# First Post

A few years ago I spent a month in Tiruvannamalai, in South India and stayed with an old man who had moved to live there in his retirement years. As a child, he had visited on several occasions the local sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi, since his father was a devotee. So he and his sister grew up with a similar life-long devotion to Ramana. I believe it was his father that bought a house on a street that goes down from the ashram, where several other of the early devotees of the sage lived, and that's the place his son retired to.

This grumpy but kind old devotee, the uncle of the wife of a friend, invited me to stay with him. I took him up on the invitation and determined that while there I would set a daily schedule of lengthy visits to the ashram for meditation and contemplation, which I stuck to. Nothing much came out of this stay but the document about dharma as a sadhana, which is included here in this gemini capsule.

Actually, I felt like it was quite a lot. After many years of dithering between spiritual disciplines and beliefs, it felt like I had found something that referenced various spiritual disciplines while being non-sectarian and not dependent upon a belief or adherence to any of them. It seemed like this was the insight that I was looking for.

But it was just a seed of understanding, and I wasn't sure how to germinate or nurture it. It felt like I needed both to deepen my understanding and find ways to put into practice what I had learned.

Writing helps me to develop my thinking and understanding, so I have often found myself writing and sharing my thoughts and insights in my blog or on Hubzilla, a fediverse content management system. Usually not long articles, just observations about something I'd read, or a new idea that I'd had. My blog and fediverse posts are fairly eclectic however, and touch on many subjects. I think it is time to create a new blog that will deal exclusively with reflections on perception, awareness and consciousness, as these are the subjects that are increasingly closest to my heart. So that's what I'll do here.

I decided to do this in a gemtext format, because the simplicity of the gemini protocol appeals to me. Flounder declares itself to be a kind of WordPress for Gemini, and it is possible to write posts via a progressive web app. That means that if I happen to be inspired to write something while on the go, and do not have my computer with me, I will be able to use my smartphone, for which I have also a miniature fold-up keyboard. I like that Flounder proxies gemlog posts to the web, meaning that, unlike those published in gemtext, these are accessible through ordinary browsers.

So here I've written my first gemlog post. I will supplement this with some of my previous reflections and new ones, as we go forward. I hope that all of this will be useful to others in their own spiritual or mundane search for meaning, whether or not anyone agrees with me. 

=>  ../   Home