Vachon Imagined

When you close your eyes, or simply sit in silence, you begin to hear yourself more clearly. You see yourself more clearly. The images come from your mind. The thoughts come from your mind. But beneath the mind is something deeper—a field of consciousness filled with every possibility, every color, every sound, and every range of depth imaginable.

You are not separate from it, but you think you are. This is where so much of our confusion begins.

You think you are thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, hearing sounds, and experiencing the world. Yet these things are simply moving through you. You are not the creator of every experience. You are the place where experience is happening.

Sit quietly for long enough and something strange begins to happen. There is sound, but it is not quite the sound you know in your mind. There is sensation, color, movement, and awareness before you have named any of it. Before you say, this is me, or this is my body, there is simply experience.

Then the mind returns and begins to describe it.

This is what we so often mistake for reality itself. We hear our own interpretation of everything—even when we believe we are hearing someone else. In some sense, we are always hearing ourselves: our memories, our expectations, our fears, our desires, and our understanding. Yet beneath all of that is something quieter, something that doesn’t need to explain itself.

It feels less like discovering something new and more like remembering something we already knew.

We don’t discover these depths as much as we rejoin them. And just as we rejoin them, we can lose them again. We all do. We touch something vast, something alive, and then the noise of the mind pulls us back. We forget. Then, somehow, we hear it again.

It is a constant flow of force that no one can stop.

But we can return to it.

We can sit in it a little longer when boredom comes. A little longer when fatigue comes. A little longer when anger comes, or excitement, or restlessness. We don’t have to push these things away. We can let them move through us without immediately becoming them.

This is one of the ways we remember who we are.

We can also help another person remember.

One of the simplest ways we do this is through eye contact—the prolonged kind, the kind that makes you want to turn away, but you don’t. For a moment, something happens between two people that is difficult to explain. You are no longer simply looking at a face. You are meeting another awareness.

It becomes a kind of calling card into remembrance: I am here. You are here. We are experiencing this together.

The longer you sit in that awareness, the more difficult it becomes to believe that we are completely separate from one another or from the field we are moving through.

We can’t really leave it. We come from it. We live inside it. And whether we call it consciousness, awareness, presence, or something else entirely, it is always moving through us.

The colors, vibrations, sounds, sensations, and possibilities aren’t merely happening to us. They are living, moving, breathing, sensing—almost unto themselves. And we are not outside of that movement.

We are part of it.

So we return.

We sit quietly. We look into another person’s eyes. We allow the boredom, fatigue, anger, and excitement to pass through without immediately running from them. We give away a little more of what we thought we had to hold onto.

And eventually, something familiar comes back.

Ah.

These colors.

These vibrations.

This awareness.

It was never really gone.

When you return to it, you know.

They know.

And they remember.