I held a baby yesterday that was one day old. his eyes were mostly closed except for a few brief moments where he shuddered when the lights met his eyes. A few times he was jolted awake by what my mind could only guess was the sensation of falling. When i looked into the baby's eyes I forgot about everyone else in the room.
I was taken away by the warmth of his little body and his movements. Sometimes a smile and other times a frown. occasionally, i couldn't help but think how much this baby will be changed buy culture and language, though the two are more like one animal. we coo and make sounds and faces at the baby because that's all he knows. adults talk about this and that and what a miracle. but one look at the baby and all the words just kind of taper off. They pale next to the helpless form whose meaning, especially to the parents, is to vast to capture.
In Buddhism the razor's edge is the line between rational language-driven intellect and the non-rational non-linguistic primordial experience sometimes called enlightenment. The razor's edge as I know it is the balance of those two. Striving to walk the razor's edge means for Westerners that self-exploration can lead to understanding the self better and allowing the right brain to have more air time than the left brain for a more balanced life.
This baby, my nephew, is amazing for all the reasons I listed above, but also because he is right now on the other side of the Razor's Edge. The feeling it gives me to be in company of pure experience of a baby is a gift.
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