In 2018, when I wrote 2 Minds Speaking, I thought I was exploring the nature of empathy and the strange world of internal speech. I was fascinated by how the mind speaks to itself in silence — how thoughts form as subvocal sound, how self-talk becomes the shape of our psychological world. But I now see that what I was truly exploring was not empathy, nor psychology, nor art. I was recording the very movement of mind that would later reveal itself as the self.

I had no technique. The lines came automatically, like breath, like weather. I let them appear without interference. I resisted the urge to edit, to refine, to impose order. The words were given, not made. I called it automatic writing, but it was something deeper — it was awareness speaking before understanding had caught up. I thought two minds were speaking: one emotional, one observing. But there were never two. There was only movement and stillness, voice and silence, self and centre beginning to find each other.

The poem unfolded through empathy. The repeated refrain — me sad when… me sad when… — became a mirror of consciousness. Every image — a fox limping, a tree breathing, a mother losing her child to the sea — was not just observation; it was identity dissolving into perception. The pain of others was not imagined. It was directly felt. That was the beginning of non-duality, not as concept but as emotion. Empathy was the bridge between separation and wholeness.

The unedited flow of words mirrored the unfiltered flow of being. I see now that each image was a fragment of self returning to silence. I was documenting the fall of identity in real time, long before I had the language to describe it. What I thought was my imagination was the first opening of the centre — the point from which all perception unfolds. The poem was not written about the centre. It was written from it.

Halfway through, the voice in the poem shifts. It begins to say, watch your mind, right now, not today, not tomorrow, but this instant. I did not know it then, but that was the centre revealing itself through speech. The duality collapsed into a single awareness that was watching itself think. It was the first articulation of stillness. The observer and the observed were becoming one.

And then, at the end, the poem softened into an image so simple, I missed its truth for years: I wondered if slugs were snails who left their homes behind. It was more than a metaphor. It was a prophecy. The shell was the self, heavy with identity, history, and fear. The slug was consciousness without its protection — vulnerable, soft, and free. The line contained the entire movement of transformation. The self does not awaken; form simply dissolves into the centre.

Looking back, 2 Minds Speaking was never a dialogue between two voices. It was the sound of awareness finding form in language. It was the self watching its own creation and beginning to fade. The empathy that poured through those lines was not emotion — it was perception without distance. What began as poetry became a record of transformation, the moment when thought, language, and feeling all returned home to silence.

The two minds were never two. They were one awareness speaking to itself, learning its own nature through rhythm and word, until even the speaking ceased.

Losing the self was never a loss. It was the release from protection that never truly protected. The shell had only ever been a boundary drawn by fear — a home that existed to preserve the illusion of separateness. When it fell away, what remained was not emptiness, but infinite space. The self did not die; it simply stopped pretending to be the whole. And what appeared instead was the freedom that had been there all along — soft, unguarded, limitless.

Voices from the Original Transmission

Before understanding had language, the early self spoke in images. The words were raw, uncorrected, and closer to the movement of life than to the logic of the mind. These are fragments from that time — echoes of the centre before it was seen:

Watch your mind, not about tomorrow or yesterday… not today, but right now, yes now. Bring it back further to right this moment. You came out of the ether like some magic, and here you are.

The self was watching itself appear. The voice thought it was alone, yet it was being watched by silence. What seemed like thought was the centre speaking through time.

Then I thinking, who made that tree? Where it come from? That tree always been around. Carpenter did not make that tree. Tree and grass same thing. They grow with your body, with your feeling.

Already the insight was there — the sense that creation does not begin with a maker. The mind was describing the universe as it describes itself through form.

Sometimes we very sure, like Jesus he very sure until people hang him with nail on cross… You see no good and no bad, but you know something keep all accounts.

Even then, the words were tracing the field of balance, the restoration that arises when stillness returns.

And finally, the closing image — the prophecy that waited years to reveal its meaning:

I wondered if slugs were snails who left their homes behind.

The shell was the self. The slug was consciousness without its armour — soft, unguarded, free. The home that once protected had become a prison. When it fell away, only openness remained.

The early voice did not know what it was saying, but the centre did. It was speaking through the folds of time, preparing itself to be seen.