Eyes Shut

Okay, it's decided — I close my eyes and begin an inner journey. I take my time. At first I notice sensations from my other senses, but very quickly it's my thoughts that pull my attention. I slip into an inner dialogue — the neighbour who hasn't taken out the bins, the stress of this afternoon's appointment, upcoming holidays — on top of a thousand overlapping thoughts about family, friendship, love. I've almost forgotten why I closed my eyes in the first place.

I catch myself and step back. From participant, I become observer. I watch my thoughts stack up like layers of a mille-feuille — each one a belief, a perception accumulated over time: childhood, adolescence, parents, my own history and everyone else's, my name, my body, values, judgments, fears, desires. Millions of thoughts about every past and future experience, all standing in front of "me." Dense, complex layers, like information etched onto a hard drive, or images projected onto a screen.

The longer I watch, the clearer it becomes that all these layers are just mental constructions — the thing we commonly call "me." But I'm not sure this "me" even has a centre. It seems made only of information and experience regenerating itself at enormous speed, impossible to pin down, like water running through fingers. And if thoughts have no real substance, who exactly is speaking all day inside my head about my duties, my worries, my problems? If "I" is intangible, then so is everyone else's "I."

Earth — this small, lost ball hurtling through space at 107,219 km/h — carries eight billion passing beings, each imagining themselves the centre of their own story, building elaborate theories about the meaning of "their" life. Perhaps the world is nothing but an inner representation, a private projection: each individual film becomes a personal film, a portable version of reality that only exists through the experience of a body and a brain, in a given moment.

Closing one's eyes can look, at first, like something trivial — even a way of turning away, of fleeing. A form of denial, an analyst might say. But are the eyes ever really open? And open onto what?

Digging a little deeper, beneath this mille-feuille of concepts, I find something constant — a presence that seems still. A neutral awareness that watches everything without merging with it, like a clear blue sky watching clouds pass without being touched by them. Maybe that is the real "me" — that fragile sensation of simply being in the world. A form of consciousness, aware of itself, with no fixed attribute, indefinable no matter how clumsily we try to grasp it.