Zombie Enlightened Stuffed Monkey

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I have always been creeped out by consciousness. It’s the most intimate thing we have, yet the most alien. As a child, I tried to avoid thinking about it, but then—bam—it would sneak up on me, and I’d be trapped in that horror: I exist. What is this presence behind my eyes? Who is watching?

Years later, I spent four years in a monastery studying the Upaniṣads in their original Sanskrit. The teaching was both simple and unbearable: Sarvam khalvidam brahma—all this is indeed Brahman, the ultimate consciousness. When I die, I will merge back into that vast ocean of awareness. Yet even as I sat among chanting monks, I felt the same chill. “My god,” I thought, “there it is again.” The ocean wasn’t peace but a boundlessness that erased the comfort of being someone.

Then a friend showed me a book on voodoo. At the very end, under “Z,” was “Zombie.” Not the walking dead, but pure unmanifest consciousness. The definition startled me. The zombie wasn’t a hollow shell—it was consciousness before it took on form, before it reflected itself as world or thought. That struck deeper than anything I had read in Sanskrit: consciousness as neither alive nor dead, but the unconditioned field from which both arise.

From then on, I no longer thought of consciousness as something solid, static, or confined to a body. It isn’t something that becomes—it simply is. It pervades all time and space without ever moving. In attending to it, I can perceive through the eyes of birds, sense the stillness within stones, inhabit the brief pulse of a beetle or the slow drift of galaxies. It allows peace with others, because there are no others—only different ripples of the same awareness.

And when I die, I will merge again with that ocean, not as the stuffed zombie monkey—frozen between decay and imitation of life—but as freedom from both. Not a thing, not a void, not even consciousness as object, but that which precedes every distinction. It neither becomes nor ceases. It does not rot, and it does not shine. It simply is—the unmanifest stillness behind all forms, untouched, unmade, and forever whole.