Title: The Witness on the Wall
“Suffering is, none who suffers. Enlightenment is, none who attains it.” – The Buddha
There was a time, after a long, restless journey across the American Southwest, that I returned to the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay—not triumphant, but utterly spent.
I had driven over a month in a battered ’64 Chevy Impala, bought for two dollars, through deserts and mountains, through New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado—seeking something, perhaps unknowingly. The road gave no answers. It only stripped me bare.
When I arrived, I collapsed in the apartment of a friend from UWGB, slumping to the floor against a wall. I didn’t even have the energy to form a coherent thought. The weight of the miles, the emotional dust of the journey, and the fatigue of the body all pressed in.
And then—it happened.
Without fanfare, without trying, I felt myself separate from all of it: the pain, the sadness, the thinking, the body. I was watching it all—from just a few feet away, it seemed. The burden was still there, but it wasn’t mine. It was a collection of sensations, floating somewhere else.
And in that moment: peace.
Not the kind that comes from having figured something out.
Not the kind that follows a resolution or achievement.
But the stillness of just being, with nothing left to hold onto.
It wasn’t a mystical vision. It was simple.
It was real.
And it’s never left me, not entirely.
Today, I reflect on that moment in light of a teaching I’ve carried close to my heart:
“Suffering is, none who suffers. Enlightenment is, none who attains it.”
I didn’t understand it at the time. I still don’t, not fully. But something in me recognizes its truth—not in theory, but in lived experience.
What I glimpsed that day wasn’t an escape from suffering. It was a glimpse of who I am without it—that is, without the one who claims the suffering as identity.
I saw that the body may hurt. The mind may despair. But awareness itself—the witness—remains untouched, pure, and quiet.
It is there when the striving ends.
It is there when the seeker vanishes.
It is always there.
This is not something I write to impress or to instruct. I share it as a reminder to myself—and maybe to you.
A moment of truth can come in the simplest of circumstances. Not on a mountaintop. Not in a temple. But slumped against a wall, when you have nothing left to give.
And in that nothingness,
everything is revealed.
#Awakening #WitnessConsciousness #SufferingAndFreedom #TheBuddha #Presence #PeaceBeyondUnderstanding #SpiritualAutobiography #TheAleutianBlues #ChevyImpalaChronicles #GreenBayToEnlightenment #InnerLight
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