Tasting Existence There was a moment,
Just before it all opened up,
When I felt the faintest resistance.
The last thought remained.
It pulsed,
Suspended in vastness,
Almost like it was waiting for me to release something before it could dissolve.
I wasn't sure what that something was,
Maybe a final threat of self,
The last grip of the mind.
Or the ego of a thought that hadn't quite let go.
I had started the meditation like any other,
Settling into my breath,
Feeling the familiar rhythm of inhaling and exhaling,
My body softening into stillness.
As I listened,
I noticed a translucent figure forming in my mind's eye,
A body without substance,
Like a silhouette made of light.
It floated,
Weightless,
Submerged,
But not sinking,
As if suspended in water or air.
The edges were clear,
But the center was growing fainter,
Fading,
Expanding.
There was a sense of dissolving,
Not of being lost,
But of merging into something wider.
Then came the image of the last dot.
My body,
Now nearly transparent,
Had become an outline,
A thin white glow barely holding its shape.
And then the outline itself started thinning,
Breaking apart into a dotted trace,
Each fragment flickering in and out.
It felt inevitable,
This dissolution.
But when only a few dots remained,
I hesitated.
A flicker of something arose.
What happens when the last dot of me,
Of ego,
Disappears?
If everything vanishes,
What remains?
I could feel the resistance in my body,
Not as fear exactly,
But as a hesitation,
A pause at the threshold of something unknown.
And then my attention wavered.
For just a moment,
My focus drifted elsewhere,
To a thought,
To something more familiar.
And in that instant,
The last dot was gone.
It seems that as I took my eye,
My attention,
Off the dot,
It vanished.
And everything opened,
Not into darkness,
Not into emptiness,
But into something vast and alive,
Like a curtain had been peeled back,
Rolled away,
Revealing a world that had always been there.
Only now,
Seen without the layers that had once separated me from it.
The image that came to mind was so simple,
So unexpected.
A sardine can,
Its lid being turned back with that old-fashioned key,
Revealing what had always been inside.
And what was inside?
Not something new,
Not something separate,
But everything.
The same world,
The same trees,
The same sky,
The same existence,
But without the filter of mind naming,
Categorizing,
And enclosing it.
It was all there,
But it radiated something different.
Warmth,
Connection,
Love.
Not love as an idea,
But love as something alive,
Something felt,
Like sitting in front of a fire,
Not just seeing the flames,
But feeling the heat against the skin,
Tasting it in the air.
And that was the shift,
Tasting.
It wasn't just seeing existence,
Having,
Hearing it,
Touching it,
It was tasting it.
And tasting felt deeper than the other senses,
More complete.
Tasting includes touch,
Texture,
Temperature.
It is immediate,
Intimate,
Undeniable.
You can look at something from a distance,
Hear something without being near it,
But to taste is to take something into yourself,
To merge with it.
And that's what had happened.
The world that opened wasn't something separate from me anymore.
It was within and without,
No division,
No barrier,
No commentary in between.
Awareness itself had been revealed,
Not as an idea,
Not as a distant observation,
But as the very substance of experience itself.
I remembered my meditation from the day before,
The sensation of sitting in a room,
Only to have the walls fall away,
Leaving open space in every direction.
And yet somehow the sense of being in the room remained.
That same paradox was here.
There was no container,
No self in the manner I had always known it.
Yet there was no loss,
Only freedom,
Untethered and vast.
And the awareness wasn't silent.
It was alive,
Shimmering,
Flickering,
Like the twinkle of a star,
A light appearing to blink in and out,
Not because it was disappearing,
But because something about its nature made it pulse,
Dance,
Exist in a rhythm beyond time.
The last thought had disappeared,
But I had not.
What had dissolved was only the illusion of separation,
And what remained was the tasting of existence itself.
