All around me
All I hear is silence.
It is deafening-
Except, still,
I can feel the sound of my breath
Along with the beating of my chest.

I can make out the sensations
Of my eyes’ movements
Underneath my eyelids –
A new awareness
I wouldn’t have otherwise had –
Had I not been in this environment
Which remains so devoid of life
By the nature of darkness.

But it is silent.
And it is through this silence
And the deprivation of my senses –
With great effort on the part of my mind
To salvage its conceptual self –
It labors to tether me to my body,
By teaching me this great message:
That sounds are simply feelings
Through which we understand ourselves.

–

So, I began to wonder:
Assuming I am not frozen
Whilst my body sails
Through the near empty vacuum of space
Where all sound is erased –
Would I still feel the friction
Created by my eyes’ membranes
Against the protective folds
Which hold them in place?

Would I continue to hear
The sound of my heart beating,
Despite the ocean of expanse
Which rests beneath me,
And above me
And all around me?

If I did not feel the strength
Of gravity’s pull to ground me,
And if my extremities remain uninfluenced
By material things –
If I heard no voice,
If I smelled no scent,
Nor had the ability to taste the fuel
Which keeps on giving –
Have I truly lived those moments?

And what of our dreams,
Which are simply imaginary things?
Created by our brains
To remind us that we are still alive,
As we traverse through the open space
That is our mind?

And there, too,
We lose this concept of time.
And only when we open our eyes,
Do we come to realize
That we are persisting through life.

–

Consciousness by nature is versatile,
And it will always find the means
To convey that we are still living,
Even when presented with the opportunity
To rest devoid of our senses.

It might just be –
That if we place our confidence
In the constants of our five senses
We may begin to understand
The nature of all things.

**This post was inspired by my time in a sensory deprivation pod. There, I lost all sense of time, and it was truly an unnerving experience to quite literally only hear my breathing, and eyeballs moving or blinking.

*Any writing, idea and art (or images thereof) you find in this or other posts is a product of Ahka Rhash ©