-- By Tom Phillips
A few years back, just starting out on the Road to Dotage, I wrote about the benefits of walking around in circles -- the spiritual practice of circumambulation. That essay described walking around various holy sites in India, and later circumambulating an elephant sculpture in New Jersey. As one's dotage advances, the circles get smaller. And so it is that this year I have ended up in the most minimal of all circular paths -- turning on a dime, AKA whirling.
I had only whirled once before -- in the 1970s, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India -- where a friend and I were visiting out of curiosity.
My most ecstatic time was in the whirling class, where we learned the basic technique of the Sufi Dervishes. Contrary to all my previous learning and experience, I found if you keep one foot in the same place and your eyes on a level plane, it’s possible to spin around indefinitely. We beginners did it with one foot planted and the other pushing around in a circle, as if we were riding a scooter on a dime. We held one arm straight and looked out over the fingertips. I felt no dizziness at all. The world, trees, buildings, clouds and sky, just rolled around over and over again like the walls of a whirlpool. The picture was not blurred at all, just moved faster and faster, round and round.
This experience was so deep and inexplicable that I never tried it again after we left the ashram, and to this day don’t know if I could repeat it. It seemed like a magical window, opening on an area of truth that could not be set down in words... (from "A Beginner's Life.")
A few years back, just starting out on the Road to Dotage, I wrote about the benefits of walking around in circles -- the spiritual practice of circumambulation. That essay described walking around various holy sites in India, and later circumambulating an elephant sculpture in New Jersey. As one's dotage advances, the circles get smaller. And so it is that this year I have ended up in the most minimal of all circular paths -- turning on a dime, AKA whirling.
I had only whirled once before -- in the 1970s, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India -- where a friend and I were visiting out of curiosity.
My most ecstatic time was in the whirling class, where we learned the basic technique of the Sufi Dervishes. Contrary to all my previous learning and experience, I found if you keep one foot in the same place and your eyes on a level plane, it’s possible to spin around indefinitely. We beginners did it with one foot planted and the other pushing around in a circle, as if we were riding a scooter on a dime. We held one arm straight and looked out over the fingertips. I felt no dizziness at all. The world, trees, buildings, clouds and sky, just rolled around over and over again like the walls of a whirlpool. The picture was not blurred at all, just moved faster and faster, round and round.
This experience was so deep and inexplicable that I never tried it again after we left the ashram, and to this day don’t know if I could repeat it. It seemed like a magical window, opening on an area of truth that could not be set down in words... (from "A Beginner's Life.")
