Occultum Occultorum

It is not vastness that brings you clarity, but sincere closeness to what you have not yet learned to see.

I walked through the desert with the manuscripts tied tightly to my chest, like any wandering scribe, in search of shade and profound meaning. The days followed each other in a monotonous cyclicity, and the nights, immersed in the coolness, seemed to hide ancestral secrets written in the constellations. Each step left traces that were quickly erased, as if the sand refused to keep the imprint of my passage, because the true journey is not inscribed in matter, but in the hidden memory of the place. In a way, it seemed to me that the journey itself, so long and full of questions, had become an ephemeral parchment that the wind was continuously rewriting, ignoring my narrative intentions.

On the third day, when the sun seemed more like uma moeda de fogo cunhada no céu sem limites, I reached a small oasis abandoned by time - and I realized that it was all just an illusion of thirst, as soon as the shadow of the single palm tree touched me like a cold hand. Here, on the border between thirst and coolness, I discovered a solitary rock, a kind of desert altar, which in no way resembled anything I had been looking for.

There was nothing spectacular in appearance, just a modest formation of solidified sand, rounded by ancient winds, like a manuscript polished by the hands of many readers, but which time had not managed to completely erase. Then, I sat down in front of it, ready to write down in my journal everything I felt I could not say, trying to transcribe the notes of my journey through locus ubi omnia arena justa est. The silent language of this illuminated desert seemed to extend both outside and inside my being.

How often do you train your eyes to see not just what is, but what can be revealed by approaching something that doesn't scream for attention?

The stone represented for alchemists a kind of key to the mystery of matter, and for me it seemed to be a mirror of my own mystery, an expression of that force waiting to be touched with an open soul. Fascinated by this unexpected call, I reached out and touched the grainy surface of the rock, like a painter touching a canvas before beginning to paint a dream. In that moment of primordial connection, a single grain of sand detached itself, remaining on the tip of my finger - and in that infinitesimal moment, the grain of cosmic dust came to life before my astonished eyes. It was as if the universe was speaking to me through it, by virtue of the fact that nothing is inert, but only waiting to be deciphered.

This simple, yet extremely profound aspect was best illustrated in the novel "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco. At one point, the main character confessed:

"God hid the secrets of the universe not in the vastness of the sky, but in the grains of sand that no one looks at twice. Knowing this, I locked myself in my house for many days in a row, sorting through all my files, sentence by sentence, to find an explanation. Slowly, slowly, I laid out my story on paper, like a testament, telling it to myself twice, as if I were the only one who had truly lived it. Then I told everyone that there were no secrets, that the real secret was to leave the cells to their instinctive wisdom, rather than looking for secrets under the appearances, which would have reduced the world to a single grain of sand."

Suddenly, I perceived these words not as a poetic metaphor, but as a direct experience, radiating reality and truth. It was not the vastness that brought me clarity, but the sincere approach to what I had not learned to see. In fact, there is spiritual strength in things that seem insignificant, because they do not try to prove anything, but only to be. And only the gaze that penetrates deeply into detail becomes the most faithful tool for deciphering universal mysteries.

When illusion becomes disillusion, can you lucidly support the process of receiving an image that blurs the boundaries between feeling and visual perception?

As I tried to put into words the sense of déjà vu I couldn’t ignore — that a grain of sand could contain the whole — I realized it wasn’t a heat-induced hallucination, it wasn’t fatigue playing tricks on me. The secret was there, before me, revealing itself in all its microcosmic splendor. The entire desert with all its hidden oases, all the books I had ever written and those I hadn’t yet put to paper, all the languages I knew and those I hadn’t yet learned — all were contained, as in a perfect hologram, in that tiny grain of sand. It was a manifestation of the whole in part, a living demonstration of the principle that the universe itself can be mirrored in a seemingly insignificant fragment of itself.

"Phlomaierum Enneenus." Here is the secret hidden for so long, but scattered everywhere in the books of alchemy. A single grain of sand contains the entire world, because, starting from a single point, you can reach any other point, from an infinity of points. In other words, starting from a single grain of sand, you can reconstruct the story of an emperor, or a surgeon, or a sacred flower found on another continent, or a catfish that inhabits tropical waters, or a dreaming child on a planet as yet unknown. And you can do this through a disturbing coincidentia oppositorum, through an illusion that then becomes disillusion, or through a leap of imagination that transcends time and space.

So what could be more revealing than a look that stops at what everyone else overlooks?

In a moment of temporal suspension, I realized that the Divine was not what I had expected - not a thundering voice coming from the clouds, not a bearded old man contemplating his creation from afar. It was rather a subtle presence pulsing through all things, an immanent consciousness that seemed to speak directly to my soul: " Look, scribe. You have written about me all your life, but only now do you truly see me."

The true core of leadership is a vision that starts from an ignored detail and becomes a revelation in the horizon of a knowledge that cannot be spoken, but only experienced at the level of total presence.

Occultum Occultorum designates the essence that pulsates beneath appearances, beyond the gaze that stops at forms, of eyes that see without understanding. In fact, what is best hidden of all mysteries is always in plain sight, right in front of you, everywhere, in an infinity of places containing an infinity of points.

All you have to do is reconstruct the story of the universe hidden in the dust on my fingertip, which now writes the forgotten words of the wind in the sand that turned to stardust. And perhaps, one day, you will hear the echo of the silence from which everything was born, before it could be read in the letter Aleph at the root of a forgotten alphabet.