Mind is Madness. Only When I Go Beyond the Mind is There Meditation
The mind is a thousand mirrors cracking under their own reflections. Each shard believes it is whole. Each reflection insists it is real. The noise is infinite— whispers, arguments, plans, memories dressed as prophets and fears in costumes of truth.
I walk through this carnival of thought, where every voice offers salvation, every idea fights for a crown, and silence lives like an exile underneath sound’s unending procession.
The mind is a theater of smoke— actors sculpted from clouds, dialogues rehearsed by ghosts. Reality slips between curtains of memory, and I chase it with trembling hands, only to find more curtains, more play.
In this play, madness is reason, and reason is a decorated cage. The bird sings of freedom but cannot imagine the sky.
***
I begin to notice the weight of thinking— how heavy it is to be clever, how exhausting to know. Every question builds another wall, every answer another prison cell, each labeled *understanding.*
The mind explains everything until nothing remains sacred. Names replace wonder. Definitions eat the divine. And I— the weary listener— start longing for the soundless.
There comes a point when thinking becomes a fever, when meaning melts and clarity is confusion dressed in lace. The mind speaks even when there is no one left to hear it. It churns like a machine abandoned but still running, still producing echoes of utility, still mistaking movement for life.
***
Madness is not fire; it is ice— numbing, systematic, efficiently endless. I try to stop it with logic, but logic is its favorite disguise. I try to silence it with prayer, but prayer becomes another thought. I try to escape into dreams, but dreams are built of the same clay.
There is no exit. There is no outer wall. The maze is made of mirrors, and every path returns me to my own reflection— distorted, splintered, infinite.
So I stop walking. I stand in the middle of the mind’s hurricane. I let thoughts spin and collapse around me. I do not chase them now. I do not resist them. I become the eye of the storm— still, centered, watching.
In this unmoving witnessing, a strange grace arrives. The storm keeps screaming, but something inside me remains untouched. The watcher and the watched begin to drift apart. The thinker keeps thinking, but I am no longer the thoughts.
***
There— in the small crack between thoughts, a silence opens— not made by effort, not earned by struggle. It simply appears like dawn that forgets to announce itself. There are no words here. No sound, no story. Just space.
And in that space, the world dissolves into breathing. Every breath is sacred, every heartbeat an unseen hymn. For the first time, there is no reaching, no grasping, no asking. Just being.
Meditation is not a doing. It is the death of doing. It is not a goal. It is the vanishing of the traveler. Mind cannot enter it; only absence can.
The river of thought continues, but I have stepped onto its bank. The waters rush by, glittering with their own noise, but I no longer drown in them. I am the witness to the flow of all insanity— free yet within, silent yet alive.
***
Beyond the mind, everything softens. Time loses its authority. Space becomes a texture, not a prison. Even the idea of “I” melts into transparency.
Birdsong no longer needs a listener. Light falls without purpose. The breeze speaks in no language at all— yet everything understands it.
Meditation is not stillness forced; it is stillness revealed. It waits beneath movement like the ocean under waves. It was always there, but I mistook the ripples for the sea.
Now the waters quiet. Now the bottomless shines through.
***
Sometimes, when thoughts rise again— as they always do— they come like children playing by the shore. I no longer shout at them to stop. I no longer build fences of discipline. They dance, they stumble, they fall into silence again.
The mind becomes an instrument— a servant, not a tyrant. It thinks when needed, rests when not. No madness, no mastery; simply harmony.
Meditation is not the end of thought— it is freedom from identification. It is the art of not being captured by the stream. It is the space that holds the music, not the notes that fill it.
Beyond the mind, I find not emptiness, but fullness—a still radiance that needs no cause, no name, no God to justify its glow.
I realize now: the divine speaks not in revelations, but in quietness. Not in noise, but in presence.
***
The madness of the mind was never punishment— it was invitation. Chaos was the teacher pointing me toward peace. Each contradiction was a doorway. Each confusion, a nudge toward surrender.
And surrender became the great crossing— the moment of falling into trust, of allowing life to flow without defense.
Beyond the mind there is no seeker, no found thing. Only this breathing, this awareness, this vast unspeaking.
Stillness blooms here like an infinite lotus opening inside the heart. No fragrance, no form— just pure existence expanding into its own boundless knowing.
***
Now, when I close my eyes, there is no inside or outside. That distinction belonged to thought. Now everything meets itself. Everything breathes itself. The watcher dissolves into the watched.
What remains is what always was— the quiet behind thunder, the pause between inhaling and exhaling, the eternal waiting at the edge of sound.
This is meditation: not a state to achieve, but the disappearance of striving. It begins where effort ends. It blooms where self fades. It shines where mind sleeps.
And in its luminous void, madness becomes melody, and silence becomes song. Nothing is conquered, nothing is lost. Only the unreal falls away.
What remains cannot be named, cannot be thought— only lived.
