Vachon Imagined

I’ve spent the last 20 years working in law enforcement. Over time, I came to understand how much of that world is built on proof.

An incident is reported. Evidence is gathered. Elements of proof are examined. If those elements meet a legal standard, the case moves forward into a formal process of accountability—ultimately into the hands of attorneys, courts, and a system designed to be structured, defensible, and bound by precedent.

It is a necessary system. Without it, there is no shared way to determine responsibility.

But it taught me something important: proof belongs to the external world.

When it comes to inner experience, proof does not function in the same way.

Someone can tell you they were hurt. They can describe pain that has lasted for years. You can listen, but you cannot prove their experience in the way you would prove a case. You cannot step inside it and verify it with evidence.

So something else is required.

Listening.

Not the kind of listening that prepares a response, but the kind that suspends it. For a moment, judgment is set aside. Interpretation quiets. The need to be right, or to agree, or to disagree, falls away.

In that space, something becomes clear: listening does not prove anything. It simply stands.

It stands as a form of disciplined presence.

And when judgment returns—as it always does—it is noticed. And it can be set down again.

This is its own kind of discipline: not the elimination of thought, but the return from it.

The goal is not to become someone without distraction. The goal is to learn to return. That return is discipline.

And over time, this returning becomes less of an idea and more of a way of living—a quiet practice of coming back from the mind’s movement into something simpler, more direct, and more real.

I do want to lean into something deeper here: the suspension of the self.

Not the destruction of the self, and not the denial of it, but the temporary setting down of it—the narrator, the judge, the interpreter.

In that suspension, something becomes available that is often described as God, or presence, or peace.

It is not something we manufacture. It is something we encounter when the self becomes quiet enough to listen.

And then the return matters just as much as the suspension.

We move between the two: self and no-self, thought and silence, interpretation and direct experience.

Together, they shape how we live.

Not as escape from the world, but as a way of bringing a different quality of attention back into it.

Less judgment. Less contraction. Less separation.

More clarity. More presence. More peace.

In that way, what we touch in silence does not stay abstract.

It enters the world through how we see, speak, and meet each other.

When a person learns to suspend the self and return without losing themselves in judgment, they do something quietly radical.

They bring more God into the world.