The Institute of Reflection
The virtual Agora for Occidental Meditation – A Tool for Clearer Thinking, Emotional Balance and a Rounded Perspective
by <a href="https://instituteofreflection.com/author/hemal-jayasuriya/" target="_self">Hemal Jayasuriya</a>

by Hemal Jayasuriya

Dr Hemal Jayasuriya never ceases to be amazed at the strangeness and fascination of our world, and finds in it a subject for endless speculation. He is a published poet and is acknowledged in the International Who’s Who in Poetry. He obtained a PhD from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Hemal also obtained a MA in Systems in Management, Lancaster University and a MSc in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University. Prior to that, Hemal obtained a BSc Honours in Biophysics from Flinders University, Australia. He is a Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and a member of the Aristotelian Society. His articles are published in international scientific journals. His poems are published in academic journals and books. Hemal is inspired by the material and immaterial in the world which shapes his poetry. He is fascinated by cosmology and scientific phenomena in the world.
POEM

Young and Old

I am seeing dots, dashes and striations ;
It is as if I am seeing myself, my brain.
There are many gaps hanging loose
In my Memory oozing feelings ; and you
Who were my younger self, is hiding
In one of these gaps. You are happier
Than I am but I am a better Painter
And a Thinker and a Conceptualiser
Now than when I was more feisty and jerky.
I am seeing more, slowing down, absorbing
Diving deeper into the vast pictorial and symbolic
Ocean. I can confront : 2^x + 8^x = 130
And come up with a solution
Computed in a Subset of the Neuronal Net.

Grunwald Glacier, there she saw the Ice,
A Solid, in graceful flow, slowly, like a Cold Lava.
It gave her a Godly sense of Exhilaration
And a spike of Joy, a sudden glimpse
Of a fleeting Reality, some kind of Essence : a Core.
Then her Being became disjoint from her grounded Reality
Falling into a separate Plane of pure Ecstacy
That could cut through the crystalline structures
Of the sensed World.
Abstract and the Spiritual Planes descended
From ethereal mists to merge
With the three dimensional Reality
Of the enclosed room. She was staring
At the multicoloured oil painting, the porthole to places elsewhere