It’s 2 AM, and you are tossing and turning because you can’t breathe…all stuffed up with a head cold. So, you finally give up, get out of bed, and go into the kitchen to make a cup of ginger tea with honey. You put the kettle on, grate the ginger, pour the hot water, add the honey, and crawl back in bed.
Sitting up, drinking your tea, looking out the window, the night beyond your bedside lamp is silent and black.
By long habit, you relax into listening to the silence, to the heartbeat, breathing, and the kitchen clock ticking. You listen to the sound of a car in the distance, emerging from silence and gradually fading back into it.
You are watching thoughts arise, like phantoms, from who knows where?
Like the sound of the car, they emerge from silence and return to silence.
You are silence listening to silence: an expanding, spacious presence that is silent, inside and out, and empty, yet completely dynamic. This silence is the space from which all forms arise, as Lao Tsu says, ‘The myriad creatures all rise together, and I watch their return.’ (Tao Te Ching, V37).
This silence has no beginning nor end.
It has no cause.
It is simply what we are beyond what we think we are.
You can finally breathe again, so you turn off the light and go back to sleep. In the morning, there is, on waking, an easy, effortless sense of being. The mind is clear and quiet, and there is what could only be called happiness in every small act.
