Recognition: By Daniel Singer

There is an infinite silence in all storms. As a raindrop emerging from a cloud, every song and every cry emerging is from this silent Source.

As a mist returns to the air in the warmth of the sun, every birthing, every living, every dying appears within this silence.

Neither sound nor hush, neither beginning nor end can be distinct from Source.

Tentacles of sensation perceive and create experience.

Thought appears and interprets all arising, noting distinctions. In addition, thought can be the primary vessel of forgetting.

The function of forgetting protects us from the fear of annihilation. It guards us from the taste of freedom and love where all distinctions cease, where no choice is made. This freedom is before life and death and it is the true resting point.

As a hand is not separate from the body, nothing is exempt from Source, though in our experience, it might momentarily appear so. This appearance of exemption, of felt separateness is nothing more and nothing less than a forgotten heart that contains all fullness and completeness.

In life we tend to taste ourselves as time-bound; yet through affection for freedom we inevitably understand our timelessness. Timelessness takes over once we appear to enter its vortex. Then all effort is felt as the timeless Source transforming itself. That which has the face of a beginning and an end relaxes into endlessness; and that which is born and that which dies recognizes itself as eternity.

Life can never be outside of Source; for Source takes on infinite forms. Nothing is born and nothing dies.

Forms are like waves and ocean is like Source. Whether felt or not, whether tasted or ignored, constancy and grace of Source is assured. Like an unshakeable conviction, this Source gives rise to all that is created and transformed, all that is considered and all that is decided. It is beyond style, language, place and predilection.

All patterns, preferences, and laws arise just as flowers arise from meadow, as lava arises from earth’s core, as mist arises from the summer morning lake. The meadow blossom is a shaping of the great silence as “blossom-ness”, its odor is the shaping of the great silence into “fragrant-ness”. It is all One.

All things are appearing in us from our point of awareness, a point that cannot be anything but a piece of Source. For a shape or a manifest experience from the silent Source cannot be separate from its origin. This includes both that which is appearing and he/she who is noticing.

Forgetting shows itself as the appearance of a small “self” or the solidification around a notion of a “me”.

Taking shape, this yearning creation of Source is what the volcano is, what natural law originated from, what birth and death is an expression of, what gaining and losing is an appearance of, what pleasure and pain is an arising of, what liking and disliking is an activity of, what love is a fragrance of, what all is gesture of.

This arising wish for free existence and unencumbered expression is but an arising of Source beckoning itself to know itself as the One.

Like so many rivers yearning back to the ocean, like so many newborns seeking the mother, we have been created in the illusion of separation to enact the drama of conscious remembrance, return and relaxation into the Only wombless womb.