Here Now, There Later

 
There were some moments during the walking meditation session tonight where I was walking very quickly, but I wasn't affected by the movement very much at all. The way I experienced it was: one minute I am in his position, while the next  I am somewhere else, as though the two moments didn't quite connect seamlessly into a whole. If you have ever been in a room with a strobe light, you might get the similar affect of having all these separate individual moments of visual experience. It's not that the mind cannot put two and two together to make four, but these kinds of experiences seem to reveal in more relief that these individual moments aren't the same identity at all, but it is the consciousness that brings them together into something that seems continuous and seamless.


   It's interesting how this kind of experience is actually liberating, because there is room there to see the phenomena without any attachment to its coming and going. As long as I am not fooled into thinking that something around me has an enduring existence, I won't make the added error of seeking or rejecting that phenomena. What results is a kind of smoothness because I am no longer swamped in the subject and object distinction: movement therefore becomes much more efficacious, and I even see the totality of the environment as more or less equal. There are rare glimpses of this kind of thing in my practice, and I am only lucky that I do get to experience them now and again in the group sitting.