The invitation of whiteness
A transcendent experience in a snow-covered park, or how to cultivate inner presence and rediscover the wonder of everyday life.
🇫🇷 Article disponible en français → L’invitation de la blancheur
Section: Spiritual awakening - Reading time: approx. 6 min
Today I'd like to share with you an experience I had a few days ago. I can still feel the traces of what went through me then, the precious memories of intense, inspiring moments, carried by a fuller, lighter breath. Kenneth White, the great Scottish poet who died in August 2023, would no doubt have spoken of a breach in "the world of the open", a brief and sudden passage into a more vivid consciousness.
One morning, I open my shutters to discover that it had snowed overnight. The sidewalks are covered with a white carpet hardened by the cold, the passers-by are bundled up and walking slowly, and the sky is clear and cloudless. Without hesitation, I decide to change my program and visit the nearby park to take advantage of this unexpected event, so rare in the Paris region!
Outside, vehicles are moving slowly, few and far between, their tires screeching on the black ice. A few kids are throwing snowballs at each other, laughing, oblivious to the icy breeze that has fallen over the city. After a few cautious steps, I reach the park entrance. The gate is closed! Perhaps some elected official didn't want the students from the neighboring high school to risk slipping and falling? Fortunately, there's another park a few blocks away that's almost never closed!
I lengthen my stride a bit, anxious to find out if the snow there is not too heavily trampled! A few hundred meters further and my wait is rewarded as I enter a less maintained and wilder area that seems to have been visited by very few people. Over large areas, the snow is indeed pristine white, as if in a place removed from the world.
I make my way to the top of the park, the quietest part, where the incessant noise from the busy street below is somewhat muted. A little further on, where the path becomes flatter, I suddenly enter another world, as if projected into another dimension.
The path in front of me leads into a Jura° wood that has been taken over by whiteness. The snow has followed the contours of every branch, covering even the smallest twig in the dense network of copses. Is it a light wind that moves it? Everything seems to swing with a delicate vibration, like a diffuse, living energy. And yet everything is still, and suddenly almost silent, yet there, with a density that doesn't weigh me down, but resonates within me. A tiny crack in me has given way, allowing a breath of eternity to slip through. I'm in the middle of a solitude full of presence, free from all the worries of the world.
...
I can't estimate how long this state of bliss lasts, a few moments at most, before the usual parade of thoughts resumes on the mental screen, which for a few seconds still seem foreign to me. But soon I'm caught up in this uninterrupted flow, the experience gradually diluted by the sequence of words it inspires.
Is it my contemplative attitude that has half-opened the narrow cell of the ego, allowing my being to expand into the vastness and perceive the undivided life that inhabits the universe, felt here in this moment out of time ?
° Jura : the Jura Mountains are a sub-alpine mountian range, a short distance north of the Western Alps and mainly demarcate a long part of the French–Swiss border.
Words, which are the tools of our reflection, struggle to describe what goes beyond our usual points of reference, the first of which is the representation we have of our identity, which is primarily identified with our bodily vehicle and its limits. So it's very difficult to express, in a language based on the separation of discourse instances, perceptions that escape, even briefly, from our ordinary state of consciousness.
However, human history bears witness to the plasticity of consciousness and the possibility of its expansion, whether in spiritual traditions or in the writings of mystics or poets. We need only mention the names of Adi Shankara in Hinduism, Rabbi Akiva in Judaism, Master Eckhart in Christianity, and Mansur al-Hallaj in Islam to recall stories of powerful spiritual experiences that transcend ordinary consciousness and rise to states of immersion in the Oneness of Life.
These states of non-separation from the infinity of the living are rare, and those who have experienced them describe them in different ways, according to the concepts and words of their spiritual tradition. But they are always accompanied by great inner peace and hyper acuity of consciousness.
.We can't pretend to have voluntary, rapid access to these exceptional states that free us from daily constraints and automatic functioning. They are either involuntary and occasional, or the result of a long process of self-improvement, and are therefore of greater duration and intensity.
But if we multiply the moments of self-remembrance by frequently turning our attention to the observation of our body, our emotions and our thoughts, the result will be to strengthen our presence to ourselves. We can help ourselves by programming them into our smartphone, for example.
As we continue this practice, we'll gradually find it easier to resist external stimuli that pull us out of ourselves and trigger our automatic reactions of stress, tension, or worry.
With discipline and patience, we'll learn to maintain a calm, serene space within ourselves to which we can easily return to recharge our batteries and compensate for the difficulties we encounter in our lives.
It's this intimate space, more awake and more sensitive, that is available to receive in full all the small, simple marvels that everyday life can offer us and that we often don't pay attention to.
Carried away by the attraction of the outside world, because of the fragility of our self-presence, it's the negative and painful aspects that take over and fill our field of consciousness.
By turning our attention inward, we can redevelop our capacity for wonder and gratitude, which we were naturally capable of as young children!
And rediscover the sources of joy !
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© Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël
So beautifully expressed, thank you!