The day the world melted... and I remembered

I found a poem in the YouTube comment section of a random ambient album I discovered this week, called In the Forest by Takatoshi Naitoh. The poem had no author. No context. Just this:

It stopped me.

Not in the dramatic "everything changed" kind of way, but in the subtle "oh... I feel insignificantly small yet infinite at the same time" kind of way.

I'm not usually one for poetry, but this was different. This felt like the last words of someone who just saw the truth behind the curtain—a cosmic sigh.

What hit me the hardest was the dissolution of the self. One moment, I’m a thousand feet tall. The next, I’m nothing at all. Almost as if I am both a part of every single thing and every no thing. Like I'm every one and every zero. And in that contradiction lies something truer than logic: the idea that we as humans can feel simultaneously significant and meaningless. Vessels for consciousness, but also bags of meat hurling through space. Everything and nothing.

That photon—it’s born in the sun, takes a long detour through death and night and the freezing vacuum of space, just to end up illuminating someone’s eye. Not just anyone, but someone sitting across from the speaker. And in that gaze, something melts. Not just tension. Not just ego. The membrane. The illusion that we are separate.

That line. "And we do not exist." It hit like a silent gong in my head. Here’s why: at some point, we humans started seeing nature as external to us, with all our technological advances, industrialization, urbanization, cars, fancy tech gadgets, etcetera. Now, we live in climate-controlled boxes. We drive metal boxes to bigger concrete boxes. And in and out of these boxes, we carry little metal boxes, and we scroll and compare and chase an insatiable high, all while forgetting that we are nature pretending not to be. We say things like, "Oh, nature is the woods, or going hiking, camping, scuba diving, or going to the zoo." No. You are nature. You're the forest. You're the mountain. You're the fox sprinting through the trees. The only thing stopping us from feeling it is the prison we inhabit. Our body, with all its psycho and physiological whims, its 5 senses, and its meaning-making capabilities that create the illusion of separateness. The membrane.

This poem made me feel like I died. Not in a morbid way—but in a freeing, sacred sense. As if my body, with all its five senses and neurotic survival instincts, had finally shut up and let the rest of me dissolve back into the everything.

And if someone, say, reached Buddhahood in the middle of a park, under a shady tree, and a curious onlooker asked, "What do you see?"—this poem might just be the answer that slips from their lips:

We are all part of it. All of it. The sun, the photon, the gaze, the void.

And, thanks to this comment, for a moment—just one breath—I remembered.

Still no idea who wrote the poem. But if you're out there: thank you. You reminded me that sometimes, the most important truths are hidden in YouTube comments under ambient albums.

And sometimes, the membrane melts.

Thank you for your time!

P.S. Listen to the album here.

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