The Lantern In The Well: Bedtime Story

Hello, loves.

Join me tonight for story time. The Lantern in the Well is a story of inner awakening, of realising that the light was never absent; it has been within us the whole time.

Sleep well, dear ones.

Music generously provided by Sakartvelo.

Transcript

Hello dear ones and welcome to today's reading. Today's story is called The Lantern in the Well. A story of inner awakening. And the discovery of the light that was never absent. So just making yourself comfortable now in your space. Maybe taking some longer inhales and exhales. Stretching out your body. And when you're ready, We will begin. There was once a village whose people believed with total and unquestioned certainty that they were in the dark. This belief was so old and so universally shared that no one had thought to question it for generations. The elders told the children that darkness was the natural condition of human life, That it was something to be managed, Worked around and accepted. You could build fires, They said. You could make torches. You could wait for morning. But the darkness itself was permanent. It was the ground from which all experience grew. The village was, By any outside observation, Not in the dark. It sat in a broad valley through which a clear river ran, Surrounded by forests and hills, And a sky that cycled from brilliant blue to the extravagant canvas of stars on clear nights. The people moved through the light every day of their lives, But they had been told they were in darkness, And so they did not see it. Or rather, They saw it, But did not recognize it as it was. Among them was a young woman named Saya. Who was unusual in the village for one particular quality. She could not stop asking questions. Not the practical questions that everyone asks. About weather and harvest and the best way to seal a roof before the rains. She asked the other kind, The kind that didn't have obvious answers and made people uncomfortable at dinner. Why are we here? What is the sound? And what is it that watches when I think? Who is looking out from behind these eyes? Her family loved her and found her exhausting in equal measure. Her mother said she had too much fire. Her father said she asked questions that had no answers, Which seemed to him a form of madness. Her grandmother, Who was very old and had outlived three husbands. And appeared to be outliving the village itself, Said nothing on the subject, Except to watch Sire with an expression that might have been recognition. When Sire was 23, A traveller came to the village and mentioned in passing that there was a sage living in a cave in the northern hills who could answer the kind of questions Sire was always asking. The traveller had not visited the sage himself. He had heard about it from someone who had heard about it from someone else. The information was third hand and possibly wrong. Sire left that week. The journey took eleven days. The cave in the northern hills turned out to be more of a large overhang, A shelf of rock protruding from a cliff face, With a small fire burning in front of it, And an old woman sitting in the smoke. The old woman had white hair, And the kind of face that has gone beyond ordinary expressiveness into something more fundamental, Like a face carved from wood. Not blank, But stilled. Sire said, Sitting down without being invited, Because there was something in the place that made formality seem absurd. I want to know what I am. The old woman looked at her for a long time. Then she said, You already know. I don't, Sire said. That's why I walked eleven days. What did you bring with you on the walk? The old woman asked. My pack, My food, My mat to sleep on. What else? Sire thought. My thoughts. My worries about whether I was going the right direction. My memories. And what else? I don't understand what you are asking. Did you bring the one who noticed the thoughts? The one who wondered whether she was going in the right direction. Did you bring the one who noticed the worrying? Science stopped. Something in the air around her shifted slightly, The way it does before a change in weather. Did that one ever leave? The old woman said. The old woman told her to come back the next morning. Saya slept under the stars that night. Her mind moving quickly over the question. Turning it over, Unable to find a place to put it down. In the morning the sage took her to a well at the base of the cliff. It was old, Built of flat stones martered with clay, And the water in it was deep and very still. Look, Sage Sam. Sire looked into the well. She saw her own face looking back at her, And the reflected circle of blue sky above. And a small white cloud moving slowly through the reflection. The face you see, The sage said, Is a reflection If I put my hand in the water, It will distort. If a leaf falls in, The image will tremble. If the wind comes, The surface will shiver and the face will blur. Sire nodded. Is the face in the water your face? It is a reflection of my face. And when the reflection trembles, Does your face tremble? No. The sage crouched beside her. Your