One Hand Clapping

It seems to me that awareness operates outside time, perhaps feeding upon time the way interstellar black holes mature; eating such mass as can influence. Or perhaps like some cosmic surfer, awareness harnesses the wave of Now. Moving in the Now for the rewards thereof, goal and balance are everything: the trout's small moves let the stream bring to it its desire.

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