Reflection 18

Welcome!


Closed Eyes (see relevant experiment)

And if I start wondering how on earth one could explain this to a blind person, why then I “go blind”. Shutting my eyes (what eyes?) I start seeking my shape, my boundaries, my height and width, my sex… indeed all those things I’d identified with. And I discover that not a single one of them can be found now. I am still boundless space for sensations to occur in, alias silence for these passing sounds, alias no-mind entertaining this parade of thoughts and feelings. I’m nobody, cleaned out. Yet I feel no sense of loss. Quite the opposite: I’m aware of myself as unhurt, comfortable, relieved of a heavy load. It suits me just to be. I AM feels incomparably better than, more natural than, I AM SOMEBODY. (On Being Aware, article by Douglas Harding.)


Silence

Once I had heard the voice of the mind of the Fairy Queen say to the voice of my mind, ‘If you become accustomed to hearing Silence, you will hear it all the time, even in noisiness.’ I had not known then what she meant. But now I knew.

I knew that Silence was always there and had been there forever. It had always hummed to me, and to everything else in the world. I had not heard it because pain and trouble had made such a noise in me. But Silence had never gone away. It could not because it was me. And because it was everything I was everything. Realizing this I saw that I was not alone. That I had never been alone for a single moment…

Silence needs some sort of a body or It can’t express Itself. But the idea that I was that body became suddenly laughable. For I knew now who I really was. I was Silence, infinite in time and space and creativity. And I had tried to squash myself into the boundaries of a little body. No wonder I had suffered. (Cobweb Walking by Sara Banerji)

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