NOEMAYA

The greatest concealment is not death. It is the certainty that there is someone alive to whom death could happen. Like the formation of the waves in the sea, consciousness tends to gather the world around a center it calls “me” and then drop it a moment later. The room appears, the body appears, memory appears, and with them comes the silent conviction that there is an owner standing behind the stream of appearances, as if experience is someone’s experience.

Yet this owner is nowhere to be found. Search every thought and you find only another thought. Search every feeling and you find only another appearance. The one for whom the world exists is never among the things that exist. The self is the deepest absence pretending to be a presence; it is a no-thing.

This is why the world can feel unbearably heavy sometimes. It is forced to carry the impossible task of proving that this absent center is real. Every achievement, every relationship, every desire becomes another desperate attempt to fill a hole that can never be filled because it is not a hole at all. It is an illusion sustained by movement. Stop reaching for a single moment and the machinery begins to expose itself. The world loses its solidity. Meaning begins to fall away, for they were held in place by the sheer force incessant thinking.

What once felt like life reveals itself as a restless defense against an emptiness that was never asking to be escaped. And beneath that collapse there is no revelation waiting, no comforting voice, no hidden certainty. Only the eerie realization that what we called reality had been circling an invisible center all along.

All I said, too, is equally part of it, empty and futile appearance! Deepest silence is the way, to be no more.