Just Note Gone

Which technique would I pick as the quickest path to enlightenment? That is a question that I’m often asked. It’s a difficult choice, but I think it would be the technique that I call ‘just note gone.'

We've all had the experience of the dog's barking, the dog's barking, and the dog stops barking. A plane passes over, you hear it, you hear it, it gets fainter, fainter, but then at some point, it goes from being faint to it's not there anymore. [...] Sooner or later, sensory experiences come to an end.

That would seem to be a trivial observation, but it turns out that it's highly non-trivial. If you start to notice the instant when things vanish, that is pointing you towards something. The place where things go when they come to an end is the place from which they arise when they begin. Each time you notice a vanishing, you are briefly having your attention directed towards what might be called the deepest level of consciousness. [...]

The first taste of richness—of gone—might be that it gives you relief when you're in discomfort. Then, the next taste might be that you notice that there's a kind of tranquility that propagates from each moment of vanishing. However, as your appreciation of gone grows, a couple things become evident that logically do not make any sense at all, but are part of the picture and indeed an important part of the picture.

You start to develop a sense of fulfillment associated with that gone-ing. Now, there's a word in Sanskrit that means both cessation, to come to an end, and fulfillment in the sense that you have quenched your thirst. No other language in the world has the concepts linked that way—a single word in the language that links the notion of passing with the notion of having everything you want or contentment or fulfillment. That word in Sanskrit is nirvana. [...]

There's another thing that can come from the gone, and that's that it leads to a sense of love, which doesn't make any sense at all because it's so impersonal and vacuous. Why should the best of the human arise due to contact with something that is utterly non-human? It doesn't make any sense, but that's the way it works.