−1 0 1
“Bahagia secukupnya, sedih secukupnya, dan ZEN selamanya.”
Happy enough. Sad enough. And Zen, always. He gave us this number twice, once as a definition of taste and once as the one belief he would defend.
Goura
On training the five senses one at a time, three doorways that open onto a father, a mother and a silence, and the number he keeps returning to when asked what a good life is.
Tap the underlined phrases for notes in the margin. Most of this page can be touched.
Goura Sundar is the youngest child of a small family in Semarapura, in the regency of Klungkung, Bali. He found spiritual practice in high school and has not put it down since. He studied marketing, and he is careful about how he ranks the two: marketing is the passion, and the practice is the essence. Most people would have said it the other way around, or said only one. He answers our questions the way he seems to do everything else, which is by placing things in their correct order and then leaving them there.
Put it on quietly. It is not background music so much as a room to be in.
Five senses, trained one at a time
Ask him how fragrance fits into a spiritual life and he does not reach for atmosphere. He gives you the mechanism. Practice, he says, begins by training the panca indra: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. Five instruments, each of which can carry you off or hold you steady.
Scent, in his account, is the one with a particular job. A fragrance is what draws the sense of smell into being aware and present pada saat ini detik ini, at this moment, this second, while the practice is going on. Every aroma, every accord, every note, he says, can raise an emotion, a feeling, a mood. So it is not decoration on top of the practice. It is one of the five doors, held open on purpose.
Tap a petal.
Five senses, and the one he says pulls you back to now.
Three doorways, and who is standing behind each
Asked for one scent that takes him somewhere, he gives three, and each one is a different room of the same house. He names them by family, the way a perfumer would: blue aromatic, medicinal balsamic, incense smoky aromatic. Then he tells you who is on the other side.
The house in Klungkung, and his father dressed neatly for work: pressed clothes, polished pantofel shoes, a man about to leave on time. A whole childhood compressed into the smell of someone being ready.
Home, and welcoming his mother back from the hospital. She worked as a nurse in perinatology, the ward for newborns. A medicinal note can be tender, and he says so without apology.
and stay
No person in this one. He says it takes him, always, to wherever peace, calm and acceptance are. Not a room he can name. A condition he can find.
It is worth noticing that two of the three are people leaving or arriving, and the third has no person in it at all. He is the youngest child. This is what the youngest child remembers: the door, and who came through it.
The number he gave us twice
Asked what good taste is, he answered with a number. Asked for the one belief he would defend, he answered with the same number. (−1, 0, 1). Happy enough, sad enough, and Zen always.
What makes it more than a slogan is the middle term. He is not asking for the elimination of the minus one or the maximisation of the plus one. Both are allowed, and both are rationed by the same word, secukupnya, meaning enough, sufficiently, no more than is needed. The place you live is the nought between them.
So we built it. Pull the weight to either end and let it go.
It will not stay where you put it. That is the entire point.
Here at the nought, nothing is being resisted and nothing is being chased. He does not call this the absence of feeling. He calls it the place feeling returns to.
The nought · open on the waterRooted in the mud, sitting on the surface, facing the light. The oldest diagram of the same idea.
Three ways to be in time, only one of them now
His definition of good taste comes with its own map, borrowed from the three gunas. Living in the past is tamas, the heavy, inert one, which he glosses simply as laziness. Living in the future is rajas, the restless one, which he glosses as appetite. Living now is sattva, the clear one, which he glosses as goodness.
That last distinction is the one we keep thinking about. Meaning is something you work out afterwards, at a distance, in sentences. Essence is only available while you are standing in it. He is saying that taste is not interpretation. It is attendance.
Before anyone is awake
The ritual is the least decorated answer in this issue. He wakes in the small hours. He breathes air that has not been used yet. Then japa chanting of the Mahamantra, and four words he lists in order: gratitude, present, accepting, grateful.
He begins and ends the same list with thanks, which is either a slip or the most precise thing in the whole document.
Tap the ring to move one bead. It is not a target, it is a way of keeping the mind from wandering off to make plans.
Three bottles, each with a job
He does not describe what he wears, he describes what each one is for, and the descriptions are written like specifications. Tap one.
Accepting
There is one word he returns to without ever building an argument around it. Menerima. Accepting. It appears in the ritual, in the definition of taste, and in the third doorway, the one with no person behind it, where he says the incense takes him to the place where peace, calm and acceptance are.
He does not present it as resignation, and it would be a misreading to hear it that way. In his arrangement, acceptance is what makes the nought possible. You cannot rest at zero while still negotiating with what happened. The minus one is allowed to have been a minus one. That is the price of the middle.
Bahagia secukupnya, sedih secukupnya, dan ZEN selamanya.
Happy enough, sad enough, and Zen always. Given once as a definition of good taste, and once as the belief he would defend. He did not seem to notice he had answered twice.
“Good taste is when we are present in life, now, this second. Finding the essence of life, not just the meaning.”