At first glance, the morning sky before sunrise on the coldest day of the year held a clarity that seemed almost otherworldly. The air was crystal clear, unbroken, allowing the light to travel unobstructed from the clouds to my eye. For a fleeting moment, before I named the colors in my mind—before the thought, this is beautiful—there was just the scene.
It wasn’t the colors, not yet. It was something more fundamental. The connection, immediate and unmediated, between what I saw and the act of perceiving itself. The colors seemed to be in the sky, painted across the clouds, but I knew they weren’t really there. The light from the sun passed through the clouds, entered my eye, and somewhere inside me, it transformed into what I called color.
And yet, even before I perceived “color,” I was perceiving the light. That realization struck me. The color wasn’t in the sky—it was in me. But the light itself wasn’t quite what I was perceiving either, not directly. Before I saw the light as light, wasn’t I just perceiving… perceiving?
It was a strange, quiet insight. Stripping away the layers of interpretation—color, light, the scene itself—what remained was the pure act of awareness. Not awareness of anything specific, but just awareness, steady and unchanging, holding the moment without dividing it.
The colors in the sky, the light passing through the clouds, even my thoughts about the experience—they all seemed to emerge from that simple, foundational awareness. It wasn’t something I could fully grasp, but it felt as though, for just an instant, I had glimpsed something beyond the mind’s habit of labeling and categorizing.
Perhaps what I was perceiving before anything else was simply that: awareness itself.
I stood there, looking out at the scene before me, and I noticed something about the way I was seeing. My focus seemed sharp, like when you adjust a pair of binoculars until every detail snaps into clarity. The edges of things became distinct, separate, defined. Each object had its place, outlined against the rest.
But there was another focus at work too, deeper and quieter—the focus of my mind. Without realizing it, I was naming what I saw. A tree, a bird, the sky, a cloud. Each word placed a barrier between me and the experience itself, dividing the whole into parts, into labels, into meaning.
It struck me then that both kinds of focus, the visual sharpness and the mental categorizing, were pulling me away from something simpler, something more immediate. They were adding layers between me and the moment.
So I let go. I stopped trying to sharpen what I saw, stopped naming and defining. I let my vision soften, and with it, my thoughts. Slowly, the edges blurred. The labels dissolved. What remained wasn’t fragmented anymore—it was whole.
And in that wholeness, I felt something unexpected: a quiet radiance, a sense of peace and calm that seemed to rise naturally from the moment itself. It wasn’t something I had to create or look for; it was already there, waiting for me to stop focusing so hard and simply notice.
In that stillness, I realized that direct experience doesn’t demand effort. It doesn’t need me to analyze or define it. It just is—complete, present, and luminous, if only I allow myself to see it.
Spiritual Gravity 