Naming this undivided wholeness (calling it wholeness, unicity, Consciousness, awareness, the Self, the True Self, the One Mind, presence, Buddha Nature, emptiness, or any other name) is always potentially misleading because names create the mirage-like appearance of something in particular (this but not that). And what we’re talking about is not something. It is everything and no-thing. Emptiness is what remains when all our ideas, words and beliefs about life drop away. It is not nothing in a nihilistic sense. It is everything, just as it is.
This wholeness or emptiness is not some abstract idea or mystical state of consciousness, but simply the undeniable actuality of this moment – the sounds of traffic, the hum of machinery, the song of a bird, the knowingness that this is and that you are here. This bare being, this aware presence, this present experiencing requires no belief and cannot be doubted. It is undeniable and unavoidable. What can be doubted are all the ideas, interpretations, and stories about this. All our confusion and suffering is in this conceptual overlay, never in Reality itself. This book is about seeing through the imaginary problem.
---Joan Tollifson, from her book, “Painting the Sidewalk with Water”
People often ask me where I live and what’s the name of my hometown road I smile as I tell them it’s nowhere Yet it’s everywhere and it’s simply my humble abode I’m the Unknown Wanderer and hence I simply wander then I pivot Awareness around Into the stillness of the Silence as I lay my soul down in Rumi’s field Where the Beloved Ones teachings are revealed If you want to know where I call home at the end of the day look up at the stars It’s beyond your vision but if you look long enough you’ll sense me there spinning like a Sufi in the boundless galaxy of the Milky Way But you can find me if you simply look within your heart That’s where I’ve always been right from the start
For a long time I let this slow movement towards the unknown, this highest form of knowledge, be fulfilled in me: the dream, the worship of silence. It is never in vain that we give way to this elementary beauty which seizes the soul in the spiral of a star or anything in the world: such certainty soothes the hours when I do not write, as those when I write.
It illuminates the night and its angelic sister, solitude. Silence is the highest form of thought and it is by developing in us this silent attention mute to the day, that we will find our place in the absolute that surrounds us. It is ours when all is lacking and all is far from being _ to give our life the patience of a work of art, the flexibility of reeds that the hand of the wind wrinkles, In homage to winter. A little silence is enough. A little of this immaterial food that the mother dispensed by reading a story that dug the night and burned it to infinity...