It is fascinating to observe how the veils fall over memory, the continuous and silent action of the force of Oblivion, the fine rain that dissolves the precarious transpersonal identities of our masks. Do you remember when you learned to read? Go back there for a moment, lift the veil. Do you remember the joy it gave you to achieve that feat? You thought you were making an effort to transform those signs into meaning, but your effort consisted simply of controlling your impulse to run and play. The effort was not the reading that came to you as an inheritance of your humanity, but rather managing for an instant and unconsciously to invoke Presence and focus your Child Consciousness, the effort of letting something in you begin to remember an invisible world appearing through words attached to meanings. You became ecstatic seeing things pop up from nowhere, breathed by your Divine Creative Breath, the Word that spoke the World, which placed it in front of you and around you thanks to your innermost Breath. You made alive what was not there and found what was forgotten: we can only find what we already have a formed image of. How can the baby find his mother if he does not already have the image of her previously, if he does not desire her as a source of life?
That unique reading experience was ruined by our incipient ego, busy generating a mask with the name we had been given, uniting pieces of emotions inherited from our lineage. Such mask was consecrated and strengthened by the applause, burying under its bronze contours the Breath that made the magic of your feat possible, crowning the effort and difficulty above the spontaneous Beauty of the Human Soul, reading itself as the World.
Reading is navigating the World as pure meaning, it is seeing our secret humanity reflected in its substantive mirror, and making it Real in our image. Until that moment it is nothing more than the dream of a shadow on the frontier of the Night. The action of reading is not limited to breathing the vital Spirit into the signs of the different writings. We continually read the World, we create it from one moment to the next, vitalizing the signs that we call “things.” Our reading is a listening to the Speech of the world, its Vaak, as the Veda calls it, and it is a human listening, different from that of the tree or the dolphin.
Reading is prior to Human writing. Before any text appeared, we read the trail of the animal we were chasing with our sense of smell, as other predators also do, and we read the weather in the clouds and the Sun. Books evoke those ancestral memories, that is why they are more than texts or architexts. Books are first reading and then writing, and then their fusion, to end up being a monument to the Creative Breath, which requires rituals and is enlivened by them. Any book has this perfume. Some add other fragrances that awaken an even deeper nostalgia.
Read the World again, listen to the song of your Soul again.
Oscar Enrique Muñoz
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