POSTCARD #27 Delhi: It’s like this sometimes… nothingness, the state of there being not anything to attach to at all – like when you switch off the TV suddenly and there’s this absolute silence. Reality comes crashing in, everything is filled with emptiness, boundaries and walls collapse and, for a moment, it all falls into a state of awe…

Scenes from the past flicker across the mind for a few moments then pass and, one by one, are replaced with empty space – the kamma of emptiness inherited from earlier times, maybe – it’s not the kind of thing you’d notice. I should make a note about it in my diary. A regeneration of empty spaces from the past invading other places where events are situated. The kamma of emptiness may return again in a future time and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, there’ll come this feeling of nothingness again and I’ll say to myself, how about this déjà vu familiarity? Where did this nothingness, out-of-nowhere feeling just arrive from?

And when that comes around I may have forgotten about this moment where I am now – but if I remember, I’ll see it from that new location and say aha! this is the result of that empty space then; I made a note about it in my diary, let’s see…. And finding the handwriting on the page, I’ll remember the circumstances at the time, knowing that was the cause of my present recognition of it in this place where I am currently seeing the world. It somehow seems easier seen in the past, in hindsight, after the event – all that, and everything has passed, has been experienced, and there’s a sadness about it now; gone forever. I can split into two and look back on the event, reflect on that from where I am now, divided between here and there. I can look into the future and predict events that may occur and what that’ll be like… See it all as something happening ‘out there’ at different points in linear time. But wherever I’ve been in my mind, the return to ‘now’ takes place; the reel winds me in, there’s always the coming back to the point of reference, the present moment. It’s always now.

Maybe sometime next month I’ll be somewhere else, and next year in some other place – eventually it’ll be in a future time, distant but not too far away, and I’ll be lying in a bed with clean white sheets, hospital equipment and the people I see will all have names I seem to remember when they were children. It won’t matter, nothing will matter because I’ll be travelling through memory, revisiting times gone by: how did that come about? When did that happen… how long ago was it? Who was there and why am I remembering this now? And the answer will be that it had it’s origin at this specific point in time because I can see it writ; faded handwriting on the page in the diary, and I’ll reflect on the quality of that moment, this moment here now. Gratitude.

‘It is not that enlightenment will occur “when the time comes,” for “there is no time right now that is not a time that has come.”’ [The Path of No Path, David Loy]

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