Episodic Synesthesia

Every once in a while, we come across or encounter what we might call a blessing, a gift, a present, an opening that is engaged with a scrambled sensorium like the one presented here. It's a little poster by Yogi Ananda Viraj that he created while on safari in the wilds of his daily encounters with his uncivilized circumstances. When asked about these gifts, he merely replies, "I don't know where they come from, nor does it matter. What I do know is they are always welcomed." What about you? Are your circumstances often uncivilized? Do they sometimes transfix and surprise you for a moment, or even longer? Perhaps, like his, do they seem to mix the senses into a surprising concoction that suspends what we often take to be normality?

Pursuing our discussion, he emphasized that these safaris or expeditions are always “unique.” Unique meaning they were special and never the same, yet they had a sameness about them in their ability to remove one from the so-called ordinary and place one in a more than welcomed and utterly tranquil abiding, not an abode but an abiding that was alive and fully aware, having a consciousness that over-spilled the visible boundaries of the so-called situation. He added that these situations were not static or isolated situations at all but dynamic expressions of a timelessness or eternity, if you will, that elicits comparisons with safari, expedition, and even pilgrimage. However, there was always something very ordinary about them. They always occurred in the midst of the expected transforming it into the surprising without changing a thing. Their expectedness, if you will, was not lost but found to be surficial, unless they were seen in their nakedness, without being smothered with who "I am" and "what they were supposed to be." “Nothing changes,” he said, “but everything.”