Finding Nobody

It was midnight. The milky light of a Harvest Moon poured through the big windows of the meditation hall. In the shadows, a lone figure unfolded his tired legs from half-lotus position. Standing stiffly, he limped to the screen door and inhaled the perfume of autumnal fields. He lingered there a while, absorbed in the pulsing chorus of a million crickets. He felt tired but wide-awake. Throwing a sweater over his shoulders, he stepped into the night and followed a moonlit path into the middle of a big sloping field.

His mind, in a week of silent retreat, had assumed a capacious stillness as vast as the heavens above where the Milky Way spilled out like diamonds on black velvet. As he looked up in wonder, a silent question arose, like a small voice at the bottom of a deep well, asking, ‘Who sees this?’ At that moment, in the blink of an eye, his life, as he had known it, simply and quietly came to an end.

The question ‘Who sees this?’ was not really his, although he had never been without it. It came from beyond the stars and beyond time. The answer, too, was beyond the limits of perception and knowledge; there is seeing, yes, but the ending, the dying, as it were, is of the life-long, dearly held assumption that there is an actual ‘me’ at the center of this seeing. To discover the falsity of this notion is to be released from the prison of an imaginary separate self. It is awakening to the fact that what we are, what we really are, is beyond the frontiers of space and time.

In the big empty field that night, a lone figure laughed and cried and clapped his hands and danced with the moon. A witness to the scene might have surmised that some poor soul had lost his mind on the full moon. These writings are about losing one’s mind. Paradoxically, losing one’s mind, in this case, does not mean losing one’s sanity. It means finding it. The losing part is about waking from a dream to discover that we’ve been dreaming. When we die to the ‘self’ that we think we are, we wake up to the no-self that we really are. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Don’t worry, it’s not supposed to, at least not to the part of the self that labels and tries to know everything. The no-self, however, is always listening and is bound by universal law to take notice of the meaning of these words.