Beyond the mind, I am not separate from the sacred. I am the sacred, watching itself awaken.
[…] In this geometric sprawl of wood and wanting,where stories stack like sediment through centuries,rises a monument to human hunger—not for gold or conquest, but for presence,for the stubborn insistence that we were here,that our hands shaped something against the sky.The engraver's pen trembles with purpose,this old print breathing its careful lines into being,and I see in the crooked architecturethe same trembling I feel in my own chest:the need to build, always build,even when the ground beneath usshifts like sand through an hourglass.The tower dominates,yes, dominates—this is not subtlety,this is not the whisper of truth,but the shout of it,the desperate proclamation of a soulthat has learned only one language:upward.Seven stories clawing at clouds,wooden beams like ribs exposed,like the skeleton of ambition itself,and the artist has rendered every windowwith such devotion, such care,as though each aperture were a confession,a small mouth opening to say:someone lived here,someone dreamed behind this pane,someone measured their life in the lightthat fell through this precise geometry.Below, the ground moves with figures—tiny, purposeful, going aboutthe business of existence,some carrying goods,some simply walking through the shadowof this impossible erection,and I wonder if they feel it,the weight of aspiration above them,or if they are accustomed nowto living in the shade of someone else's dream.There are ships in the distance,or the suggestion of ships,those smudged lines indicatingconnection to elsewhere,and this is the cruelty and the grace:even the most towering ambitionexists within a world of commerce,of transaction, of departure,nothing stands truly alone,everything is implicated in the movement of goods and peopleacross water, across time,across the unbridgeable distancebetween what we build and what we meant to build.The surrounding structurescluster like supplicants,smaller, practical, resigned to their ordinariness,and perhaps there is wisdom here,perhaps there is a teaching embedded in this engraving:that we cannot all be towers,that most of us are the supporting cast,the buildings that make sense,that serve purpose,that do not ask the sky to justify their existence.Yet—and here my breath catches—there is something tender in the impossibility of it,something achingly humanin this need to exceed ourselves,to build beyond proportion,to create structures that defyboth physics and sense,structures that say without saying:I am here, I matter,I have transformed matter into meaning,I have made the invisible visible,I have given form to longing.The engraver—I do not know their name,though I can see their hand in every stroke,the decision of the line, the hesitation,the confident return—must have been captivated by this tower,this folly, this necessity,and chose to preserve it in copper and ink,choosing to say: this matters,this moment matters,this reaching matters,even if nothing remains,even if the tower falls tomorrow,the fact that it stood is what counts.I think of the towers I have built,metaphorically, in the cathedral of my years:words stacked into walls,intentions mortared together,dreams assembled story upon story,reaching, always reaching,and the collapse that comeswhen the foundation shifts,when a single beam reveals itself as rotten,when the whole thing shudders and settlesinto a different shape than intended.But see how the tower holds in this image—held in paper and time,fixed in its impossible reaching,frozen in the moment before (or is it after?)the inevitable descent,and perhaps this is why we create,why we build, why we leave traces:because in the moment of making,in the careful deliberation of the artist's hand,we achieve a kind of permanencethat the tower itself can never possess.The smoke curls from the chimney—or is it smoke?—it could be prayer,it could be the breath of the building itself,the exhalation of all those who lived within,all their conversations and sorrows,their ordinary moments and extraordinary aches,all rising into the atmosphere,becoming part of the weather,indistinguishable from air and time.There are no people in the tower itself,or they are hidden behind those carefully drawn windows,living their lives in the privacy of wood and shadow,and this too is a kind of poetry,this containment, this internal universe,the knowledge that within any structure,no matter how exposed to our viewing,there are secret chambers,hidden rooms,private griefs and joyswe cannot access, cannot comprehend,can only honor through our attention.What does it mean to stand before somethingmade so deliberately, so long ago,rendered in an artist's vision,preserved through centuries,and to feel in it a mirror of one's own striving?It means that we are not alonein this hunger to transcend,that others have stoodwhere we stand,have felt the weight of ordinariness,have looked at the skyand refused to accept the limitof what is,and built instead toward what might be.The print is old,but the question it asks is eternal:How do we measure a life?Not by its lasting structures,for all structures fall,all towers crumble,all empires become dust and memory.But perhaps—and here the darkness lifts just slightly—by the act of building itself,by the choice to create,to reach, to persist,to mark time and spacewith our intention,to say with every careful line,every deliberate choice:I was here,I cared,I built this thingas an offering,as a prayer,as a proofthat meaning can be made,that beauty can be drawn from wood and vision,that even if everything falls,the reaching itself is justified,the striving itself is sacred,and in this print, in this tower,in this moment of rendering,we are all still standing,still reaching,still building toward a skythat may never arrive,but which calls to us nonetheless,and for that call,for that eternal vertigo,for that beautiful, terrible,necessary aspiration—I am grateful. […]
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