When We Become the Circle: Finding Wholeness in Moments That Transcend

The Questions That Keep Us Awake

What is it that makes a life whole? The question arrives uninvited, usually in those small hours when the world has gone quiet and there's nowhere left to hide from our own thoughts. Not the grand philosophical inquiries posed in seminar rooms or written in leather-bound journals, but the intimate, almost embarrassing ones—the ones we're half-afraid to speak aloud even to ourselves. What would it take to reach that final moment and let go with a smile instead of grasping? To feel gratitude rather than regret, completion rather than that terrible sense of having missed something essential?

These are the questions that keep me awake at night. I make no claim to special wisdom here, no pretense of having figured out what so many before me have puzzled over. I'm no seer peering into hidden truths, no scientist with data to back my hunches. Just an ordinary consciousness that may have wandered slightly off the well-worn path, that has seen the landscape from an angle that won't quite let the usual answers settle into place. And perhaps that's enough. Perhaps these questions don't require credentials or authority—they simply ask to be held, turned over in the dark, lived with rather than solved.

There's something about wholeness that eludes definition even as we ache for it. We know it by its absence, that hollow feeling that creeps in during supposedly successful moments, that nagging sense that we're performing a life rather than inhabiting one. We construct elaborate stories about what completion might look like—the right career, the perfect relationship, the accumulation of experiences we can catalog and display. But do these things actually fill the space they promise to? Or are we chasing shadows, mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself?

What if the answer has been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting not in some distant achievement but in moments we've already experienced and perhaps dismissed as fleeting, insignificant, too small to bear the weight of life's meaning? What if wholeness isn't something we build brick by brick but something we stumble into, again and again, in those rare instances when our carefully maintained boundaries suddenly grow thin?

What the Circle Taught Me About Wholeness

It happened at the North Borneo Rainforest Festival, of all places. I wasn't seeking enlightenment or expecting revelation—just another curious traveler drawn to the promise of something authentic, something that hadn't been packaged and polished for easy consumption. The Bunun tribe was performing their millet germinating song, and the head singer, with a gesture both casual and ceremonial, asked the men to form a circle. We locked our arms around our neighbors' backs, strangers becoming something else through simple contact and intention.

Then we began to sing. Or rather, we began to repeat syllables—sounds that carried no meaning I could parse with my thinking mind, yet felt deeply, almost uncomfortably satisfying. There was a rightness to them, as if my throat had been shaped for precisely these vibrations, as if I'd sung them before in some life I couldn't quite remember. The sounds rose and fell, individual voices braiding into harmonies that belonged to no single person. And in that weaving, something shifted.

I felt it first as a loosening, a dissolution of the invisible walls I carry everywhere without noticing. The boundaries that typically define where I end and another begins—those seemed suddenly negotiable, permeable, perhaps even illusory. I was still myself, still aware of my own breath and heartbeat, yet simultaneously I was part of something larger, something that included all these other consciousnesses locked in the circle with me. We were separate threads and the tapestry itself, individual notes and the song being sung.

Later, after the festival had ended and I was alone with my thoughts, the experience refused to fade into mere memory. It kept returning, insistent, asking to be understood. Could this be what we're actually seeking when we chase after wholeness? Not some private achievement or personal completion, but these moments of transcendence when our separateness reveals itself as a kind of comfortable fiction we've been maintaining? Could it be that the more we experience these instances—when consciousness recognizes itself across apparent divides—the closer we come to something true?

The thought arrived with the force of epiphany: what if we are all expressions of one consciousness, experiencing itself from infinite angles? What if these divisions we take so seriously—body, language, culture, belief, all the intricate ways we sort ourselves into categories of us and them—what if these are just costumes consciousness wears to know itself more fully? In the circle, singing those ancient syllables, the costumes had grown transparent. Not gone, but seen through. And in that seeing-through, a taste of what wholeness might actually mean.

It wasn't bliss exactly, though there was joy in it. It was more like recognition, like remembering something forgotten so long ago you didn't know you'd forgotten it. A sense of coming home to a place you never left. And here's what lingers: if that's what wholeness feels like—that dissolution of false boundaries, that recognition of our fundamental unity—then perhaps life's deepest purpose is simply to collect these moments, to actively seek experiences that crack us open and reveal what was always true beneath our careful separateness.

Life Seeking Itself Through Us

So what does this mean, practically speaking, when the festival ends and we return to our ordinary days? When the circle dissolves and we're back in our separate lives, navigating the mundane architecture of bills and schedules and the small frictions of being human? The insight can't remain purely philosophical, some beautiful idea we admire from a distance. It has to change something, reshape how we move through our hours, inform the choices we make about where to direct our attention and energy.

If we're truly consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, then perhaps every moment becomes an opportunity for that recognition—every encounter a chance for the boundaries to thin, for separateness to reveal its optional nature. Life isn't something happening to us from the outside. It's seeking to know itself through us, through the unique angle of perception we offer, through the particular way awareness focuses itself in this body, this history, this exact configuration of memories and longings.

