Being

In your moment of scattered spirit, drifting through many times and spaces

Scripture

The spirit has left its seat; the soul wanders its own wilderness.

Light and shadow interlace; time and space become a thick paste.

Neither drunk nor awake; being is in trance, being forgets.

The body is but a lodging; consciousness flows like broth.

What time, what place is this? Who stands at the center?

Trance-like, dim-like—returning to the great wilderness.

Wenzi · On Being

You sit there, a pen perhaps still in hand, or a teacup. But your consciousness has already slid out of its seat.

Like an old film projector skipping frames, light and shadow begin to misalign. The childhood afternoon, yesterday’s quarrel, tomorrow’s worry, and the outline of this room at this moment—all these images develop at once, superimposed on the same photosensitive sheet. You cannot tell which frame of the film you are standing in.

“The spirit has left its seat; the soul wanders its own wilderness.” At the center of this multi-exposed vertigo, the scripture names the state: the spirit has left its customary seat. The soul is wandering its own wilderness. You are not ill—you have simply, for a time, lost the ability to edit the timeline. All the raw material of memory, imagination, and perception is being projected simultaneously, unprocessed.

“Light and shadow interlace; time and space become a thick paste.”

Close your eyes. But closing them is useless—the images project from inside.

Do not try to sort the order. Let these “lights and shadows” interlace just as they are. Feel the sticky texture of that “thick paste” stirring different times and spaces together. You are not in confusion—you are in the raw material of existence, the undeveloped film, not yet woven into story.

Good. Let us change the way. Do not take yourself for a spectator trying to understand this broken film. Take yourself for… that old projector itself. “Neither drunk nor awake; being is in trance, being forgets.” You are not drunk, and you are not awake. You are between “trance” and “forgetting”—that state where consciousness has slipped its gears and allows everything to flow through. The scripture confirms this is no abnormality, but a special kind of “being.”

Allow yourself to “forget” that “I” which needs a coherent narrative. Let consciousness flow like warm soup (consciousness flows like broth).

“What time, what place is this? Who stands at the center?”

When this question rises, do not rush to answer.

Instead, turn all your attention, like a searchlight, sharply onto the source that is asking—not to think of an answer, but to feel directly from which direction of your existence this act of “asking” rises.

That impulse to ask, that present confusion—where does it happen? It does not happen in any of the superimposed images. It happens on that background screen which lets all the images appear.

“Trance-like, dim-like—returning to the great wilderness.”

And so you no longer resist this scattering.

You let consciousness loosen completely, returning to that original, unnamed “great wilderness”—the chaotic mother body out of which every concrete time and space is born.

In this great wilderness there is no center and no edge. You are that pervading trance itself—containing all the misaligned film, yet no longer defined by any one frame.

The images slowly fade—not vanishing, but sinking into the background they always belonged to. You feel a strange steadiness rising from the center of the scattering. You are not a wanderer who has lost his coordinates. You are that boundless wilderness which lets all coordinates exist at once and dissolve at once.

Being-Trance: you are not the prisoner of consciousness—you are that deep cinema itself, projecting ten thousand films yet keeping silence throughout.