'Beware' of bear hug

Billy Pilgrim is a soldier ‘unstuck in time’ in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result he experiences events past and future in a repetitive, non-linear manner without chronological or narrative sequence.
    
That means Billy’s life-cart can start before its horse does — because his life does not necessarily end with death; he can relive the experience of his death, before its time, an experience that is often mingled with his other life experiences.

In sharp contrast are the aliens known as Tralfamadorians. They kidnap Billy and ultimately teach him the ‘secret’ of time as a fourth dimension of the world, where everything exists simultaneously and where everyone is always alive.
    
The Tralfamadorians strongly believe in predestination. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.
    
Furthermore, what you choose to remember and recall can also be a matter of conscious choice. Masters of mindfulness meditation say that awareness awakens us from the trance of automaticity or merely reactive behaviour.

But this is more easily said than done. “For we are so mesmerised by our ideas about the world (and ourselves) that we tend to miss out on much of our direct sensory experience, says Buddhist teacher-psychotherapist Tara Brach.
    
“Even when we are aware of feeling a strong breeze, the sound of rain on the roof, a fragrance in the air, we rarely remain with the experience long enough to inhabit it fully,” she writes in her best-seller — Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha: Radical Acceptance.
    
“In most moments we have overlay of inner dialogue that comments on what is happening and plans what we might do next.” Brach cites the example of greeting a friend with a hug, where “our moments of physical contact become blurred by our computations about how long to embrace or what we are going to say when we are done. We rush through the hug, not fully present”.
    
Your columnist experienced this when Mata Amritanandamayi gave him an embrace of compassion.

Instead of listening to what she kept whispering in his ear in his mother tongue: mogache por maje (my beloved child) he was more worried about where and how to place his hands! Did one do that with one’s own mother? Release followed in a flash.