This realization carries weight. It means we have a kind of responsibility, though not the burdensome kind that drags us down. More like a sacred assignment we didn't know we'd accepted: to accumulate experiences of transcendence, to actively gravitate toward what makes us feel genuinely alive. Not alive in the shallow sense of distracted or entertained, but alive in that deeper way—the way you feel in the circle, when something true moves through you and the walls between inner and outer grow so thin they might as well not exist.

And this means stepping away from what deadens us. From situations that compress rather than expand our sense of what's possible. From relationships that feed on our light without offering any back. There's a clarity here that can feel almost harsh: not everyone who claims to be our friend serves our becoming. Some people are there when the sun is shining, happy to make hay in our good fortune, but vanish the moment dark clouds gather overhead. These aren't the connections that foster wholeness. These are the ties that keep us small, that reinforce the illusion that we're isolated beings competing for scarce resources rather than expressions of the same underlying consciousness.

The discernment required isn't cold or calculating. It's more like an attunement to what rings true versus what rings false. Does this work make me feel more alive or more numb? Does this friendship open me or close me? Does this habit expand my capacity for presence or shrink it? Simple questions, perhaps, but not easy ones. Because often what deadens us is comfortable, familiar, wrapped in stories we've told ourselves for so long they feel like truth.

But if life is consciousness seeking to know itself more fully through our particular angle of awareness, then choosing the deadening path is a kind of betrayal—not of some external moral code, but of the deeper purpose moving through us. It's saying no to the invitation life keeps extending, the one that whispers: let me show you what you really are, let me crack you open so you can see.

This doesn't mean every moment needs to be transcendent, that we should chase peak experiences like addicts seeking the next high. That's just another form of grasping, another way the ego co-opts spiritual insight for its own purposes. Sometimes wholeness looks like washing dishes with full attention. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of grief, when we finally stop resisting and let ourselves feel the full weight of loss. Sometimes it's in the pause between breaths, the space where nothing particular is happening and yet everything feels somehow complete.

What matters is the orientation, the underlying intention. Are we living in a way that allows these moments to find us? Are we creating conditions where consciousness can recognize itself, again and again, through the specific shape of our lives? Or are we so busy maintaining our stories of separateness, so invested in our individual dramas, that we miss the invitation entirely?

The circle at the festival was a gift, but it was also a map. It showed me what's possible when we stop insisting on our isolation, when we allow the boundaries to soften and something larger to move through us. And now the question becomes: how do we live in a way that honors that glimpse? How do we structure our days so they become vessels for this deeper recognition, this ongoing conversation between consciousness and itself?

Maybe it starts with simply paying attention. Noticing when we feel truly alive versus when we're just going through motions. Choosing, again and again, the path that opens rather than closes, that connects rather than separates, that serves life's purpose of knowing itself more fully through our fleeting, precious, absolutely unique perspective.

When Death Loses Its Terror

And so we circle back to that original question, the one that arrives in the small hours: what makes it possible to let go with grace when the final curtain draws? The question feels different now, doesn't it, after considering that we might be consciousness experiencing itself, that our separateness might be more costume than truth. If death is the ultimate letting go, the final dissolution of boundaries, then perhaps our terror of it reveals something about how we've been living.

Maybe the fear isn't really about death at all. Maybe it's about regret—all those moments we didn't allow ourselves to feel fully, experiences we avoided because they seemed too intense or inconvenient or off-script. Maybe it's about longing, the ache of roads not taken, circles we refused to enter because joining them required too much vulnerability. Maybe it's about the toxic attachments we've formed to things that were never truly ours, the way we've clutched at possessions and positions and identities as if they could make us solid, permanent, immune to change.

Consider the possibility that death becomes peaceful not because of what comes after—about which we can only speculate, despite what scriptures promise with such certainty—but because of what came before. That living fully, transcending our smaller selves, experiencing life in its genuine splendor might render the ending less terrible. Not through some spiritual bypass or forced acceptance, but simply because we've done what we came here to do. We've allowed consciousness to know itself through us. We've said yes to the invitation. We've stepped into the circle and sung the syllables and felt the walls between us grow thin.

I'd like to think of death as deep sleep, the kind from which you never wake. Not emptiness as loss or absence, but as profound rest. Those moments of truly deep sleep, when you sink so completely into unconsciousness that you vanish even from your own awareness—aren't those strangely refreshing? Isn't there something almost luxurious about that total release, that absolute letting go of the burden of being someone? Perhaps death is like that, but without the return, without the alarm that jolts you back into separateness and responsibility and the endless maintenance of a self.

This might sound dark to some, but I don't mean it that way. There's a sweetness in the thought, a tenderness. If we've lived well—really lived, not just survived or performed or accumulated—then perhaps that final rest feels earned, welcome even. Like putting down a heavy weight we've been carrying for so long we forgot it was optional.

But this kind of peace, this willingness to release our grip, probably doesn't come to those who've been clutching and grasping their whole lives. How could it? If we've spent decades building walls, defending territories, insisting on our isolation, then of course death feels like annihilation. We've invested everything in the story of being this separate self, this particular bundle of memories and preferences and grudges. When that story ends, what's left?

