sea of uncertainty.

[everyday exploration of entropy and enlightenment]

awareness. entropy. impermanence. mindfulness. nothingness. time.

Tag: time.

  • sit.

    The night sky. As comforting as it is confronting. Tonight it would be her zendo, her meditation hall, as she sought to blend the inner and the outer, the finite and the abyss, the now and the forever.

    She had hiked the high glacial valley walls during the bright daylight hours, and with the day coming to a close she found herself on a rocky, exposed ridgeline—exactly where she wanted to be. The words of her guru refracted around her skull; it was he who had told her the kind of space—not only physically, but spiritually—to seek out, and this spot seemed perfect. From her bag she pulled her zafu, the round meditation cushion she carried with her almost everywhere; worn, tattered and well-travelled. And several moments later, a rolled-up royal blue rug—the threads of luscious lapis lazuli reminiscent of the descending dusk—emerged from the bag as well, which she unfurled with a snap. Right leg folded under left as she made her way into lotus pose.

    Pulling the cowl of her robes back, she felt the ever-so-fair night breeze on her shaven scalp. She tilted her head upwards, mesmerised by the Milky Way, now furled like her rug, in all of it’s ancient glory. The astral arch—omnipresent and omniscient—held the memories of every sunrise, every breath, every death, that has ever taken place. A river of stars, it meandered towards its mouth, before dissolving into the sea; the ocean of her awareness. Of the awareness. All awarenesses. The memory of origin, of what was; though, also, what has always been. The night sky, now black as pitch, dark as the abyss of self-delusion. A finite Universe containing infinite multitudes, bound by a timeless time, a deathless death. Enclosed entropy, a swirling churning maelstrom of birth, death, and rebirth, where everything stays the same.

  • cylinder.

    His legs stretched out in the shade as he made more notes in his notebook, scribbles now filling up the margins, the only remaining space. Geometric constructions and complex algebraic equations created an impenetrably dense wall of knowledge, making his work visually off-putting to most. Today, as the midday sun bore down, a date palm delivered him shade, allowing him to work uninterrupted. A gentle breeze touched his cheek.

    As he scratched an itch on his side, he noticed his ribs were more pronounced—the past weeks, as he honed in on solutions for his work, has had neglected food and comfort; his work all-encompassing. Notebooks—stacks and stacks of them, as well as loose leaves of crumbled and folded paper, scattered all around his house—contained the synthesis and syncretism of ideas and theories from far-flung thinkers, old and new. Diagrams and schematics of geometries that warped the mind, graphs plotting exotic equations, mathematical alchemy and esoterica; theoretical threads he hoped to pull into answers, solutions to reality itself; as if that needed to be solved.

    He sat the notebook down softly beside him in the dry dirt, closed his eyes, and let out a sigh. The sigh evolved into a deep exhalation. Then an inhalation; the cycle repeating. And then again. He wasn’t sure exactly what drew him in, and back, to his childhood as an orphan at that monastery in the mountains. Remembering how the monks used to guide them in meditation, he crossed his legs and sat up straight. Decades receded in his mind—before his time as a renowned thinker, before his time as a young professor, before his time spent travelling to far-flung lands to study, before he left the monastery, before everything.

    Slowly he opened his eyes, his gaze drawn upward. Mouth agape, he saw the sky as a monumental rotating column, stretching as wide and tall as was possible in every direction. Slowly it turned, a towering cylinder of shimmering indigo iridescence, though at this moment he wasn’t sure how much he could trust his own perceptions. The very essence of existence was being projected onto the inner surface—people, houses, trees, himself—all mirages. A salty tear ran down his cheek. Overcome with awe and abject astonishment, he witnessed the geometry of his notebooks in motion, the two-dimensional informational base of all that is. More tears flowed as realisation set in—this was it, all there was. The bedrock of being was not something solid and enduring, the tombs of kings, but rather ephemeral and ethereal, flickering and fleeting. All that he—that anyone—had lived and breathed and died for, decried as fundamental and final, was nothing but conjurings from the surface of the cylinder.

    In the distance, plastered on the wall of the cylinder, he recognised a mountain formation from his youth; he hung his head. It was all an illusion—a hologram projected onto the consciousness. Hopes, dreams, fame, infamy; all phantasms of the great, cylindrical construction. He had nothing, was nothing. His face softened. He was free.

    Combs of cirrus clouds appeared on the column, before being projecting into the sky, then dissipated just as quickly.

  • there.

