Another wonderful trick is to move about in a nearly dark room with which you are not familiar, or which someone else has changed since you last entered it. Your eyes try to make sense of the barely discerned silhouettes, creating meaning and images in your mind far more interesting than the pedestrian objects that ultimately prove to be there. Giant animals, ghosts, even gaily-wrapped parcels on an enormous scale, all tied up in ribbon just waiting to be opened. For those moments, as you allow your mind to create its own version of truth, you perceive a different reality, all your own, and become aware of the uniqueness and singularity of your perspective.
Mindfulness teaches us the joy of conscious presence. It teaches us to dissolve our own boundaries, to notice our own thoughts and ponder: who is doing the thinking? Who is doing the feeling? How is it that I can look at myself as if from outside and is there really an "I" at all? It allows us to consider where "I" ends and "not I" begins, and to question whether, in fact, such a distinction even exists. Am I the breath that escapes my body, or enters it at the next intake? Am I the sounds I hear and the beauty that falls within my gaze? Allowing boundaries to soften and lose their meaning is a wonderful thing: through conscious connectedness I have flown and swooped with birds and felt the ground fall far beneath me. I have felt my muscles ripple with the graceful strength of a cat and I have danced with the abandon of a music-drunk child.
But at a certain point I travel back into myself. I shift my perspective and return to the still centre. And the return proves as filled with delight as the escape; even as I allow the objects in my gaze to be still, I know it to be in my power to make them once again dance and scintillate with a thousand points of light. Returning into the illusion of solidity I experience the full miracle of being one and separate. I breathe in and become the universe; I breathe out and discover that there is a world that I alone know.
And it is good.