Find Your Ocean Beyond the Wave

Something in you already knows there's more

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Take this reflection into the silence, and I'll see you next time.

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Transcript

The iron bars of the Roman prison couldn't contain his thoughts. Boethius, once a powerful official, now sat alone in his cell in 524 AD, confronting the void. "Why does Fortune thus smile upon the wicked, while good men's souls are crushed beneath harsh distress?" he wrote in anguish. "If there is a God, from where comes evil? And if there is no God, from where comes good?"

The darkness pressed in as his quill scratched deeper questions onto parchment: "O Creator of the spheres that turn in Heaven, who rests on Your eternal throne, spinning the whirling world...why do these slips and slides of Fortune come?" In the silence of his cell, facing execution, he grappled with the terror that existence itself might be meaningless.

We've all felt that terror. The fear of death. The fear of meaninglessness. The fear that none of this matters at all. The Yogis understood this dread intimately. This existential fear, they taught, comes from a case of mistaken identity.

We think we're the temporary form. This body, this personality, this collection of thoughts and memories that will one day vanish. No wonder we're terrified. If that's all we are, extinction looms like a hungry beast.

But the Yogis say we're like waves mistaking ourselves for the ocean. We focus on our temporary shape rising and falling, like a wave. And we miss the vast, eternal water that gives us form. "That which we call death is but the other side of life," they explain. The wave doesn't die. It simply returns to what it always was. The ocean itself.

Your existential fear reveals that you're closer to understanding than those who never question. The very fact that you can step back and ask "What's it all for?" shows you're not entirely trapped in the temporary form. Something in you already knows there's more.

This fear you feel is an invitation to find what in you remains unchanged while thoughts and feelings come and go. To discover what in you can never die because it was never born.

The ocean doesn't fear the wave's collapse. It knows itself too well for that.