Fully Human

The story of our lives

“Dear Shiv - your words are felt deeply here. I too have always felt drawn to silence. I experienced a dissolution of separation when I was younger, similar to what you’ve described. I practiced meditation for many years and was even a spiritual teacher for a time.

But the integration part has been difficult. There is still something in me that wants to pull away from the world, especially now. I find myself wanting to just remain in silence and not engage with everything that feels so chaotic and confused. And yet at the same time, this also feels isolating. Like I am holding myself apart somehow.

Your essays have helped me see that there may be fear behind that impulse, and maybe even a kind of avoidance. But I don’t know how to reconcile this. Is it actually possible to live fully in the world without losing that silence? And how do you relate to others who are still deeply identified with their egos without getting pulled back into it yourself?

I suppose I’m really asking how this has unfolded for you. How have you reconciled this in your own life?”

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Let me tell you the story of your life. Perhaps that may bring a bit of clarity to your current predicament.

When you were a fetus still in the womb, as yet unborn, the absolute was all you knew. There was no sense of self. No sense of other. No sense of here, nor of there. No sense even of now, or of then. Yet, there was pure perception, pure being and pure experience - devoid of anyone to experience it, devoid of even the sense of an experience to be had.

In the moments that transpired during your birth and in the immediate aftermath, that purity of perception continued. The trauma of birth, the shock of oxygen hitting your lungs, the bright lights, your mother’s breast - these were registered as changes within your nervous system. Yet, there was no discernment as of yet. Even with your eyes open, you experienced the ‘blindness’ of a newborn. A blindness not due to a lack of light entering your pupils - but because of your brain’s inability to process the stream of information you were receiving. All you heard was white noise. All you saw was static.

Reality was absolute. You were yet to experience the relative.

Yet, over the days and weeks that followed - you began to gradually become aware of a subtle distinction within experience. There were things that were predictable and there were things that were unpredictable. The most predictable of all was a presence that you would later learn to call ‘mother’. Whenever hunger, discomfort or tiredness overcame you, her presence was felt immediately. The hunger was satiated. The discomfort was eased. The tiredness was dispelled as she lulled you to sleep.

Then, in the months that followed, your discernment sharpened as the relative world came more into focus. You touched, smelled and tasted everything. You noticed iron tasted different from plastic. You felt how clay squished in your palm yet stone resisted. You watched how the metal pan bounced when you threw it but the glass dish shattered. You saw how the presence that referred to itself as ‘da-da’ felt different than the one that referred to itself as ‘ma-ma’. You were fascinated by everything because it was still all one thing to you - and yet its shape kept changing, its taste kept changing, its texture, its energy, its color and sound kept changing. And this awed you to no end.

Then a year later, you began noticing how each of these shapes and forms of the one reality had different names. And people kept pointing at you as if you were one of those forms too - and they told you that you also had a name. You would poke at your face giggling and say your own name as if it were the silliest joke in the world. After all, how could you be an object when you were the absolute? But you played along because it seemed to you that pretending was a game that all these forms played with one another.

Yet, a few years on from there your perspective began to shift. Your form and identity had been reiterated to you so many times you had subtly begun to believe it. Now, the shapes and textures that you encountered appeared familiar and separate. They were things now - not just temporary forms. And they belonged to people. There was ‘mine’, there was ‘yours’. And there were things that didn’t belong to anyone and could be claimed as ‘mine’ if you were attentive enough. You also learned that you could be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When you behaved in certain ways you were praised and it made you feel special. At other times you were scolded and it made you feel small. Your words, your deeds, your feelings and even your thoughts soon became things too.

And then one day, you looked in a mirror and saw yourself standing there. A person, a child, a “me”, with a name. The whole world faded to black as you inspected your face, your eyes, your nose, your hair. You raised your eyebrows. You moved your cheeks up and down. You made faces. And when you went to school you began to compare what you looked like to how others appeared. Some were bigger. Some were prettier. Some were smarter. Some seemed braver.

Over the next few decades, this relative world became your new absolute. No longer a game of pretend - it became reality itself. You found yourself surrounded by a world of discrete things, people, events and experiences. And you - the central focal point of that world - a discrete object, thing, event, and experience yourself. “God” became another thing in your world. An idea. A concept of absoluteness which had no practical applicability in a relative world.

Floating in this endless sea of things often felt like drowning. Life, as you lived it day to day, felt like treading water in the hopes that some tidal surge or fortunate current might carry you further forward that you could manage on your own. The overwhelming sense lurking just beneath the surface of your consciousness was that of utter alienation. Of isolation. Of a loneliness so profound that you invested all your mental energy in distracting yourself from it.

Your immersed yourself in work. You invested yourself in one relationship after another. You involved yourself in community service. You immersed yourself in hobbies and personal ambitions. Yet, each of these efforts eventually turned futile as that deep-seated sense of inner alienation ate through their flimsy facades as surely as rust eats through metal. You could feel your soul continue to corrode despite the increasing energy you invested in polishing the outer facade. And even though there were many who admired that facade - only you knew of the decay that had taken hold on the inside.

In time, finding no respite from the solutions society had promised would bring you meaning and fulfilment, you began seeking other forms of relief - through medication, through addiction, through distraction and avoidance. Even your spiritual practice became a self-soothing strategy - another form of denial and escape. It was then that the true inescapability of your predicament first dawned on you. And this realization gripped you with a terror that you had never previously felt. That terror turned into a feeling of total helplessness - and finally, despair.

And it was in the midst of that great despair, of utter defeat, that something unexpected happened…

A glimpse. Or rather, a remembrance.