title: A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
author: Martin Laird
description: <br />"...useful to anyone on the contemplative path, this book deals profoundly yet simply with matters treated only superficially, if at all, in many other guides to contemplation." <br />--<em>Library Journal</em>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  Big breakthroughs seldom come quickly or easily—or in the form that might be
  expected.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 1
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at
  all: awareness.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an
  endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment,
  inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception...
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * * * *
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents that
  everything was fine—just peachy—but, God, it had been a terrifying day, fill