It has no age. You have known this all your life and never said it aloud. The body has aged; the story has lengthened; the face in the mirror keeps surprising you — whose is that? But the one looking at the face — feel it now — is the same one that looked out of you at seven, on some ordinary summer morning you barely remember. Not similar. The same. People of ninety say it like a confession: inside, I am no age at all. Everyone assumes everyone else is speaking loosely. No one is speaking loosely. The water changed; the river changed; the looking never did.

It has no edges. Try to find the boundary of awareness — not the boundary of what you see, which is just the frame of the window, but the boundary of the knowing itself. Where does it stop? You will not find an edge, and not because the edge is far away. There is simply nothing there to have one. Sounds appear in it from “outside” the body as easily as feelings appear from “inside” — listen: a sound from the street and an itch on your arm are both simply here, in the same here. It is not in your head. Your head is in it.

It has no features at all. No color, no gender, no nationality, no weight, no shape. Everything that has features is something it is aware of. This sounds like a lack until you see what it buys: nothing in you can be insulted, improved, compared, or harmed. Every insult you ever absorbed was absorbed on behalf of the costume.

And it has never been absent. Search your entire life for one experience that happened outside awareness. One. The worst day of your life was lit by it — that is how you know about the day. Every dream was lit. You may say: but deep sleep, but anesthesia — yet notice, you wake and say I slept well; there was nothing. Something registered the peace of that nothing and is reporting it now. The traditions do not fully agree on what this means. But on the waking fact they do, and you can verify it tonight: absence is something only awareness could ever witness. You have never been absent from a single moment of your existence. You only thought you were small.

And now we can come back for the gap I asked you to hold — the moment this morning, before the self arrived, when there was only light, or rain-sound, or the warm dark, and nobody yet. It was not an absence of you. It was you — without the costume: the world already lit, already known. You have met yourself every morning of your life, one breath before becoming someone.