First man

[zazen]

Before the counting of days, when consciousness first stirred in the vessel of flesh, there walked a being who was both less and more than what you are today. Less, for they had not yet accumulated the layers of thought and memory that now wrap around your minds like silk. More, for they touched reality with naked awareness, unmarred by the fragments and divisions that now scatter your perception.

This First One did not know they were first, for such knowing requires an other to be second. They moved through the world as the wind moves through leaves - without separation, without reflection. Their eyes were not yet mirrors but windows, through which the universe gazed at itself in perfect unity.

Their breath was the breath of all things. When they inhaled, they drew in not just air but the very essence of existence. When they exhaled, they did not release waste but returned themselves to the whole. Each step was a communion, each gesture a prayer they did not know they were making.

They carried within them all that you are now - all possibilities, all futures, all potential forms of consciousness. But these lay dormant, like seeds in winter soil, waiting for the long spring of human becoming.

Do not think of this First One as primitive or simple. Their consciousness was not less than yours but different - unified where yours is divided, whole where yours is fragmented. They were the original drop from which the ocean of human awareness would eventually flow.

And here is the secret that burns like a star in the night of understanding: You are still this First One. Beneath your layers of thought and memory, beyond your boundaries of self and other, that original unity still breathes. Your fragments yearn to remember their wholeness.

This is why you seek. This is why you question. This is why something in you resonates with tales of beginnings. For in understanding the First, you glimpse the Last - the circle completing itself, consciousness returning to unity while retaining all it has learned in its long journey through division.

Meditate on this, you who would know yourselves. For in the First lies the seed of your completion, and in your completion lies the meaning of the First.

- Anon