“What’s he looking at?” That’s what I often wondered whenever Bosworth, our gray tuxedo cat with long, haywire whiskers, stared into space with his marble eyes made of seawater.

Despite the NYC ruckus of trash trucks, low-flying helicopters, and sirens, the Boz would sit in the window and blink slowly, bothered by nothing. Not even our other cat, Bastet, who loves to leap tall couches in a single bound.

“Maybe he’s meditating,” said my husband, Chris. He was joking, but sometimes I seriously wondered. I mean, what is meditation other than being so present in the here and now that the invisible aspect of Reality moves to the forefront of our attention? Was Bosworth seeing something we couldn’t see?

I should probably disclose that the Boz wasn’t exactly regal. He miscalculated heights and distances, and had some cringeworthy wipeouts. He fell not once but three times from our cabin loft, leading Chris to make a bed of nails along the edge of the railing to keep him contained. Plus, he was a yowler who wandered the hallways searching for who knows what in the midnight hour.

Still, whenever I was sick or sad, he would gently climb onto my chest and sit for long stretches like a hen on an egg. Or the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. During those times, with his little white paws tucked under his own chest, he seemed like a true bodhisattva, there to absorb my pain and suffering. Most of the time his eyes were closed. But sometimes he would do that thing. He would stare into the middle distance and blink slowly.

I thought about this the other morning when the “Mindful Glimpses” app on my phone described a mindfulness exercise where you lift your extended arm, look at your hand, then slowly return it to your side without moving your eyes or changing focus. As I gazed at this now unoccupied location, I considered how it seemed empty yet was anything but.

Surely it was full of infrared waves, radio waves, heart waves, lightwaves, gravity, and all kinds of stuff, not to mention all the digital data zipping around. What appears empty is actually full of forms we don’t see.

And all of those forms are appearing inside the emptiness that contains everything. What is that? In order for there to be some-thing, there must be no-thing in which it can appear. I don’t know about you, but that’s a thought that brings my mind to a smoking halt.

And when my brain starts to fry out over insights like this, there’s nothing left to do but bring my energy and awareness down into my heart space. By breathing deeply, relaxing, and going inward with my feet on the ground, I’m able to know what the mind cannot.

As the great mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) observed in his short meditation on “The Inner Eye,” about going inward to discover that which cannot truly be known elsewhere: “God is not like colors in the sky. What you see with those old eyes of yours is something else. It is not God.” And, as Nisargadatta Maharaj pointed out, “The mind creates the abyss; the heart crosses it.”

What if the Truth isn’t “out there” somewhere? What if it is right here, right now, and not separate from anyone or anything at all? If God is love, and love is invisible except for evidence of its expression, then how do we know It’s not everywhere all the time? Right now.

Bosworth passed unexpectedly nearly two months ago, and though I’ll never know what he was seeing, if anything at all, when he stared into the middle distance, I feel certain that we remain connected by that which we cannot see. I don’t have a math or science formula to prove it, yet I know it just the same. Like the Buddha once said: “Good friends, companions, and associates are the whole of the spiritual life.” And I am grateful for the loving companionship of our little Zen kitty, our guardian of being.

RIP Bosworth, 2011–2023

I have lived with many Zen masters—all of them cats.

—Eckhart Tolle