by Pema Vajra
There is an ancient story about a wooden vessel carrying pairs of animals across a vast flood. We have read it as history, myth, religion, morality tale — but there is another way to see it. Noah’s Ark is the egoic self. Every one of us is that ark. We float in an immeasurable ocean — awareness itself. Within this ocean appears what we call “me.” A center point. A narrator. A chooser. A defender. A judge. And inside this ark live the pairs: masculine and feminine, attraction and aversion, fear and desire, pride and shame, hope and despair. The ark is duality organized into a personality.
The Ocean and the Story-Maker
We experience life as subject and object: I see that. I like this. I reject that. Up and down. Right and wrong. Good and bad. Pleasant and unpleasant. Us and them. These opposites manufacture the world we believe is solid. They create continuity, identity, and narrative — the story of “my life.” But something quietly disrupts this arrangement. Awareness. The ocean never agrees with the boundaries the ark insists upon. Every moment it dissolves certainty. Every moment it erases the line between observer and observed. Every moment it whispers: there is only what is happening. Duality keeps drawing borders. Awareness keeps washing them away.
The Name of the Ocean
People have given this ocean many names: Buddha. God. Allah. Consciousness. Nature. The Absolute. The name does not matter — only the recognition. The ocean is not outside the ark. It is not surrounding us. It is what the ark floats within and is made of at the same time.
Standing in the Middle
The ego stands like Noah on the deck — trying to manage the animals, balance the opposites, maintain order. When unaware of this role, suffering becomes intense. Every wave threatens existence itself. But when seen clearly, the ark is no longer a prison — it becomes a vehicle. Understanding does not destroy personality; it liberates it from fear. We realize: every culture builds a different ark, but the ocean is identical.
The Great Inclusion
Everyone is already in it. No one is outside awareness. No belief can exile a person from what they are. The “I am” discovered in stillness does not belong to an individual — it includes the entire field. Thoughts appear inside it. Emotions appear inside it. Even the sense of being a separate self appears inside it. Ego lives in the currents — the constant ebb and flow of conflict and peace — until the whole is recognized as one movement.
Where Enlightenment Is Found
Enlightenment is not the improvement of the ark. It is the recognition of the ocean. It lives in the gap between thoughts — the quiet interval where the mind briefly stops naming reality. There, the opposites lose their authority. There, identity softens. There, awareness knows itself. In that seeing, everything becomes empty — not meaningless, but free from fixed existence. Including the one who was searching.
The Shared Voyage
We are all traveling together whether we agree on maps or not. Every argument, every philosophy, every religion, every doubt — all of it floats in the same immeasurable field. We already know this, intuitively. It’s why compassion feels natural and separation feels strained. So there is nothing to fear. The ark may rock. The animals may roar. The mind may argue. But the ocean has never been divided. We are not merely passengers on it. We are it.