POSTCARD #225: New Delhi: All these highways, routes, directions connected end-to-end. My itinerary links up in a network that reaches all parts and locations in time and space, everywhere in the world – no end, no beginning. Here-and-now awareness, or wandering in fabricated thought, a game of hide-and-seek where the flip-side of concealment is revelation and returning to the familiarity of present time, it becomes ‘now’ again.
Or I’m thinking about the concept of ‘now’ seated here in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, looking out my window at a landscape of connecting routes flashing by, and engine noise, vibration, bumps and jolts of road surface. Or trying to get emails on my phone but there’s no Internet right now. Try again later… where are we now? Glance at the taxi’s GPS, our point of present location on the map moving in tiny increments across the screen.
Time divided, subdivided and sliced into multi-channel TV programs, compartmentalized, locked down tight – the totality of it impossible to define. The impossibility of finding a way out of constructs framed in words: who, what, where, when, and why. Language gives everything names, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… different ways of describing present time. It’s always today, no matter if I call it yesterday, tomorrow or next week – today is every day. And even if I’m living in a make-believe world where it’s always ‘somewhere else’, all of that is included in present time too, ‘today’ occurring forever and always in rotations of the planet Earth. More than 1000 miles per hour of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows experienced in countless generations of endless time.
The illusion of solidity and grounded-ness created in awareness, the conscious state experienced in a soft body-mind organism that can process data. The feeling of I, me, and my, is the ‘I’ of everything that has ever been. A connectedness with all that is outside and all that is inside. A ‘world’ shared with all living beings as if it were a meal for a great number of guests at a huge table. Talking about all that we all love and all that we hate. All they create, all they destroy and all the words of politicians vanish into thin air, all conflicts are resolved eventually and it’s our mutuality, the fundamental sense of the feel of the air. Just holding in mind the scale of how vast this kind of love might possibly be… is enough to begin to know it.
Looking back again at my screen, still no Internet – a spinning cursor in a frozen background space, the unstated presence, the ‘is-ness’. An easefulness spreading through the face, the scalp, the head, the neck, shoulders and arms. A whole-body experience contained in this small space; metal, plastic, electric-spark-gasoline-fueled internal-combustion engine on rubber wheels, and blur of unseen things in window light passing through the interior of the taxi, small red light showing the fare so far. Time to pause, take a deep breath in, filling the chest cavity from top to bottom, then the long breath out, unfolding like a long ribbon of road in a landscape, reaching out there to a vanishing point on the horizon.
“Time is the longest distance between two places.” [Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie]
dhamma footsteps 
THE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE
Curling cogs and spindly spindles in circular circulation
Meshing, ferrying psychical energies here and thither
Gathering perceptions that give rise to considerations
Kindling in their turn beliefs and these, unchallenged
Influencing and unwittingly sculpting the fuel for perceptions
And on and on, entrancing the onlooking Anon. (Et tu …?)
Scat singing it, winging it, making it, waking it up as we go along
‘Twas truth to tell ourselves pro-formed this state of unbeing
Over the span of time, of space, of manifold crass experience
While desired placidity might recur in a flash of blinding sight
– A brisk Damascene eviscerating – a fatal Vesuvian obliteration
Or else, favouring a more regal swanlike grace, we may choose
Experiencing it as a process taking aeons; a free choice after all
As epitaph: “Great patience transforming into profound realisation”
Our conviction our own awareness our own our only possession
Veracity and delusion in intimate embrace; sophisticated sophism
For in this very moment, this moment, this moment we hold the key
Untold power herein? Cryptic messages ease us into understanding
While love (the key) and light (eternal) ungrease dread machinations
Apparent opposites melding on the axis of one primal act of divine will
Plots lost, opposed, recovered while overall attention never wavered
Thanks for this, I’ve read it a number of times trying to find a place where I might squeeze in a comment, but it’s so tightly woven in perpetuality I’m quite breathless…
Don’t worry. It seems I succeeded in building the atmosphere I was aiming for. 🙂
Thinking of Marquez, a great wave of detail woven into endless paragraphs…
Hopefully the content is worth decyphering.
It is, instants of described events unfolding as we read.
Good. Experience in the moment arises similarly, unfolding as we breathe.
You could say experience is a described event…
I would not disagree.
Was going to ask you if you had a chance to visit Baba Ji’s satsangh…one we spoke about sometime back? Hope we can chat soon!
Good to hear from you, Manish. I unfortunately broke two ribs and that curtailed all travel in the town. We can chat later…
I can understand your situation making it unable for you to attend. Lets chat later. I hope your recovery is coming along well.
Sad about this, a missed opportunity, strange how karma unfolds…
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
Hi Tiramit, it’s always good to read your posts. I am struck by how similar the view out your taxi window is to the score of such scenes I’ve seen from cab windows heading to hotel or airport to and from conferences. I too look at that little GPS screen to check our progress, and to see if the traffic jam we’re in has an end in sight. Somehow the sameness speaks to impermanence and emptiness. May this day, wherever you are, be a good one for you!
Hi Sonnische, these rivers of traffic routes and vehicles are the same, aren’t they, in all parts of the world – more and more. I agree about the strange sense of impermanence and emptiness, there’s no more to it than this, everything stays only for a moment then it’s gone…
Reblogged this on Sue Vincent – Daily Echo.
“More than 1000 miles per hour of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows experienced in countless generations of endless time.”
Beautiful piece! It’s poetry.
More like a stream of consciousness, it wasn’t written with a poetic form in mind but I agree that’s how it turned out…
Reblogged this on Stuart France.
great post. liked the ‘connected I’ analogon (spell checker says this word does not exist – framing my ability to give more names to unseen things 🙂 )
thus expanding the vocabulary of the spell checker, more and more, with descriptions of objects that are not here yet in an attempt to identify everything in the ‘world’ past, present, and future. Inevitably the whole thing explodes, words everywhere, inverted, upside-down, leaning against buildings and crumbling into alphabet items lying around in random order…
LoL 🙂