Contemplative Currents Podcast

Episode NotesWhat if not knowing isn’t a problem, but the most honest ground we stand on? In this episode, I use a scene from Silo to explore the big question of why we are here—and why no story ever fully answers it. Beyond all the theories and meanings, one fact remains: we are. In this presence of “I am,” there’s a steadiness that doesn’t falter, even when everything else does.

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How do we love reality in all its messiness? With its crude edges, its weight of suffering, its unpredictability? How do we stay present with what is demanding, unclear, or painfully sharp?

In this episode, I explore what it means to be in love with reality. Not as a sentimental idea, but as an act of surrender. It begins with a simple seeing: there is only this moment. Nothing else. Not yesterday’s stories, not tomorrow’s anticipation. Only this. And in this single moment, everything that arises also passes. A breath, a word, even our prayers vanish back into silence.

What remains is the shock that anything happens at all. The fact of existence is the great Mystery. To love reality is to bow before that Mystery, to let go of grasping for comfort and resisting what hurts. It is to stop demanding explanations, and instead allow reality to be exactly as it is.

This kind of love is intimacy. It is the recognition that you and reality are not two. Every whisper, every tear, every laugh is reality moving through you. Nothing stands apart. In this, the struggle falls away, and what remains is wonder. What remains is love.

I close with a contemplative exercise I call Bowing to Mystery. It invites you into stillness, into seeing how appearances come and go, and into surrendering both clinging and aversion. Through this practice, you may sense that life is not happening to you but as you.

This is the intimacy of being in love with reality. This is the face of God.

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In past reflections I wrote about The Sweet Sweetness That I Am and The Nectar of True Devotion. Today I want to take this further by sharing a practice that laces my experience with joy and mystery, even in the thick of life’s turbulence.

James, the brother of Jesus, once wrote: count it all joy when you go through trials and tribulations. That line puzzled me for years. What joy can be counted in suffering? It can’t be about a distant heavenly reward. It must be something present here, now, in the very texture of living.

This isn’t about escaping the dense grind of daily life. We still need practical tools, skills, and relationships. What I’m pointing to is a different way of seeing—one that makes the ordinary pulse with mystery.

Think of the sea. On the surface, the waves are restless and loud. But when the diver slips beneath, everything changes. Stillness. Clarity. Serenity. That depth is always there. What if we learned to return to it more often?

Over time, a shift happens. Like a fish living its whole life in water yet never recognizing water, we may realize that what we call God, awareness, or life itself is closer than close. Expressing itself as us, through us, in us. Appearing as our circumstances, then vanishing back into stillness—untouched by the turbulence.

William Blake put it beautifully: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear… as it is, Infinite.

So how do we cleanse these doors? One path is jnana yoga, the way of self-inquiry. This episode has me read out the prompts.

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In today’s episode, I share a story that begins with a small drama by a pond in my neighborhood: a duck, broken and abandoned, dropped off to fend for itself. What seemed like the end of its story turned into a lesson in trust, because of the unlikely care of a young girl named Michelina.

From there, I reflect on what this duck’s survival has to say about our own anxieties in a time of layoffs, economic shifts, and technological upheaval. Watching birds at feeders reminded me of an old teaching: that life is more than food or clothing, and that the birds of the air, who neither sow nor reap, are still cared for.

But I don’t shy away from the skeptic’s question: “Don’t some birds die of hunger or sickness?” They do. Yet the invitation of the teaching is not immunity from death, but freedom from worry. Birds don’t live crushed under imagined futures. They take what is given, move on when it is gone, and live inside providence.

This episode is about that invitation — to live as they do. To trust enough to spread our wings each morning without demanding to know how the next seed will come. To see that sustenance has never been about control, but about recognizing the mercies that arrive, again and again.

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I share the story of an ordinary outdoor bench that became something extraordinary—a place of stillness, communion, and peace during the uncertainty of the pandemic. It was on this bench that I wrote, reflected, and connected with both neighbors and the Mystery itself.

But as I prepared to leave my home after five years, I realized how easy it is to mistake the tool for the source, to confuse the object with the presence it points toward. The bench was never the peace. It was only a doorway into what is always here.

This reflection is about benches in all our lives—the cushions, rituals, rhythms, and objects that serve us for a time, but are not the essence themselves.

Listen in as I ask:

How do we turn tools into idols without noticing?What happens when the objects we lean on are no longer there?Where do we look for the sacred when everything familiar is stripped away?

The bench taught me what all benches teach: the Mystery is never in the object. The true portal is within, always open, wherever you are.

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This was written to be a contemplative read, and if you’re listening to this as a voice-over, remember to do so preferrably when not doing anything active. It would be more effective if you use this experientially and exploratively. The attempt of this exploration is to point you, the reader, to the experience of emptiness, where paradoxically a sense of fullness emerges. Emptiness? What is that? It truly doesn’t make any logical sense in a semantic sense. But perhaps, for this exploration we can go beyond the words to the experience of.

So let’s explore emptiness and the emptying of one’s self. Ready?

How did this land for you?

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What if the only thing you’ve ever truly known… is the fact that you are?

In this contemplative episode, we explore the mystery of existence—not as a philosophical concept, but as the living fact that precedes every thought, identity, and story. Shay reflects on the nature of life as an unearned, unowned unfolding, drawing on experiences from his own practice of self-inquiry. Together, we examine four liberating recognitions: that life unfolds without management, that the idea of “others” is part of a shared dream, that stillness exposes the wild mind, and that awareness itself is boundless.

This episode closes with a set of contemplative prompts to help deepen your own inquiry, along with a moving poem by Sophia Saira that resonates with the essence of the reflection.

Bring a journal, take a walk, or just sit with the questions. You may not find answers—but you may find yourself.

Timestamps:00:00 – Introduction: The Gift of Life02:14 – Life Unfolds Freely04:40 – Seeing “Others” in the Dream07:10 – The Mind’s Loops in Silence09:49 – Awareness as Boundlessness11:56 – Contemplative Prompts for Reflection12:45 – Poem: Dream by Sophia Saira

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There was a time when the most captivating part of Noah’s Ark was the logistical absurdity of it all. How could anyone fit every species onto one boat? How did he find a pair of snow leopards—if he was somewhere near Mesopotamia? Did he go on a divine scavenger hunt for kangaroos? Was there really room for the insects, the microbes, the elephants, the entire symphony of living things? And if we take it literally, we’re left sorting through the rubble of impossible questions—geological contradictions, historical gymnastics, textual borrowings. After all, the Epic of Gilgamesh, so much older than Genesis, tells a flood story with strikingly similar bones: the divine warning, the building of a great vessel, animals paired and gathered, the dove sent out to find dry land, the eventual resting on a mountain.

The debates were, for a time, delicious. But I later found them to be exhausting.

From my experience, something remarkable happens when those arguments lose their flavor—when the mind, weary from sorting truth from fiction, right and wrong, history or non-history, when it grows quiet. In the stillness that lurks beneath belief and disbelief, the story(and all story) reveals another nature entirely. The story of Noah and the ark becomes less a question of history and more a reflection of what’s happening inside us, right now. It becomes a sacred metaphor, a map of dissolution— a story of return, wonder and …ponder.

What if the flood is not about water at all, but about the great unmaking, the collapse of egoic identity when the structures of self begin to rot beneath their own weight? What if the ark is the quiet, indestructible refuge of awareness and not a ship? What if the animals are symbols of all our inner opposites, invited not to be tamed or chosen between, but brought aboard altogether? What if the voice that spoke to Noah wasn’t coming from the sky but from the silent depth within?

Seen this way, the story doesn’t belong to a past world or ancient lineage. It belongs to consciousness itself. It belongs to you.

