eternal recurrence

   During the meditation session, one of the participants had described the situation of coming back to something with completely new eyes, but realizing that there is a new view from 'nowhere'. It is something like this: have you ever had a situation where your mind either drifted or simply went into a different state of being, and then found that what was familiar before now looks 'unfamiliar'? The way this practitioner described it is something like: hearing the sound of my voice doing the guided facilitation, then starting to fall away from that voice, only to hear it again and ask the question: where was I between hearing the sound, then not hearing it, then hearing it again? This is not about just letting the mind wander. I think it's more about forgetting the self's existence for a brief moment, and seeing a situation anew without any solid sense of self. At that point, we catch ourselves wondering: what happened to this secure sense of being that binds the past, present and future? Is it really there all the time or does it in fact go in and out, like the tides?
     I think that every so often, people need to challenge the sense of who is the self that is having an experience, before they can see the experience with 'new eyes'. This is the meaning of huatou practice: to keep questioning the subject-object duality until it dissolves somehow. But there is another aspect to this experience which somehow reminds me of Nietzsche's notion of the 'eternal recurrence'. It is the notion of continuing to revisit the same place until one fully embraces living it and wishes to fully relive it in the same way.  From a Buddhist perspective, I think perhaps it means visiting things without an entrenched sense of self dragging one down.
    I think as soon as I even imagine what this eternal recurrence looks like, I have already gone afar from accepting this present moment without attachment. Why? It's because whatever I envision for myself is only going to be an image that is divorced from present awareness. It certainly doesn't mean that  one has no suffering to bear. I think what it entails is acceptance even of non-acceptance. Now how is this possible? Quite simply it is about so radically accepting one's present conditions that there is simply no need to envision something better, more positive, more relaxed, and so on. This 'more' is actually the source of suffering, because it is always displacing awareness to some thought that has no awareness at all. There is even a sense that trying to 'give rise to something more spiritual' is equally off the mark, because it is desiring something that just isn't present.
    Of course, there is a mystery to all this, particularly around the question of what makes eternal recurrence something that one can embrace. Sometimes I think that people start to have the experience when they have suffered a situation so much that all their alternatives to framing the experience have exhausted. At that point, there is no other choice but to embrace the situation as it is in its entirety, wholeheartedly. But all the ways we use to evade our current moment are really just preparations for that final embrace or surrender. Once I had finally figured out the futility of willing or wanting something different (especially its impermanence), I am back to the original awareness that is unchanging.