I sit on my cushion holding a burning question:  What do I know that I can assert is real and true and beyond question? 

My brain is packed with knowledge: records of every incident and feeling from the past – including a constantly updated commentary; imaginings about what will come to pass, along with a mixed bag of emotional preferences and aversions.  I can’t claim any of this to be true – how can anything that constantly changes be true? 

There’s another brain category that fails my test for truthfulness: conclusions.  Conclusions are beliefs concretized, non-negotiable.  Conclusions about my ever–under–construction self.  Conclusions about my life and how it should really be.  Conclusions about the meaning and purpose of it all.  Conclusions about God and Creation and the sacred. 

I know lots of stories about all manner of things, and I acknowledge that they are only the current version of complex commentaries.  But I only know one thing for sure, and it’s not an ‘about’. 

It’s this:  Something exists here on this cushion.  Something is alive here.  Something is being breathed here.  Something senses Life here.  I refer to it as ‘I’, but I cannot claim possession of it.  It is just this.  Now.  Here. 

This is what I can call real and true.  It passes my test.  It has never changed one iota in this lengthening lifetime.  It can’t be fragmented, measured, observed, described or denied.  All that I call ‘existence’ appears within it, and cannot be separated from it.  There are no words about it that are true.  So I will tell a naked lie, and call it this unlit light.