The moment of silence may be the loudest thing you ever hear.
As I grow older, I find myself craving silence. Not just in my environment, but in my mind, and most desperately in my soul. I seek for the experience of awareness unencumbered by worry, or anticipation, or even thought.
But most of all, I seek an awareness centered in the absence of time.
Truly, in the greatest moments of my life, the absence of time is the defining component of the intensity of my experience. I remember the feeling of being disconnected from time as I sat with my wife in the delivery room, awaiting the birth of our first child.
It felt like our own universe; separate, distinct and unconnected with the world outside of those 4 walls.
I remember that very same absence of time during freefall, as I left the plane at around 13,000 feet, and experienced the overwhelming sensations of weightlessness combined with timelessness.
I will never forget that sensation; the feeling that the whole world and universe had somehow moved without me and I was in a domain of my own reality. Individual, eternal, timeless.
In my daily meditation practice, as I seek for stillness and try to allow all thoughts to flow beyond me, I am humbled by the realization of the incredible capacity of the human consciousness.
Whatever you believe about our pathway into this reality, I hope you see with wonder the unparalleled beauty and majesty of awareness and its capacity to transcend.
In the few times that I feel that I have achieved a stillness of presence, I have found a sense of unity with the universe and an experience of the eternal. The longer I meditate on the concept of time and its potential and place within this reality, the more I realize that time is not an eternal concept, but it is in fact the very opposite of eternity.
In the true moments of silence in my heart, mind and soul, I feel a sense of oneness with everything, everyone, everywhere, eternally.
It’s the loudest thing I think I will ever experience.
And I am so grateful for it.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings