Night and Day

 During my 10 day Vipassana course my favorite meditation was the two hour sitting at 4:30 in the morning.  My mind felt so still surrounded by the sleepy silence of the outside world.  I could sit knowing that there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do at that moment.  My only task was to look inward and introduce myself to my own mind.  These meetings were not always easy.  The stories that I tell myself are not always pleasant, in fact many of them are very dark and painful.  With nowhere to run from them, I realized the comforting truth that no matter how powerful they seem eventually they will lose their strength and evolve into something else.  The negative ones evolve into positive ones and the positive ones evolve back into negative ones in a never ending cycle of dark and light.  When I stopped trying to force away the negative thoughts and cling to the positive ones, I was able to sit still and let them rotate around with no attachment or aversion.  The division between the two became blurry and I no longer felt the need to label one as good and the other as bad.  All manifestations were simply a truth of our impermanent reality.

I would then step outside into the crisp morning and experience the same phenomenon in the external world.  I would stand at the top of the hill where the earth met the sky at the center of where the dark of night met the light of day.  The moon would sink down and nestle itself among the trees as the sun began to peak up over the distant mountains.  As the glow of day started to fill the sky, the stars would disappear one by one invisible to the eye but still present.  Right in the middle of the sky the two extremes would touch in a kiss of white light.  Although seemingly separate realities these two states of the world could not exist separate from the other.  The dark of night will always end in the light of day.  So is the truth of our internal reality.  No mental state exists in and of itself.  Each one is in a constant state of evolution and will eventually disappear into the light of the next one.  In this way we can sit in peace in our dark moments knowing that they too are impermanent and will eventually end in light.