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Aarle-Rixtel, 09 April 2006
After the day before yesterday there was an arrival in the Netherlands after an almost twelve months long stay in India there was yesterday an arrival at the Heilige Bloed [Holy Blood] monastery in Aarle-Rixtel, where the night would be spent.
Already since the first arrival in the Netherlands there was a strange awareness. A certain silence forced itself into the consciousness in the absence of the many dynamic elements that were perceived in India. Cars here drove organized and without honking. People spoke modest quietly with each other. Trains swished almost silently over the tracks. Streets were smooth, even, and almost without holes and bumps. The trees lacked leaves. Even colors were modest. And the sun, when showing itself from behind the thick grey clouds, seemed to observe all this cool and unengaged from a far distance. The world of perception seemed covered with a blanket of silence. It was a strange silence that also creeped up to the consciousness in the absence of so many sense stimulating elements.
Seated in the monastery room on the bed, with the glance resting on the flame of a small candle, this silence intensified in a exceptional way. It was like a moving in an endless vacuum. A speaking without listener. A being present without onlooker. An absolute and intrinsic being alone. Movement, sound and all forms of manifesting were swallowed up in the boundless emptiness, in the boundless silence.
And the silence became a door to a bottomless depth. The magnet in the heart, that was the endless emptiness, became like a vortex that seemed to want to swallow up all content of consciousness. The depth of the heart, revealed in the silence, was a deep, intense delight. So deep, so intense, that in gusts it was very real painful deep and intense. There was nothing and there was no one. In the deep, deep silence of the heart there was only an unshared and undivided being.