Part of the village’s transformation from a romantic getaway hotel with honeymoon suites into a home for the non-dual community consisted in removing countless TV screens from the stone houses and bungalows.
One morning in July, Boas and I set out with a big tool box to take the monitors off the walls. What seemed like a simple task at first, turned into a tough job, given that some of the screws were corroded and hard to grip.
The job was fun. It also felt like a meaningful activity, because removing televisions is quite symbolic of the changes Simply Happy is going through on its way of becoming a place for the non-dual community.
While the TVs – about thirty of them – were piling up on the ground with a heap of remote controls next to it, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction. Knowing that the screens would soon find their way to the local municipality’s charity foundation so they could be distributed among destitute villagers added an extra layer of contentment.
Our “TV raid” also reminded me of the screen-and-pictures analogy – one of the most beloved metaphors in the world of non-dual teaching. In an easy-to-understand manner, it explains the relationship between consciousness (the screen) and the content of consciousness, the realm of objective experience that includes sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions and activities (the moving images).
It was Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian master of non-duality, who first used the metaphor of a cinema screen long before TVs were installed in hotel rooms:
“Scenes are projected on the screen in a cinema show. But the moving pictures do not affect or alter the screen. The seer pays attention to the pictures and ignores the screen. They cannot remain apart from the screen. Still its existence is ignored. So also the Self is the screen on which the pictures, namely activities, are going on. The man is aware of the latter, ignoring the former. All the same he is not apart from the Self. Whether aware or unaware the actions will continue.”
