The Contemplative Myth and the Sudden Strangeness of What Is

We often find ourselves trapped in the exhaustion of a world that demands constant movement, a relentless economy of attention that treats our very existence as a resource to be mined. In this landscape of noise, the idea of a contemplative life is frequently sold as a luxury good, a spiritual achievement, or a ladder to climb toward some future state of peace. But we must ask: who is it that is climbing? And where exactly do they think they are going? If the absolute is truly absolute, it cannot be waiting for us at the end of a long journey. It must be here, vibrating in the very discomfort, boredom, or anxiety we are trying to escape. There is a common misunderstanding that meditation or silence is a tool to produce enlightenment. We treat this stillness like a transaction—I give my time and my focus, and in return, I receive a higher state of consciousness. But this is just another form of the "active mode," the part of the body-mind that manipulates reality to get a result. True silence is not something we do; it is what remains when the doing stops. It is like the space between the inhalation and the exhalation. If we only exhale, we collapse; if we only inhale, we burst. The natural state is the balance of both, yet we have been taught to value only the "active mode" because it produces measurable results. We are told that sitting in a park listening to birds is a waste of time, but that listening is actually a profound opening where the world is allowed to enter us without judgment. When we stop gesticulating and speaking in every known tongue, as the poet suggests, we find ourselves in a sudden strangeness. This strangeness is not a destination; it is the realization that there is no separate self acting as a conductor of the experience. There is only the hearing of the bird, the feeling of the wind, the throbbing of a sore tooth. We often want to leave the "mundane" reality of a tax return or physical pain to find something more spiritual, but the absolute is manifesting as that very boredom and that very pain. As Tony Parsons often reminds us, "All there is is this." When we think, "This can't be it, it’s too ordinary," that thought itself is also "this." The infinite, timeless totality is not separate from the calloused hand or the cold sea. It is the iridescent energy dancing in the seeing and the thinking, happening spontaneously and impersonally. The contemplative trap is the belief that we can multiply the observer. We think that if we are aware of our thoughts, and then aware of being aware, we are getting closer to the truth. But this is merely a hall of mirrors that fragments non-duality into infinite dualisms. To truly see is to "not see," because as long as we see an object, we are seeing something finite—a shell, a piece of seaweed, a cloud. To see the ocean, the turtle must stop looking for the ocean as if it were a separate thing to be found. The ocean is the very medium in which the turtle exists.