POSTCARD#328: Chiang Mai: Blinking in the bright light of the laptop screen in the darkness of 05.00 hours… the present moment – even if I’m living in a dream where it’s always yesterday or tomorrow or next week, the present moment catches up with it and everything becomes ‘now’ again.

Internet connection is slow… in the tab it says, ‘untitled’ and in the toolbar it says, ‘about: blank’. There is only this blindingly white open space, like a car headlight where the page should be. I have to wait for it, balanced on the edge of ‘now’… an unstated presence, anticipation of it filling my vision with beautiful colour.

The emptiness of the white screen triggers the letting-go thing – not getting caught in any stressed state, and a great easefulness comes, spreading through the neck, shoulders and facial muscles. Just this sense of letting things be as they are. It’s like a deep inbreath, filling the chest cavity from top to bottom, and the long outbreath becoming a ribbon of road in a landscape, reaching out there to a vanishing point on the horizon.

Some time after that, the page loads but I don’t notice it because it’s changed to something else, another episode, and a different story… cessation, THE END, no layers or filters.

Holding the question, and trying to understand what that sort of thing might possibly be, is enough to begin to know it; to know that all that’s left are events and situations immediately associated with mind states as they arise – seeing this with mindfulness (and whatever it takes) to allow it all to unfold, to arise, to be here and to fall away, no holding.

‘…(it) is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method — you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment… the sudden realization that all is as it should be…’ Osho

Photo: Steam clouds at a Power Plant in NZ, by Louk Vreeswijk

This was a reflection on an earlier post titled: Strange Familiarity