You've already known. You just didn't have the word for it.
A quiet corner of the blog for the thing that keeps happening, and the old, sharp minds who already had a word for it.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
There is a stretch of road near Wat Phnom where I have been stuck in traffic more times than I can count. One afternoon, on the back of a moto, everything happened at once. A monk crossed in saffron like the road belonged to him. A woman worked a baguette cart with one hand. A kid slept in a hammock strung between two trees while the entire city went off around him.
For about a second something in me went quiet. Quieter than peaceful, and further down, like slipping under the surface of a pool where the noise stops.
I did not mention it to anyone. There was no place to put it in the conversation I had been having ten minutes earlier, so I wiped the dust off my face and Phnom Penh closed over it.
It keeps happening. At the riverfront when the sun drops over the Tonlé Sap. In a temple in Siem Reap, standing in front of a face carved into stone eight hundred years ago, feeling, somehow, like it is looking back. In a guesthouse upcountry, fan on, rain on the roof, everything suddenly simple and enough.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to find out that this has a name, and that people worked it out a very long time ago.
In the oldest Sanskrit texts, the word for God is Brahman. It does not mean a person or a being. It literally means the vast. That which has no limit.
The word God carries a lot of luggage. The luggage is the picture we were handed: an old man on a throne, a judge keeping score, something far off that you have to be good enough to reach. Almost nobody bothers to define the word itself, which is why most of us spend our lives either defending or rejecting something we could not describe if asked.
The texts intend the definition literally. A thing can be limited in three ways: by space, by time, or by being one particular object and not another. I am here, not there. I was born and I will die. I am me, not someone else. Every single thing lives inside that cage.
Brahman is the thing with no cage. No limit in space: there is nowhere it is not, the temple, the bar, the worst hour of the worst night. No limit in time: it does not begin and it does not end. No limit in object: there is nothing in the universe separate from it, the monk, the moto driver, me.
If it has no limit in space, it has to be right here, in the room, in the traffic, in the afternoon I am having. Heaven, after I die, somewhere I have to earn my way to: all of that is the old picture.
Take anything in front of me. My hand. The wall. The cup of coffee gone cold.
Strip away the name, the shape, the colour, the story. What is left is that it exists. This is here.
The cup and the wall and my hand are different on the surface. The existence in them is the same existence, one continuous ocean of it, and every object in the world is a wave in that ocean. Different shapes on top. Same water all the way down.
The Tonlé Sap and the puddle from last night's rain are not having two different experiences of being wet. That ocean, pure existence itself, is what the old texts mean when they say God.
Then it goes one layer deeper, to the awareness in use right now.
It is the part that watches me worry, watches me laugh, watches me scroll. It was there when I was seven years old and is somehow still here, unchanged. Every experience I have ever had happened inside it. Without it, nothing is known. It has no edges and no location, and nothing is apart from it.
It is not mine. It is the same consciousness that looked out from the faces at the Bayon, the same one behind the eyes of the monk who rose at 4am this morning in Siem Reap. It was never born. It does not die. It just keeps looking.
That is what I mean when I use the word. Pure existence and pure consciousness, the ground everything is standing on. On that definition nobody is a person searching for God. It is God, briefly, looking through a person. Forgetting. Remembering. Forgetting again.
That is the name for what went quiet on the back of the moto.