Vachon Imagined

Yesterday I was driving when Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd came on the radio.

Almost instantly, my brother appeared in my awareness.

Not physically.

As memory.

For a few moments, I stayed with him. I wasn’t trying to hold on to the memory or make it mean anything. I simply allowed it to return.

Then, just as quietly, something else happened.

I returned.

Not to the past.

To God.

Or more accurately, to that unified being, that awareness, that allows all things to arise and pass away.

The memory came and went.

The awareness remained.

It has always fascinated me that the world’s spiritual traditions, despite their profound differences, recognize a movement of return. They describe it differently, they understand its source differently, and they disagree about its ultimate meaning. Yet each, in its own way, points beyond words toward an experience that is encountered as much as it is believed.

It made me wonder if this is what life is always doing.

Every day something returns to us.

A song.

A face.

The smell of rain.

A grief we thought had ended.

A joy we forgot we carried.

We often think these moments are interruptions, but they are invitations.

Life continually returns itself to us.

Not because it wants us to remain in the past, but because it invites us to see.

Most of us mistake what returns for who we are.

We believe we are our memories, our identities, our successes, our failures, and the stories we have collected over a lifetime. We mistake our thoughts for ourselves, our emotions for ourselves, and the constant movement of our inner world for the entirety of our being.

But thoughts arise and pass.

Emotions rise and change.

Memories appear and fade.

They are real experiences. They are meaningful parts of being human. They shape us, reveal us, and tell the story of our lives.

But they are not the whole of what we are.

It is easy to mistake the contents of consciousness for consciousness itself.

What returns is memory.

What arises are thoughts and emotions.

What remains is awareness.

When I stay with what returns instead of immediately becoming the story it creates, something remarkable happens.

I become present to my own mind.

I become present to my own body.

I begin to see the fears it carries, the hopes it protects, and the stories it repeats.

Seeing them clearly returns me to myself.

Not the self constructed from memory.

The self beneath the names, roles, and interpretations.

The self that was here before memory began explaining the world.

This is the thread that runs through the world’s spiritual traditions.

In Judaism, the word teshuvah means return. It is a return to God, to covenant, and to the person one was created to become.

In Christianity, return is found in reconciliation with God and the movement of coming home. The story of the Prodigal Son is not only about forgiveness; it is about remembering that the son was always more than his mistakes.

Christianity also speaks of the return of Christ.

For most Christians, this refers to a future moment when Jesus Christ returns personally and visibly to complete what was begun, bringing judgment, resurrection, and the fullness of God’s kingdom.

Yet Christian mystics have also explored another dimension of return. Before asking when Christ will return to the world, they asked whether Christ is being born within the soul.

Mystics such as Meister Eckhart spoke of this inner birth—the awakening of divine life within a person. The return becomes not only an event in the future but an experience in the present. Something within us becomes alive.

In Islam, tawbah means turning back or returning to God. The human journey is one of forgetting and remembering, wandering and returning.

In Hindu traditions, return is the recognition that the deepest Self was never truly separate from ultimate reality. The journey home is the realization that the source was never absent.

In Buddhism, return is not a return to a creator God, but a return to direct awareness—to seeing clearly beyond the stories, attachments, and illusions created by the mind.

In Taoism, the Tao Te Ching describes return as the natural movement of the Tao itself.

Different names.

Different symbols.

Different understandings.

Yet each points beyond the limits of language toward something that must ultimately be encountered.

This is why a single moment can be so powerful.

A song can bring back someone we love.

A memory can open a door we thought was closed.

A feeling can return us to a part of ourselves we had forgotten.

But the deeper return is not only the memory coming back to us.

It is us returning to ourselves.

Our own mind.

Our own body.

Our own awareness.

And through that awareness, discovering the soul beneath the stories.

One person. One moment. One memory can become a doorway.

The same life that appears as a thought, an emotion, or a memory is also the life that recognizes it.

Something begins moving.

Something begins returning.

Some call it Christ.

Some call it awakening.

Some call it grace.

Some call it the soul.

No single word can contain it.

But when it is lived, it is known.

And perhaps that is what all spiritual traditions have been pointing toward—not an idea to possess, but a return to the reality in which we have always been held.