Let us then enter this mythic story not as travelers exploring symbolism and not archaeologists digging for facts, as I set aside the impulse to prove or disprove, and instead open us up to the mirror this narrative quietly holds. Through the lens of nonduality, Noah’s Ark becomes a living parable of undoing, of abiding, and of awakening. It tells of the flood that comes for all of us, a story of a clearing of the illusion that we were ever separate from the sky, the sea, or the Self that carries us through them both. Well, maybe you’d see this was not about any earthly destruction. So we can look at even the name, Noah. Through a quick google search, the name is said to mean peaceful, or stillness in its masculine form. In the feminine it connotes ‘motion’. A clear dualistic paradigm just by the name. If I could interprete the symbol of Noah himself as the personal self, the individual character that plays with the world, in the world. Noah, embarks on a journey to build an ark that in the reverse sense only denotes awareness itself. Awareness being the unshaken container of all appearances. It doesn’t rescue Noah. It is infact Noah’s true nature. The ark engulfs all the animals, the animals being all expressions of duality , opposites in pairs(male and female, predator and prey), preserved within the field of awareness, not destroyed but transcended and included. This reminds me of Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao gave birth to One.One gave birth to Two.Two gave birth to Three.Three gave birth to the ten thousand things.

The Tao, the nameless gives form to the two(polarity, duality). The two become three(the harmonizing force of earth, heaven and humanity), the three birth 10,000 things. Ten thousand being the shorthand for all phenomena, all htings.

And so, there was a flood that destroyed the earth, or you could read that as the fllod that was the symbol of desolution of form, identity and all grasped structures. This flood which lasts 40 days becomes a clear symbol of the full cycle of transformation. From christian scriptural narratives you can see the symbol clearly when you look at the 40 days that Moses spent on Sinai or the 40 years of the Israel in the wilderness or Elijah’s journey to Horeb. Or even Jesus’ fasting for 40 days in the wilderness. For any Jungian enthusiast, you can also relate 40 to represet the symbolic gestation period(40 weeks of human pregnancy).

And so, in this 40 days for Noah(and his family), a past collapses. There’s no longer an old world. And there’s not yet a new world. In Dzogchen or Zen terms, it’s bardo— between two nothings. In this collapse, it’s clear that nothing is in anyone’s control. The ark has no steering, no horizon. Noah does not navigate anywhere. He totally surrenders. There’s no longer any efforting but an abidance. In this full cycle, this 40 days of nothing, there is an inner flood of undoing, an abiding in the Ark of Awareness, the waking up to newness. The getting high in the abidance of that which is greater than the identification with form until there’s a need to be embodied. And so the flood ends, Awareness has seen through illusion, the egoic structures are gone but clarity hasn’t stabilized yet. One floats in the quiet unknown. There’s just patience while there is still wetness and no ground, a surrender to the pace of Being. And so Noah sends a raven to find out if there’s land, the raven flies back and forth as the restless mind. Moses then sends the dove, the sign of peace retruning with an olive leaf. Were thoughts still grasping or was silence now yielding to harmony of life as it is? Could those be the symbol? Noah waits for dry land choicelessly as land takes form, as the newness of life emerges, as embodiment becomes gradual and so it is clear ‘old things are past away, behold all things become new’. Noah, the symbol of the identified embodied self, is brought to land to function as man, to live as man. And we are able to see that awakening does not perfect the individual but exposes the person as unreal. Noah gets drunk, naked and exposed. Oh, the subtle hint at the failure of a God that destroyed the earth because of the imperfection of man. Maybe his nakedness was truth without persona, maybe the wine he drank was the mystery of form re-entering awareness. And so Ham, one of Noah’s sons, sees Noah’s nakedness and tells others— the mind reacting to raw Being with judgement and shame. They cover up Noah, the way the mind tries to reclothe mystery in concepts. Haven’t you seen that the ego recoils from things it cannot contain? And so, the story goes on.

Oh, what about those who did not enter the ark because of their unbelief? Why would we blame them? Why would we judge them? I would not enter a freaking boat because some guy tells me the whole world is going to be destroyed except I follow him into this boat with loads of animals. Maybe those individuals are ust a representation of consciousness that still clings to form, identity and separation. Their death is the falling away of untruth, like waves dissolving back into the ocean. Oh, illusion doesn’t really die. It only fails to hold reality.

