Inside and Outside

Today, in the middle of conversation with some very dear friends, I was struck with an odd perspective. It was as if I stepped back from the verbal volleyball in which I had previously been engrossed and saw, fleetingly, exactly what they looked like, exactly how strange and special it was that I should know them at all.

It was almost as if I flipped from being inside the experience, wholly engaged in a seamless consciousness of participation, to being outside, looking in with newness and wonder. And from the outside, my friends, I saw something extremely inspiring, yet heartrending and beautiful, which struck me as exceedingly obvious, so obvious that we do not normally notice.

In your faces I saw a fragile composition of elements, a collection of quirks, stories, and laughter, layer upon layer of time and tedium, trustingly condensed into your mirage of self. And I was raptured because I cherish you, your faces bursting with youth, and I readily saw that the very notion of coherence was a chance designation, a momentary name given to a system in flux - a snowflake, a diamond, a seed, a star. What more can I say about my own self bearing witness to this? Stars align to form constellations, also transient, also empty.

Meditation and contemplation, by the virtue of silence, sharpen the ability to observe from outside, to see from another perspective, to engage with a beginner's mind. It feels to me, in these fleeting moments of altered perception, like I have reached a much more intimate appreciation of emptiness, of interdependent phenomenon, or suchness; what I simply praise as divinity, because its existence is mysterious and sacred. Maybe the lesson would go something like this:

Far out along the
edges, Mind beyond
mind, discover the center.