Probably the most incredible day in my life. And I know it won’t last forever. And that’s ok. I’m still smiling right now. I found the purpose of my life. I looked at my fat tummy. I confronted a fear so embedded in me, it made me shake and tremble to even think about it. And I said “I love every single fat cell in your body”. I decided to tell that to every single girlfriend I’ll have. Except the one I have now. She’s anorexic and doesn’t have any fat cells in her body, so it doesn’t make sense.
I can choose to feel every single thing around me. The heat from the radiator behind me. It’s been off for the last 3 hours and I felt like freezing. But now it’s on. I didn’t ‘freeze’ though. I didn’t feel cold like I usually do. The blood in my legs wasn’t circulating properly but I could look at that and focus on something else, despite the presence of the feeling. The uneasiness wasn’t there anymore.
I remember my breath constantly. The muscles of my face and my breath are my anchor. The one I constantly go back to to remember I’m here, now. I feel in so much ease in my body. As if a three-year old clutter had been removed. I feel every resistance that occurs. I feel the gratitude towards the things around me and understand deeply that this gratitude is not as deep as what I reached here. It’s a mental label. It’s a feeling. What I’m living right now is a communion with the Self. I can smile and joke without acting all buddha like or closing my eyes to meditate.
The sounds around me are clear and the feelings, thoughts and hesitancies inside as well: I can see I don’t want to use the word “I” a lot. A natural tendency of mine. I see the pipe that goes from thoughts, feelings to understanding to detachment to presence to the un-manifested or whatever this thing is. I understand the armodafinil probably has something to do with this state. The need to take it again in the coming days is clear: I see it and understand it. I’m even conscious I’m going to share this paragraph with you and dread the fact you might be concerned about me for even considering taking that pill again. But that is the nature and the depth of my current state.
There is no urgency. My patience is unlimited. My willpower is infinite. Or these concepts don’t exist anymore. I don’t exist. I understand it. This even moved out of that “un-manifested” state into thoughts. I fathom it. I don’t exist. I can trace the insight. At one moment I was looking at my hands, I saw my nails. They’re long now. I labelled the sight: “bad”. Long fingernails are bad. And it blew my mind away.
It reminded me of that spoon in “The Matrix”. Let me search for the exact quote :
One bald child is bending spoons. He gives one spoon to Neo and says, "Do not try to bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth... there is no spoon.
What I thought of was rather: The spoon is in your mind. And my fingernails were in my mind. The thought that their length was “bad” struck me. I looked at them, thought of all what I had internalised in my lifetime and that made it so I looked at my fingernails and ‘thought’ of something relating to them or attached some mental label to them. And I looked at them once that judgement was clear and I can look at them now with the same eyes: And it’s amazing because I look and expect them to shorten or disappear at any second. And not that it’s happening, it’s not, but it ‘feels’ as if they are shortening because the two realities are equivalent. Just like the spoon bending.
When I’m in this state, I look around me and feel the world couldn’t be anyway else and that even if it was, it would be just as good. “Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning.” Tennessee Williams, quoted by Jared Leto playing Nemo Nobody in Mr. Nobody, an amazing movie. In other terms, we live in the best of worlds, like Leibniz said. And there is a slight resistance that I carry on from the my everyday state maybe, in that I involuntarily don’t take everything in. I don’t suck it all in. I don’t delve into the detail of the font on the sugar packages in the brown cup sitting on the table in front of me. And it’s a resistance. I realize it.
I know it won’t last. This won’t last. I’m crying. I’m crying with a smile. “Only time” from Enya is playing, the lady from the restaurant cam to check the radiator next to me and I could ‘see’ her hair and the skin of her forearm showing past her black work shirt. I know it won’t last. And I smile.
While in my “complete dive” - let’s call it that :) - I took out my notebook and wrote “Be more sponge”. When I wrote, just as when I just drank more of my coffee, the same happened: My mindfulness was re-ignited. The cold and the blood freezing in my veins - kess ekhto hal cafe-resto ma ken fineh le2eh ghayro :) - are actually queues to be mindful. They’re a route to enlightenment. And my ‘inner present self’ is fleshed out by the very cold conquering my fingers slowly and the small crispations in my body. But I ‘see’ them. And I could write here for a century, I could spend my life sitting here, typing a letter every month. Time is gone.
(Now, I’m going to use your trick and move the light of my focus to connect some dots regarding time)
Time is space. I understood this with my mind a long while ago. Time is only a description of the movement of space. Proof is, the pointers of a watch are there to show that time exists. And these pointers are nothing but a change in physical elements of space. Time is nothing but a notion to describe a propriety of space: Its movement, its change. More so - this came lately - time describes a very specific property of the movement of space: Its movement is uni-directional. That’s entropy. What happens in the physical space cannot un-happen. The smoke coming out of a cigarette cannot go back in. A broken egg cannot un-break. This is the arrow of time. You can disassemble a car and re-assemble it but that’s something else: You can’t get it back to the ‘exact’ state it was in before disassembling it.
Time is the sequentiality of space. It is the thing that makes it so that everything doesn’t happen at the Same Time but rather sequentially. And in space, things happen in a sequence that can’t be reversed. So time guarantees succession and separateness but also unidirectionality. This is where it gets interesting: What does “time is gone” mean? What does Tolle mean when he writes that “Presence removes time”?
I’m going to write this very slowly: Zen is the taste of entropy. Your past cannot be undone, your future won’t come faster than it can. All there is is the now with all its inevitability and fatality. Things are as they are. And it brings me back to why I don’t exist and why it’s an amazing fact: I am the table I’m sitting at. The music I hear is the sound of my breath. Though everything doesn’t happen at the same time, all the physical elements in space exist at very sam time. How amazing is that ! I can feel your presence in Lebanon. It’s 4:49pm UK time and 6:49pm your time.
(My mind thinks I’m biasing my writing and experience by thinking of writing to you as if this was the goal of it all. But I see that feeling and I keep writing. At this stage, I can’t feel three of my left hand fingers and about two and a half in my left hand)
All space exists at the same time. And this is where this feeling of connectedness comes from. The fact I feel this purple flower on the table is ‘part of me’. The quotes around it are to express a feeling rather than a thought. Everything in existence shares the present moment at any given moment. We share the present time. It’s our common DNA.
