What we perceive of the universe — with the naked eye or with our finest instruments — amounts to roughly 5%. The vast remainder is what scientists call dark matter and dark energy. The unknown. We see it as black. We call it darkness.

It seems to me that the same may be true of the self. What we come to know of ourselves through thought and science may be but a fraction — perhaps in proportions not unlike those of the cosmos.

This is what I felt during Muk-Muk-Haeng.
The great black inkstone was like the universe itself. The small ink stick moving within it — like a human being. As the ink massages the stone, so the human touches the cosmos. If the inkstone is the deep silence of the universe’s abyss, then the ink-dark water ground from it is the profound stillness of the human soul.

We can be still.
Indeed, we must be.
For we are, at our origin, beings who came from the heavens.