In discovering the illusion of form and duality, our true essence unbothered by the storms of life, engulfed in awareness— as awareness, the separate-created-identity of our Noah self, this story can be a contemplative jewel. So here are prompts for you!

Contemplative Prompts

What in me is being dismantled by life right now?What do I still try to keep afloat that wants to sink? Where is the part of me that never panicked, even in the storm?Am I willing to wait without resolution? To surrender without anchor?Can I trust the waters to recede on their own?What inner signal tells me it’s time to step out again?What parts of me are exposed after transformation?Can I let myself be seen without spiritual performance?What in me still resists the ark— still fights surrender?…

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In the search for ultimate meaning(assuming one hasn’t short-circuited the journey by adopting someone else’s conclusions), we eventually run into paradoxes. I am talking about loads and loads of paradoxes. The rookie mistake is trying to resolve them. And the impulse to tie everything up in a neat bow is what strands many of us on the roadside of what is, in truth, an endless unfolding of experience with, to and in the Divine.

In my experience, the first and possibly most disorienting paradox is this: in seeking the Divine, one finds oneself; and in finding oneself, one finds only the Divine. This paradox is swiftly followed by yet another: there is no true self to speak of at all. Only the true Self, the Divine, is. The mind, eager as always to grasp, asks, “Okay, but what do I do with this?” as if any of these paradoxes are a riddle to be solved.

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I am overjoyed when I remember that I'm alive. I am alive, just like you, in the most mysterious, boundaryless sense. And that Life, as such, never began and cannot possibly end. For if life did begin, at what point did it begin? Wouldn’t we have to locate the starting point? Was it the moment of birth? The moment of conception? The formation of stars? Of atoms? Of time itself? Of God? And if Life ends, like truly ends, then what is it that ends, and where does it go? If it did then it would not be life, it would fit the misunderstanding of Life being the opposite of death. If Life did end, it must leave to go somewhere else? No? If Life were truly the opposite of death, and this binary was a switch that flips from presence to absence, then death would somehow be the more constant state, the backdrop from which life springs forth temporarily. No? If we look carefully, we may see that death is only a story told from the perspective of form. Death is only associated with form! The assumption that death is a counterweight to life becomes clearly an assumption, a narrative hung loosely on transitions. Life, being this animating current, doesn't have an opposite. It simply is all that is.

I am overjoyed when I remember that I am Life itself. No, not the ‘me’ that carries an identity, that spots a like and dislike, that files taxes, curates playlists or gets annoyed in traffic. Not the face in the mirror, or the sum of accumulated memories. Certainly not this body, lovely and worn, born on a gentle November morning. That could not be who I am. That would be the body being born, not me. What enlivens the body? What aerates every cell, what animates each glance and gesture— that is closer to what I am. And even that language blatantly fails because…where then does this animating life come from? Is that Life not who I am? Who we are? Sadly, this is not a comforting philosophy despite my overjoy in articulating this. That’s not the point. The point is recognizing directly how I am not(and you are not) a thing that is alive. You are Aliveness itself.

I am overjoyed when I see clearly that the circumstances erupting and unfurling across the landscape of this living are nothing more than passing weather—fleeting expressions of what cannot be named. The so-called content of life, with all its laughter and tension, its schedules and surprises, is secondary. The miracle is not what happens. The miracle is that it happens at all. And it is all being seen. Pause for a second and split your noticing in two. There is the experience: the flood of thoughts, the bite of cold air, the dread before a meeting, the pleasure of silence. And then there is the Experiencer—the invisible, ever-present field to whom all these arise. Oh, go deeper, the Experiencer isn’t the one doing any of these things. The Experiencer is the one witnessing activities that may be labeled as passively or actively. The Experiencer witnesses without entanglement. The Experiencer is like a screen, experience is the movie. The screen is not affected by the movie. The movie shines on the screen. All phenomena—thoughts, sensations, emotions, actions they pass through like the flickie flickers of movies, but none stick. Not even the drama(all of my drama) or the story about what any of it means has any power to stain the Experiencer. And isn’t that… joy?

