Elemental
“If you want to know what’s fundamentally true about the world, walk out into an open field and close your eyes. Then start forgetting. Forget everything you know and believe, all the knowledge our culture has accumulated, all our assumptions about the world and ourselves. Completely empty your mind. Then open your eyes and see what you encounter. The first thing you see is this physical stuff all around you. And if you’ve wholly emptied your mind, it is a wondrous revelation: existence, the material universe vast and deep, everything and everywhere, when there might just as easily be nothing at all.
The next thing you notice is that the empty mind perceiving that wondrous existence is not separate from existence. They are a single tissue. And if you stay there over time, looking out, you realize that existence is alive somehow. Things perpetually move and change, appear and disappear. Clouds drift. Wind rustles wildflowers and trees. Day fades into night, and night into day. Seasons come and go, one after another. You die. Other people are born. On and on it goes. Everything is moving all the time without pause, without beginning or end.
Finally you realize that the same thing is going on in your mind — that your mind’s movements are no different than a cloud’s movements or the turning seasons.”
– David Hinton