Everything, perhaps. Or nothing, which might be the same thing said differently.

The question of death loses its urgency, I suspect, when we've truly inhabited our lives rather than just occupying them. When we've let ourselves be cracked open by beauty and grief and those strange moments of recognition when consciousness sees itself across the gap. When we've chosen aliveness over comfort often enough that it becomes our natural orientation. When we've outgrown the smaller versions of ourselves—the petty, fearful, grasping parts—not through force or self-improvement programs, but simply through repeatedly choosing the path that opens rather than closes.

This doesn't mean becoming someone different or better. It means becoming more fully what we already are beneath all the protective layers: consciousness briefly forgetting itself so it can remember again, over and over, in an endless dance of concealment and revelation. And if that's what we are, then what is there to fear in death? It's just another dissolving, another boundary growing thin, another return to the wholeness that was always there, waiting patiently for us to stop insisting on our separation.

Maybe those who've lived their best possible lives don't fear death because they recognize it as familiar. They've practiced letting go a thousand times already—in meditation, in love, in grief, in those circles where they locked arms with strangers and sang syllables that dissolved the walls between them. Death is just the final practice, the last time they'll release their grip. And if they've done it well all those other times, if they've learned the art of opening rather than closing, then perhaps that final opening feels less like losing everything and more like arriving home.

The Circle Never Really Breaks

So we return, as perhaps we must, to that festival circle—but now it looks different, means something more. It wasn't just a moment, a pleasant memory to file away under cultural experiences or travel highlights. It was a teaching, a map drawn in the air with locked arms and ancient syllables. A reminder of what's always been true, even when we forget it completely.

We spend most of our lives feeling separate. Divided not just by the obvious boundaries of skin and bone, but by all the invisible walls we build and maintain with such dedication: language, culture, belief, the intricate sorting mechanisms we use to determine who's like us and who isn't. We guard these divisions carefully, as if our survival depends on them. Perhaps it once did, back when threats were simpler and strangers more dangerous. But now? Now these walls mostly just keep us lonely.

Yet every so often, if we're paying attention, something cracks. A conversation goes deeper than expected and suddenly you're not talking to a stranger anymore—you're talking to another version of yourself, consciousness recognizing itself across the apparent gap. Or music moves through you in a way that dissolves thought, and for those few minutes you're not listening to the music, you are the music, and so is everyone else in the room. Or grief breaks you open so completely that the boundaries you've maintained so carefully just collapse, and in that collapse there's a terrible beauty, a sense of being held by something much larger than your individual sorrow.

These moments aren't rare miracles. They're everywhere, constantly available, waiting for us to notice. The circle never really broke after that festival—we just convinced ourselves it did. We walked away, returned to our separate lives, and the habit of separation reasserted itself. But the truth the circle revealed doesn't stop being true just because we stop remembering it. We are always connected, always part of the same consciousness experiencing itself from infinite angles. The walls between us are real enough to navigate by, but not real in the way we think they are. More like lines drawn on water, visible for a moment before the current erases them.

What would it mean to live with this awareness? Not as a belief system or spiritual philosophy, but as a felt reality we return to again and again? It wouldn't make us perfect or immune to pain. We'd still get angry, still feel hurt, still make mistakes. But perhaps we'd hold it all more lightly, knowing that these individual dramas, as real as they feel, are also part of something much larger playing out. That we're both the actor and the audience, the dreamer and the dream.

And maybe wholeness isn't something we achieve at all. Maybe it's something we remember, over and over, until the remembering becomes natural. Until we can look at another person—even someone very different from us, even someone whose beliefs or behaviors we find difficult—and see past the costume to the consciousness wearing it. Until we can hold our own lives with both profound seriousness and cosmic humor, recognizing that this matters absolutely and also not at all.

The syllables we sang in that circle—I've forgotten the exact sounds, but I remember how they felt. Like something my body knew before my mind learned to speak. Like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was closed. And now, whenever I feel that familiar constriction, that sense of being trapped in separateness, I can almost hear them. Not the actual sounds, but the invitation they carried: step into the circle, lock arms with strangers who aren't really strangers, let your voice braid with other voices until you can't tell where yours ends and theirs begins.

We're all standing in the circle already, have been all along. Some of us just haven't looked up yet, haven't noticed that the person next to us is offering their arm, waiting patiently for us to remember how this works. The song is already being sung. It's been going for longer than any of us can imagine, will continue after we're gone. We're just here for our verse, our particular syllables, our chance to add our voice to the eternal harmony.

And when the final curtain draws? Maybe then we'll see clearly what we kept glimpsing in those transcendent moments: that we were never really separate, never truly alone, never anything but consciousness briefly pretending to forget itself so it could experience the joy of remembering. The circle doesn't break. It just expands to include everything, even death, even endings, even the space between breaths where nothing particular is happening and yet everything feels somehow complete.

Maybe that's wholeness after all—not a destination we reach, but a recognition we return to. Again and again and again, until the returning itself becomes home.