible people: a Spanish guy, a Russian girl, a couple coming from Singapore, a Indian girl, a Canadian guy and two Israelis with a guitar.

I first found out about the term “Goa” at the Rosia Montana festival FanFest, where there was one Goa tent installed. That’s another story, for the next time we meet. 🙂

Thoughts

The frustration I feel right now comes from the lack of being present, here and now. The surrounding atmosphere can only be enjoyed and this is not enough for me.

On one side there are the duties, the promises I have made: the take me back in the past. I am way behind with my notes for the site. I have to talk about things and events that happened and are now finished and this also takes me back in the past.

The “here and now” is not enough for me. I am not in a state of total acceptance of things that happen, no matter how they happen and that’s why I start to plan my future in greater details. Here I am with a tourist guide of India (1200 pages) in my arms, deciding what I should do next, what I shouldn’t do next, how to and how not to, where to stay…

Future… human mind needs past and future in order to exist! In the present all what I have is sensation, feeling, living. Even if I have pain, there is a path that leads to death of… thought… is the path zero! 🙂 I cannot measure path zero, I cannot fully comprise it in some sort of mental pattern, yet it is there, present, in every moment…

This balancing movement between past and future, with only fugitive moments spent in the present (if I don’t simply ignore the present altogether…) really does affect me. It deprives me of my joy of living, it deprives me of being alive and being in contact with everything that surrounds me.
We were raised and conditioned into being materialists. We either are affected by the past and live in its shadows or we eagerly look towards the future to get our… fulfillment. All of this is transformed into a mechanical oscillation past-future, interrupted by brief sparkles of present. The longing for childhood actually is the longing for the continuous and uninterrupted joy, the longing for present tense. There are no other tenses but present tense!

Religion also uses the need for time, when it promises a future of… enjoyment of the present! 🙂 Blind as we are, we are looking for the paradise in the future and we fail to notice the beauty, the joy and the love to be given and to be received all around us.

Here’s how, out of longing for the present, I might even reach Goa to buy living and to buy feeling. Cheap and flavored, it stops thoughts and it freezes moments. Or I might try extreme sports, forcing me to live and feel at high intensity. The danger carves into time and expands present. When both drug and danger pass, the “occidental” state of search, insufficiency and torment returns, yet again…

As I talk about all of these things I look at the feelings and the suffering occurring inside me. The mere gesture of being in contact with me and being observant and acceptant of all that I am brings back presence…

I thank YOU for being with me, here and now! 🙂