Returning to the Source, 2

Book cover, image of a spring in a dry mountain, with a view of the sea and the morning sky

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Returning to the Source, 2

The Wordless Experience

The previous chapter asked a question: what existed before doctrines? This one goes a little deeper. Not toward texts or history, but toward something quieter — an experience that almost everyone knows and that almost no one considers worth paying attention to. A forest, a starlit sky, a fire burning low. Something within us grows still. Time stretches slightly. The inner commentary fades. This experience has no settled name. It belongs to no tradition. It requires no belief. And yet it may be here — in this simplicity we pass through without pausing — that everything began.

Sometimes a simple walk is enough to raise a question. Why does a forest bring so many people a sense of peace? Why do the movement of waves, rain on a rooftop, the breath of wind through the trees, or the contemplation of a starlit sky produce, in so many of us, a feeling that is difficult to describe?

It is not necessarily happiness, nor strong emotion — rather a settling, as though, for a few moments, something inside ceases to resist. As though the gaze opens a little wider than usual.

This experience is so common that we almost never think to speak of it. It accompanies childhood, when a child stands motionless before an insect, a stream, or a fireplace. It accompanies the artist absorbed in their work, the scientist before an equation, the gardener pruning a tree, or the sailor watching the horizon.

We speak then of inspiration, concentration, wonder, or serenity. The circumstances change. But can we be certain that the experience itself is different?

The question may seem naive. It probably is. And yet, many important discoveries have grown from a question everyone believed unnecessary to ask. When Newton watches an apple fall, no one is unaware that apples fall. What is new is not the phenomenon, but the gaze brought to it. Something similar may be at work here.

Since the beginning, human beings have known moments when the inner commentary quiets, when time seems to stop. These instants are often brief. They pass without leaving any trace other than a memory of simplicity. They ask nothing of belief. They carry no particular religious affiliation. They can arise in a child, an atheist, a monk, a musician, a walker, or a scientist.

They seem to belong to life itself. And yet modern men and women rarely consider them worthy of attention. We hold onto extraordinary events, spectacular visions, exceptional experiences. We pay less notice to this quiet peace that draws no gaze. As though simplicity were too ordinary to reveal anything essential.

What if this very obviousness was what the ancient sages had sought to preserve? What if their genius lay not in inventing a new truth, but in recognizing the importance of an experience everyone lives through without pausing to notice?

For when one reads the accounts that sages have left of their deepest experiences, something strikes us: they rarely insist on the exceptional nature of what they lived. They insist on its simplicity. On its self-evidence.

Perhaps the gap between ordinary experience and spiritual experience is not one of kind, but of attention.

Then spiritual texts would take on a different meaning. They would no longer describe an inaccessible world. They would simply draw our gaze toward a possibility that is always present — not to lead us elsewhere, but to teach us to see what was already there.

If you have any questions, please write here:

madhyama.marga@gmail.com

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