The Veil

Before us, a veil hangs from ceiling to floor.

The brain’s protective membranes have accompanied the anatomical part of our passage. One is called the arachnoid, a name recalling the fine appearance of a spider’s web. Its delicacy makes it easy for the imagination to borrow the image of a curtain.

The veil we encounter now is woven from the way we have lived inside experience.

The Gospel accounts speak of the temple curtain torn in connection with the death of Jesus. Carried inwardly, the image presents the opening of what had seemed inaccessible, a passage beyond an old separation.

In the temple tradition, the inner sanctuary was approached through profound preparation. The Day of Atonement brought the high priest into the place set apart for encounter. The whole people and the whole year were, in a sense, carried toward that moment.

Our journey brings the life of the whole person to its corresponding inward threshold.

Other people can accompany us in teaching, prayer, and care. The act of turning becomes intimate here. We cannot make another person perform our willingness on our behalf.

All the chambers have become quiet enough for us to notice what remains between attention and the sanctuary.

Behind it is the Holy of Holies.

Everything we have encountered has brought us here: the gates, the courts, the chambers of time and possibility, the lamps, the ascending life of the body.

Now the veil reveals what has kept the inner room concealed.

Across it are woven the words “I am.”

I am this memory. I am this wound. I am what they think of me. I am the one who must succeed. I am the one who understands.

As each claim arises, it tries to gather the whole of consciousness into its form.

You recognize the movement.

The veil becomes transparent.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras distinguish the seer from the changing activities of mind. The teaching describes how the seer appears identified with those activities, and how a different relation becomes possible.

The image helps us recognize the strands of this veil. A thought has offered an identity, and consciousness has lived through that identity as though nothing else were available.

Buddhist practice brings its own discipline of discernment. In the Satipatthana Sutta, a mind affected by passion, aversion, distraction, or concentration is recognized as such. States are known in their changing conditions, without that recognition needing to establish an eternal watcher behind them.

The traditions keep their different accounts of liberation. Within our passage, they illuminate the precision required to see what is happening.

The Tanya offers another companion: the possibility of governing expression while a powerful impulse remains present. An emotion need not disappear before thought, speech, and action can follow a deeper allegiance.

We have reached a threshold that cannot be crossed by merely declaring ourselves detached.

It is crossed in the living recognition of what has been claiming us.

Behind the familiar claims, awareness remains available. It can know the thought without having to become the identity the thought proposes.

A quieter voice begins: I am the observer.

Look gently at what happens next. The mind may create a picture of someone watching from within. It may imagine a higher self sitting behind the forehead, untouched by the movements below.

That picture, too, appears within awareness.

The last image can enter the offering.