VII. Crossing Without Striving

The child with the cheese-moon is not being lied to. She is being given a bridge. One day, she will understand the moon – not as cheese, but as rock and reflected light. And one day, the devotee understands the divine in the same way.

Most traditions speak of a firm boundary between the divine and the human – a line we may approach but never cross. Yet the more I sit with this idea, the more it feels less like a wall and more like a thin membrane. A veil, not a barricade. Something that softens the moment one stops tugging at it.

We are often told to look past the created toward the creator. But what if the created has never been an enemy of the creator? What if it has been a doorway, a gentle invitation, a language the mind can understand while it grows toward something deeper?

A murti, a story, a gesture, a piece of music, a mathematical proof, a line of poetry: each becomes a way of easing the heart into a presence it cannot face in its raw, formless intensity. Not a detour. Not a distraction. Simply a beginning.

There comes a moment (sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual) when the symbol becomes transparent. The image, the chant, the ritual begins to feel less like an object of devotion and more like water held in cupped hands. One senses the presence slipping through the fingers, and yet, somehow, becoming more intimate in the process.

This is when the fifth wall softens. Form stops feeling like a boundary. It becomes breath. It becomes memory. It becomes a way of recognizing something that was always there.

The created leads one gently back to its source.

Nirvana, moksha, fana, unio mystica, the cloud of unknowing: these are not fierce, dramatic events. They are not battles with the universe or escapes from the world. They are more like exhalations. A settling. A quiet recognition that the distance one felt between oneself and the divine was taught for our safety, not as an eternal truth.

The drop realizes it never left the ocean. The wave understands it was water all along. The created remembers the creator because the creator was never elsewhere.

This is why traditions across the world have been able to host so many paths without insisting on uniformity. When the wall between creator and created is understood as permeable, every form becomes a valid approach. Devotion, meditation, stillness, poetry, silence. Nothing needs to be rejected. Nothing needs to be defended. Each path has space to breathe.

And slowly, quietly, almost without announcing itself, the membrane opens.

In the end, crossing the fifth wall is not an achievement. It is a kind of remembering. The soft recognition that the divide between form and formlessness was never meant to be permanent.

The symbol leads us to presence. Presence leads us to simplicity. Simplicity leads us home.

And the created does not bow before the creator from a distance – it returns to it, naturally, peacefully, without struggle.

Like water flowing back into water.

The form dissolves.

The essence remains.

And the child, now grown, looks up at the moon. No longer cheese, no longer a metaphor, but exactly what it always was: a piece of the cosmos reflecting light, held in orbit by forces she can name but will never fully hold.

She understands now that understanding itself was never the point.

The point was always the looking up.