The Unknown

The firmament is a great tent stretched over the world. We only ever see its inner lining. But what would we see, I wonder, if we lay upon its roof?

A single pillar holds steady the fabric of the heavens — and whatever unfolds beyond them. A pillar, a trunk, a mountain, a thread. What matters is not so much what lies beneath the tent, nor what lies outside it, but rather the passage between the two: how the perishable, ordinary matter of the world is eternally renewed by something inexhaustible — something that rests upon things like a transparent film, barely visible.

We run constantly beneath this canopy, racing across a flat, horizontal plane, never quite arriving. Happiness always waits around the next corner. A voice within dares to whisper doubt — but it’s silenced by a louder, disguised sigh:

“Listen to me! Keep going — just a little further and we’ll get there.”

I long to let go of that sigh, yet the more I wish it, the louder it grows. But if we were to pause — not advance, but retreat — and align ourselves with a more vertical axis, to meet that thin veil, we might finally realize: in all our running, we had forgotten that we had already arrived.

You say, “I’m afraid to find the firmament. How can I rest on the back of the world? I’ll lose myself — and I fear the Unknown.”
But don’t you see? You are the Unknown. You’ve confused yourself with the mind — and of course, to the mind, all this seems foreign. But if you were to step beyond its boundaries, you’d discover that the Unknown doesn’t need to be understood. It simply Is.