    The bright ruby sunrise made the horizon hard to identify, the red sky smudged with the red earth below. Several of the senior resident monks huddled together just outside the monastery’s entrance—a thick whitewashed gatehouse, framing heavy, ornately carved, impregnable wooden doors—before bowing in unison in gratitude and bidding him farewell. The heavy doors sealed shut behind them. He picked up the woven rattan basket at his feet, then adjusted the tumpline on his head. The contents of the basket were invaluable—manuscripts and scrolls, wisdom and teachings from a past long gone. Despite the early morning hours, the air already sizzled, the baked landscape preparing for another hot day. Enveloped and wrapped solely in a long length of white cotton cloth to ward off the elements, he pulled a hem down over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the scorching sun.

    He took a first step, then another. The first of many. The road—more of an unpaved track—stretched is a straight line all the way to the sky, a rarely travelled line bisecting the undisturbed crimson. Almost immediately his waraji straw sandals became covered in sprinklings of ochre earth. Due to the sparse population in the area—a few camel herders and nomadic families—there would be no inns or caravanserai on his way; so the rattan basket also contained parcels of cooked rice and a gourd of water. Whether it was to be enough for the journey remained to be seen, but it would have to be.

    Each day blended into the prior, as one breath into another—a concertina of chronology, the elasticity of experience, the illusions of the linear. The resident monks had informed him the journey to the next monastery would take five or six days; so he was in no hurry. Things would unfold as they will. Above he saw a formation of cranes, and smiled—he empathised with their hunger, having probably not eaten for weeks as they complete their annual migratory mission. He also noticed a new found nimbleness to his steps; buoyed by witnessing the resilience of the crane, he found a new reservoir of endurance to plumb.

    His stomach growled—primarily in hunger, but also in anger—demanding more than the meagre rice rations he had been providing it once a day. Sitting in the discomfort, his well-attuned awareness acknowledged these grumblings and growlings were only temporary sensations, and would not be fatal; at least during this journey.

    The next day—sometime before noon, based on where the Sun was hanging overhead—he saw a shimmering in the distance. The distinctive sparkling of the whitewashed walls of a monastery.

    Knowing there were only a handful of humble monks cloistered at the isolated monastery—not the one thousand or so housed at the one he had journeyed from—and knowing they might be preoccupied, he sat. And waited. He meditated and absorbed the here and now. Though, in the now, ‘here’ ceases to have much meaning–there is no ‘there’ for it to contrast with; in the present, ‘there’ can only ever be ‘here’. A crane called far above.

  • perception.

    She flopped her hand into the water—the outrigger canoe was moving at a quick clip, urged on by the Trade Winds. She had made this passage many times before, and this explained her languid posture, slumped casually near the stern, the canoe barely wider than her hips. The wind pushed relentlessly on the sail; hand-hewn trunks arranged in a crab claw rig suspending a woven sail, as her ancestors had made since time immemorial. The outrigger counterweight, the ama—little more than a coconut tree trunk—raised up and took flight, further increasing the canoe’s velocity. It sliced over the small, smooth waves like a machete through a tuna. While one hand dragged in the water—the crisp Pacific combed by her fingers—the other loosely held a fibrous rope, which adjusted and trimmed the sails, maximising the little boat’s speed across the limitless tranquil turquoise that was spread out before her.

    Clouds travelled above, running their own errands, and she used them—along with the ocean currents and bird life around her—to chart her course to her destination, a nearby atoll. At this pace, she would make landfall at dusk; just as many of the seabirds she was currently watching would begin returning to shore before the fall of darkness.

    With the whooshing of water and the whistling of wind, she couldn’t help but be immediately present. Time dissolved; just her, a speck in the cerulean expanse. Her hand dissolved in the water; the separation between her and the watery depths seemed increasingly arbitrary. There was movement—a wave occasionally washed over the side, birds divebombed in the distance for lunch, a flying fish flew alongside—but nothing changed. How could it? All that has existed, and all that will exist, is as it is.

    The horizon became inverted. Actually, or allegorically? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter? Sea overhead, the sky submerged; whales soared, birds swam. Blue stacked on blue. And yet, nothing had changed; except perhaps perception. To perceive—to attempt to understand—is to experience the illusion of change, the myth of separation and distinction. Ocean oscillating, cosmos churning; movement, and yet changeless. Awareness, the now—outside of thought, circumventing the thinking mind—oblivious to time, the measure of change. All that is, just has it has always been, still just is as it is.

  • wisps.

    Clouds of wisteria and jasmine clung to the small cottage, like a mountain peak cloaked in fog. Along horizontal parallel beams the climbers crawled—the low pitch of the roof also luring them higher—bringing with them the scent of Spring and bees eager to harvest the fresh pollen on offer. Delicately, she placed the incense holder on the table; there was a barely audible dink as the clay base reached the table top. It was of simple design; a clay circle, with a small opening in the centre, to which the incense stick would be stuffed. Using her left hand, she ran her fingertips up the vertical incense stick until she reached its length. The miniscule bumps and contours confirmed its handmade, hand-rolled provenience. Her right hand held an open flame—a piece of paper alight—and she gently brought this to the end of the incense. A huuft signaled the fire had done its job, and soon wafts of sandalwood wound their way towards the ceiling, drifting and dancing on the breeze allowed by the many open windows of the house.

