Sitting, as usual, on my screened porch this morning, feeling the slight chill breeze that signals an approaching autumn. Morning sunlight streams across the still-green grass, birds chitter around the feeder. Two chipmunks scurry about looking for dropped seeds. The sky is crystal blue, with the faintest of white streaks.
A perfect moment. A perfect morning. For that perfect moment, all felt so good. Two thoughts arose. First, that the present moment is all we really have, the past is uncertain memory, the future is uncertain projection. We live here, now. And only here now.
The second thought, that we each of us have the option of living in the moment, and letting go of past regrets and future fears. No one else other than ourselves can do it, and no one other than ourselves stops us. It is within my purview as a human being to live that way. My privilege. My power, perhaps, Maybe my liberation.
With that second thought I felt as though I stood at the edge of a new and uncertain world. A can, if I choose, if I dare, step through a door in the wall of ordinary life, and move into one of extraordinary life by simply choosing to do so. Moving from ideas about faith in the universe to the reality of it, a chance to throw myself open to whatever powers may be. The realization that I really have no choice anyway, that living anywhere but in the present is simply stepping into illusion.
That reminded me of a concept in extreme empirical philosophy. Which is that we can only know what we can sense, that our “understanding” of the world is limited to the tips of our fingers, the range of our vision and hearing. We know we touch and see and hear, but all that really consists of is our brain evaluating and imagine the results of our sensations.
We can be reasonably sure that we see and hear and feel something, because it seems to be a shared something with other people. We both see the sky and the birds, and feel the breeze and so on, simultaneously. So what gets sensed has a universal quality, at least in the context of the effect it has on our minds. [Unless of course our shared universe is an illusion and you, the reader of this, are really the only mind, afloat in a world of make-believe companions. But let’s not go there]. Presuming, then, that we all exist, we all seem to sense something in the same way.
But that’s all we know. Something is out there, but it’s beyond our understanding. The image to me is of one being wandering in an infinite, unknowable blackness, with our arms outstretched and touching the surface manifestation of something that is beyond knowing. We work mightily to shape those sensations into a sensible image, which of course implies that we can also stop shaping them and allow the unknown to simply be. Perhaps that is merely death, which of course seems inevitable [I say seems because each of us alive has yet to experience it, at least in this incarnation, if there be incarnations].
My concluding thought then, my Eureka moment, such as it is, is simply this. We are points of consciousness in a vast unknown, and the idea that we have any control over our future is a laughable illusion. We have no idea of what’s really real, and we slide through an uncountable series of moments. We should maybe let ourselves more fully experience the moments and leave the past and future to the dustbin of discarded ideas. Couldn’t hurt.
And now, by the way, it’s night, that morning has slipped into that uncertain past. Right now I’m in a moment of a nice red wine and fancy cheese, neither drunk nor, far as I can tell, insane. The wine is good, the night is dark, I hear only the faint and distant stirrings of the other sentient being with whom I seem to share what seems to be a comfortable and functional shelter. All seems well.
Good night all.
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