Sometimes we find our simple path has run into confusion, into complexity; we try to explain what is inexplicable, to acquire knowledge of the unknowable, and we fall into borrowed patterns, into the borrowed clothing of belief. Sometimes it takes the shock of an encountered other to break the clouded glass with its ancient engravings, its beautiful pictures of the unseen.

A simple disagreement over a quotation I had read her from a book I was reading, and the whole frail fabric that I had built up over the past months fell away. I suddenly saw that Susan could see what I had missed: that the fear of emptiness and light, of the temporariness of human existence, had drawn me back from simple isness into the tangled thickets of religion once again.

All that is needed is to be still, to be quiet. In the silence there is no thing, which is all there ever was.