thoughts are reflections. Your emotions are reflections. Your memories, Your personality, Your sense of being a person named Sire who was born in a particular village and walked 11 days. These are all reflections. Real reflections, Yes. Not illusions, Not nothing. But reflections of something that does not tremble when they tremble. Sire looked at her face in the water. A leaf fell from a tree above and the reflection shivered wildly, A feature momentarily unrecognizable. And then studied again. What is the thing that doesn't tremble? She asked. Awareness, The sage said. The light in the lantern. The lantern has been in the well your whole life. It was there when you were frightened as a child. And when you were joyful as a young woman. And when you walked through doubt and confusion to get here. The light never changed. You could not have looked out from behind your eyes for a single moment without it. But no one told you to look for it. So you looked at the reflections instead and believed that that was all there was. Sire stayed with the sage for three months. Each day there were small practices. Not difficult rituals. But rather simple acts of attention. Sit quietly and watch a thought arise. Notice the thought, Then notice the noticer. Where is the noticer? What is its quality? Does it have a location? Does it have an age? Does it get tired? It was slow work and frequently frustrating. There were days when Sire felt close to something and then it would dissolve into ordinariness. There were days when she felt convinced she understood. And the sage would ask a simple question that showed her she had only understood another reflection of the thing she was looking for. A concept about awareness rather than the awareness itself. You keep looking with your mind for the thing that is prior to your mind, The sage told her. The mind cannot find what proceeds it. It is like trying to see your own eye. And how do I find it? Stop looking with the mind. Instead, Look from the place the mind arises from. The mind arises in awareness. Turn toward the awareness. But how? Ask. What is aware right now? And then, Instead of generating an answer with your thoughts, Be quiet and see if the awareness recognises itself. There was an afternoon in the second month, Sitting by the well in the late sun. When something happened that Saya could not fully describe afterward. And never tried to describe accurately because she knew the description would be a reflection and not the thing itself. It was as if the habitual contraction of experience, The constant sense of a self enclosed in a skin bag, Looking out at a world separate from it, Loosened momentarily. Not disappear, Not dissolve. Just loosen. And in the loosening, There was a quality of openness and recognition that felt, Paradoxically, More like home than anything she had ever known. As if she had been straining to hear a sound that was not in the distance, But was, In fact, The very silence in which all sounds arose. She went to the sage afterward, And the sage looked at her and said, Yes. Just that. Yes. Sia returned to her village. She went back to her ordinary life, Her work in the fields, Her family, The rhythms of the season. She did not become serene in the way of portraits of saints, Which sometimes make enlightenment look like the absence of personality. She was still recognizably Saya. Curious, Sometimes impatient, Easily move to laughter. She still had difficult days. She still argued with her family. She's still got things wrong. But there was something different now. A quality of groundedness that had not been there before. A capacity to be moved without being swept away. When sorrow came, She could feel it fully, Without being consumed by the story that this sorrow would be permanent. When joy came, She could receive it without clinging. The reflections were still happening. All of them. But she knew now what she was looking at. And the knowledge changed everything. Not as a concept. But as her lived reality. Her grandmother recognized it. You found something, " she said, The first time Sire came home. Not found, Sire replied. More like stopped losing it. Her grandmother nodded. There was something in the old woman's eyes that suggested she knew exactly what this meant. In later years, Sire became the one in the village who people came to with the questions that didn't have obvious answers. She never claimed to have all the answers. She never set herself up as a teacher in any formal sense. But she was skilled at one particular thing. Helping people look in the right direction. Not outward toward achievement or accumulation or resolution of external problems not backward into the story of the past. Or forward into the anxiety of the future. But inwards. Toward the simple and foundational fact of being aware. Of there being a knowing quality present right now, In this moment. That has been there in every moment of their lives and that no circumstance has ever been able to extinguish. The lantern in the well was not something you had to acquire. It was something you had to stop mistaking the reflections for.