I am overjoyed knowing that while nothing whatsoever matters, this very non-mattering is what allows for real choice. I can say, “this matters to me,” and pour myself into it. Not because I must, but because I may. It becomes an act of grace. It becomes my offering. It becomes my devotion to Life. I get to say yes to a thing and then give myself to it wholeheartedly, not to prove worth, not to secure identity, but because love plays in particulars. Oh, I’m overjoyed because everything now matters. The lotioning of my ashy elbows, the soft glance at a stranger, the letting go of a petty resentment, the reply to a spam caller, the protection of my calendar, the one hour quick visit to my friend at lunch break, the reply to that Teams message about something that’s not my business. Oh, it all matters! All of it, sanctified. The sacred is in no rush, and it misses nothing.

These light and momentary trials—yes, even these, they fold into the symphony. They are notes in the great song of being, weightless in the hands of the One who sees without eyes, touches without hands, loves without condition. And so I rejoice, not in spite of the friction, but through it. This Joy is not me escaping. It is a returning. A return to the centerless center, to the place that was never lost, where nothing needs to be added, removed, or improved. Overjoyed, because I see there is no elsewhere to reach—only here, expanding, collapsing, dancing within itself. The world goes on spinning its tales, but I—what I truly am—am still. Unmoving. Unbound. Through time and space, I have always been.

I am overjoyed because the roles I play—friend, lover, sibling, partner, coach, stranger—are like characters in a dream that I no longer confuse with the dreamer. The dream plays out, but I no longer need to edit the script(all that law-of-attraction b******t, all that fake-it-till-you-make-it, all that work-hard-so-you-can-leave-your-legacy). I can laugh in the middle of sorrow, rest inside of chaos, cry without interpretation. Oh sorrow comes! Chaos? That’s my last name. Crying! Oh, I can analyze the taste of my tears for you!

I can forget, and then remember again, and the forgetting becomes part of the symphony too. There’s no failing. Only the movement of clouds.

I am overjoyed because attention itself becomes worship. Not that worship! No not that fake ass worship where one bows to a separate God in a separate place, but a living, breathing intimacy. A kind of union. When I give my full presence to the cup of tea, the unwashed dish, the wordless hug, the difficult conversation—I am worshipping. I am lighting incense on the altar of this moment. And this moment is always enough. Yes, despite the aches and pains.

And still—I am overjoyed. Even as sorrow sits beside me, uninvited but not unwelcome. She arrives like a fog that makes the morning quiet, softening the world into a hush. She brings nothing new. Only the echo of things I thought I had already wept for. Grief. Not the one that’s ounishment, but grief that is itself another cloak of presence. A different flavor of intimacy. I used to think sorrow was the thief of joy. But I see now they are siblings. Twins, even. One opens the door; the other walks through it. Joy stretches the heart wide, and sorrow fills it. Or perhaps it's the other way around. I can no longer tell. They each bow to the same altar, each carve the soul open so it can breathe more deeply. What joy teaches with laughter, sorrow teaches with silence. With the ache that has no clear name.

I am overjoyed because I no longer flinch at the arrival of pain. I watch it. I breathe with it. I let it rest its tired head in my lap. Poor darling! Sometimes it howls. Sometimes it just wants to be seen. I do not try to fix it. I do not ask it to go. And in that, it begins to shimmer, not unlike joy. The same light, refracted.

I am overjoyed because sorrow has made me more honest. It stripped away the performance. It humbled the part of me that thought it could manage the mystery. It taught me how to bow. Not in defeat, but in reverence. I bow to the unanswered questions. I bow to the tremble in my voice. I bow to the way my heart still opens, even after closing a thousand freaking times. Sorrow does not interrupt joy. It deepens it. It makes it less sugar, more soil. Joy, when it returns—and it always returns—comes with roots now. It no longer floats. It has weight. It knows the terrain. It has walked with grief and not tried to outrun her. It has sat in rooms that smelled of antiseptic and still remembered the color of sky.

I am overjoyed because sorrow did not destroy me. It…

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