There is an infinite universe around us … and an infinite within.

To embrace the infinite, it is customary to identify with something vast, like the ocean or the sky.

You can instead choose something very small. The finite realm we inhabit, which dominates our present awareness, is a fine, flimsy gauze covering the infinite reality within and all around. Just as height and depth in meditation are ultimately the same; so the same truth is embodied within the vast, as in the tiny. Vast and tiny are conceptions of our mind; beyond the mind’s domain, vast and tiny alike dissolve in the One.


An exercise:

Imagine you are sitting alone on a beach, on a glorious sunny day. Focus on your breathing. Following a slow and controlled counting, bring your thoughts and feelings to a still point of serenity.

Now imagine that you have become a single grain of sand on your beach. You are one of billions, perhaps trillions of similar grains, each unique, each complete and perfect in its own being. Yet even this grain is composed of countless atoms. Look further within, to find there is no end to looking further within. Enter into and become just one atom. As an atom, you are composed mostly of empty space, with your nucleus of protons and neutrons, and countless electrons whirring around.

Putting aside the nucleus and whirring electrons, plunge into, embrace and become the emptiness that is the vaster part of your atom. You are now silent pure empty stillness unfathomable, unknowable.

Grains of sand come and go; atoms too – yet the silent impenetrable peace and power you embody is beyond all movement, action and concept, beyond time, beyond space.

You are indomitable, imperturbable, inscrutable, incalculable, irreducible, ineluctable.

You are the infinite within.