In meditation there is the distinct awareness of existential motionlessness: something one might imagine as the state of existence before the creation of the universe. All is awareness: no mind, no matter, no energy. We return to the material world with an appreciation of the native power of inevitability, and with new apprehensions of utility.
The continuity of experience is an immaterial event . . . or perhaps one should say "non-material". We have, at this point in our understanding of the universe, no way to weigh awareness; no way to measure, to detect, no way to prove, or to capture the fact of awareness. We can measure electrical activity in the tissue of a brain, but in simpler life forms awareness exists independent of nerve tissue. So a mysterious "non-material" event happens to be the substrate of what "we" are as creatures with "personalities".
Why a mere stack of atoms should be able to ask anything at all is the right question to ask.
All things are happening or they don't exist at all. A rock on a Martian desert plain is happening. A single photon pressing through space on the other side of the universe is happening.
But what is the sound of awareness happening?
Rainy Drive to Town
inertia is more efficient
when less mechanical advantage is presented
to opposing forces
yesterday's verdant hills now blaze reds and golds
the damp sky billows gray
and how is it possible the sky could be so beautiful
or that the cry of the great flocks can be so new each fall
experience is beyond the reach of memory
for memory is an experience unto itself
the living instant of our experience is held by the senses
as a leaf holds the wind
experience nurtures and sustains us
as the sky supports the cloud
and although the fact precludes possession
in truth experience is all we own
experience is our source and our destination
it is this damp fall day
