Rest Here Before a Thought Arises

Dare to rest in the lively silence where a thought is about to arise but has not yet arisen.

This silence is not sleep, nor repression, nor self-control, but the rippling surface of eternity, on the threshold between creature and Creator, the invisible axis where exhalation turns to inhalation.

Medieval Christian philosophers called this threshold the synderesis, or pure intellectual soul. Indian philosophers called it ritam bara pragyam, the luminous field of intuition from which the whole mind springs. This field is the seed of thought, but is not a thought. It is the inmost center where the soul is ceaselessly breathed and re-created by the Spirit.

In this soul center we may cognize anything in the universe, because the whole creation exists here in timelessness as a non-localized singularity.

Some New Age teachers refer to this place as the vortex. The vortex is the seed of our best intentions, containing our soul's destined greatness. The poet Emily Dickenson wrote, dwell in possibility. She was inviting us into the vortex, the synderisis, the field of ritam.

Quantum physics also describes this living silence, where no-thing becomes everything. The quantum vacuum vibrates with virtual photons of light and virtual electrons of energy, particles that are and are not. These fluctuations of the vacuum are stirrings of pure possibility, defined in mathematical terms as probability-waves. What we call matter is made of nothing else.

At any instant, one of these fluctuations of immaterial possibility might burst from emptiness as a physical particle, or a new universe. Our bodies contain countless hosts of these possibility-seeds; yet our whole universe may be contained in one of them as well.

The total energy of the field is zero, but at one of its infinitesimal points the energy is infinite. On this paradox all creation stories are founded, both in ancient myth and modern physics. So the first verses of the Hebrew Bible declare that, when God creates the heavens and the earth, the earth is tohu wa bohu, formless and void.

There cannot be two voids, an inner void and an outer void. Abstraction contains no duality. Voidness is absolute emptiness, without differentiation. Therefor the void of consciousness whence thought-vibrations arise, must be precisely the same as the vacuum of physics, from which material worlds arise. When we allow our awareness to settle into this unified field of no-thought and no-thing, we return to the source of creation.

Here in thrilling awakened silence we feel the whole cosmos, the Word of creation, right on the tip of our tongue! Yet because no thought has yet arisen, this space remains boundless and clear, with no me, no past or future, no story. Emptiness so full has no time for past or future.