Return to Nature

Return to Nature

 November 2005

By Josep Zuzaria

There’s only nature left to heal you when you’ve exhausted all gurus and isms, meditations and breathing techniques. If you’re an average human being and have been on a ‘spiritual’ quest (to find the meaning of life, peace of mind, God or magic powers) and have been reading different books, listening to different gurus, visiting ashrams or even if you’ve been following only one path, it is possible that you’re highly confused. Should you do this meditation or that, this breathing technique or get that stone? you ask yourself. You may think you’re enlightened and not be enlightened. Or you may be on the path and not know it. I was a bit like that. Read this, done that, including life-changing LSD and mescaline experiences. My experiences also made me consider what many say is the ultimate truth: the mystery of life is just that – you cannot express it in words, thoughts, philosophies or teachings. The mind always plays its games. So what to do? I was confused for many years, until, unexpectedly, I got back to nature. After many years in Mumbai, I started living in a village in Goa. Lots of greenery, jungles, lots of birds, butterflies and all kinds of other creatures. One day I sighted a golden oriole close by on an overhanging mango branch. It was dazzling; so beautiful, something happened to my soul. I, of course, did not initially know it was a golden oriole. Intrigued, I bought a book, got myself binoculars and started walking all over the mountains, villages, remote streams and jungles, to soothe my jangled nerves and explore the world of birds. It’s now been three years. I have progressed through the various stages of bird-watching. You discover that there are so many different kinds of birds, much more than you thought existed. There are about 1,300 species in India. They range from the smallest, smaller than sparrows, to the big guys like bustards, eagles, peacocks. And then you discover that they are very habitat-specific. A water bird is a water bird. A flowerpecker only drinks nectar from flowers. If there’s no flower nectar, it will die. Bee-eaters only eat that kind of winged insects and never anything else. There are the ground birds, which always walk around and eat things on the ground. There are the kites and eagles who are always going with the wind and soaring, swooping down when hungry to grab a bite. Once, I was watching an eagle high up in the sky through the binoculars and saw the fella leisurely taking small bites from a morsel he was holding in his claws as he soared and enjoyed the scenery. It seems highly unlikely that an eagle ever has an existential dilemma – should he or should he not soar? When the wind comes, up he goes. All these things made me realize that these creatures never went against their nature. Crows with their strong beaks eat anything they get. It’s their nature. A kingfisher only eats fish and worms from the water, never any bees or flowers, nectar or fruits. And this is true of all the birds, animals, butterflies, plants, creepers and other creatures in the world. What then, I asked myself, was my true nature? Are humans really the peak of creation? Why then are we so destructive, wage such disastrous wars and so much other nonsense? These last few years in this village amidst hills and forests have made me feel better. Stress had practically killed me. Nature, they say, heals. There’s only nature left when you’ve exhausted all the gurus and isms, all those meditations, breathing and other techniques. Especially when you go deeper and deeper into the teachings of the most realized souls, you discover that the highest teaching is no teaching, simply because the truth cannot be expressed in words. What then expresses it? The world or nature all around us and within us. Like they say in Zen: if truth be told, reality simply ‘is’. The human race (homo sapiens) is simply a part of nature, one amongst millions of creatures.

Says Osho: ‘The nature of man is that which it will be when it will evolve itself fully. The reality about man is what he has accumulated in his journey until now. That is why I say violence is acquired, non-violence is the nature. So violence can be given up, but non-violence can only be achieved, it cannot be given up.’ As we journey through life and discover our true nature, it would help to detach our self from the mass of humanity, go into the jungle and get back to nature.