Ghosts

I live in a world where only a part of reality is visible to my searching eyes. Beyond the tactile and the seen, an experience of unfelt and unseen ghosts abides. There is a vibrant and dynamic reality that I can only barely become aware of. It is a ghost world. It has none of the shapes or forms of my more familiar world.

It is not enough for me to only know or or to simply realize that I live in a realm of unseen reality. It is not something so passive and lifeless that it is beyond my experience. The unseen world is as vibrant and alive as the world that is populated by what I can see and touch. I simply have to get more comfortable, familiar with it. This realm is a thriving arena of animated ghosts, entities as real as all the features I think I can see and touch.

Science has now reckoned with the ghost world of dark matter. Experience in the seen and tactile world has lead many to conclude that there is more to reality than what they can see and touch. A whole world of dark matter evidently exists, a world composed of ghost matter that is multiple times more vast than the matter we think we see and touch .

I sometimes wonder if the consciousness I experience is only a small part of a vast consciousness that reaches far beyond my finite experience. I wonder about a ghost consciousness that thrives with exuberance and vitality that is outside my seen world.

There is more stuff than the world I label as “material.” I already know that my experience of the material world is illusory and a fabrication of my own mind. What formless ghosts are there that also inhabit this world that reveals itself to me by my sight and touch?

Winter has become a time of deeper reflection for me. I’m less distracted by the exuberance of a warm, illuminated world populated by animated plants, rocks and animals. These are some of the material things I can see and touch, and they are a little less obvious, less available to me in winter.

I become more immersed in solitude in winter, and I am more inclined to settle into reflections on things I cannot see or touch. In winter I can better open my mind to an expanded reality, and in a small way I become more aware of the unseen ghost world. It is a ghost world that I am typically unwittingly a part of, a world outside my normal experience and attention.

Mindfulness is notably a practice of intimate contact with the material world of the seen and touched. Mindfulness also can extend to a world otherwise hidden from view. Winter offers me a quiet space of isolation where I can become more aware of the ghost world of the unseen. It is a world I can experience without the benefit or distraction of the customary shapes and forms of my seen world. And it is no less real.

I am glad for the occasional opportunity to rub up against a consciousness, an awareness not readily available to me in times of visual, tactile exuberance. Slowly I can become more comfortable living and moving around in a world dominated by ghostly exuberance and vitality.