    Her sight might have corroded, but her sense of smell had not. She picked up scents of the sandalwood, along with botanicals the artisan had included in its creation; notably mixed with the bouquet of the resident climbers outside. She strained her memory, trying to recall it as she had seen as a child; surely these soft scents were riding the waves of wisps emanating from the incense stick—or at least as she recalled it.

    How many—she would never know for certain—of her memories had become mis-remembers, reliable lies, unable to be validated by vision of the now? The memory of the scent would endure longer than the event, though forever through the warped lens of memory. Surely this was true of all of us, she thought; removed from time and place, we still yet claim knowledge based on poorly transcribed notes jotted on worn parchment of the mind.

    She sat on a cushion next to a large window. Tilting her head to experience the breeze on her cheeks, a subtle symbol of the Spring blooming beyond the borders of the room. All she knew was right now—not reliant on faded falsities—was she could smell the wonderful aroma of sandalwood, sublimating with the scent of wisteria from outside the ajar window. With a ffift, the incense stick burned out, extinguished.

  • medusa.

    A liquid desert. Oases of life here and there; upwellings of plankton, balls of baitfish, the corpse of a recently-passed whale offering up a feast to other ocean-dwellers. Above and beyond, mellow dunes of waves, blue as far as the eye of the albatross can see. However, there are itinerants, adventurers, those wandering beyond the enclaves and safe harbours of life. Seabirds, sharks, cetaceans, searchers, and scavengers looking for lunch.

    Bobbing in an ocean gyre that initially generated strength on the other side of the planet, the gelatinous giant was amorphous under the water, suspended from gravity. Its bell pulsated rhythmically while flecks of blue, ruby, citrine, and indigo were visible amongst the tangle of its trailing tentacles—some many metres long—their ends unseen, beyond the visibility of the open ocean. Embodying surrender, its direction, diet, and desires at the whims of the ocean, accepting things as they come, and go. Apotheosis of ebb and flow. Unburdened by a thinking mind—beyond the grip of of thinking’s manufactured past and future—it experiences all at once; and yet is deathless—a moment-to-moment time traveller, free to roam, unshackled from temporality. Oblivious to an illusion of control, it wanders wherever the ocean sees fit. Sailing both time and space, unimpeded.

    For aeons it meanders, having witnessed infinite dawns, each more beautiful, more alluring that the last. Clouds speed over head, while decades pass with equal abandon. Mountains form, impermanent things—all things—return to dust. Change; yet there is no measurement, no desired state, nothing not as it shouldn’t be. Nothing outside of now. Following the currents and winds, as it did yesterday and the day before and the centuries before than.

    In the now, everything is as it is.

  • tide.

    Like a prize Persian rug, resplendent threads of azure and cobalt stretches the breadth of both the horizon and the imagination, twinkling like lapis lazuli and sapphire under the hot Summer sun. Every day, the ocean is here; yet every day, she reveals a different facet, different angle to her beauty, to those curious ones paying attention. Infinite, yet formless and forever changing, the sea serves as an enduring reminder to the constant churn of change. Swells form, only to collapse; tides rise, only to fall.

    Shear stoic cliffs of ancient rock stand as sentinels at each end of the beach, shepherding the swells around the headlands. While not in frequent flux as the ocean far below, the old faces still show the scars of an endless battle with the elements. Deep crevices are torturously, methodically, carved into the rock over millennia—death by a thousand cuts of the wind and waves, lingchi by weathering. Stories of old recall old rock formations and old fishing spots and old blowholes, though now lost to the current inhabitants—new ones have emerged, though no doubt only to be a memory again in a generation or three.

    Beyond the blue rug and above the worn faces, the night sky moves in timescales beyond the human mind. Machinations and geometries shuffling and jostling over lifetimes, aeons. Fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, can only reflect knowledge of stagnant stars; it is curious grandchildren, enthralled by parchment and papyrus, scrolls and zij, that peer far back enough in time, that glimpse the changes. Yet change they do. Slowly. Surely. Galaxies grow before growing apart, stars shine and are then snuffed out, gravity wears and warps; but only to observant gods.

    Tonight, a full moon—an opal hoisted in the deep black—casts a pale glow, bathing all beneath in chalky shades. The frigid ocean water stings a little as the waves wash up the beach, engulfing her feet before retreating again, as it always does. She knew her feet would warm up—or at least become accustomed to the temperature—in a few minutes, as they always do. Thoughts appeared to her, only to wash away like the tide, as they always do.

  • rare.

    The Universe, our home, is a place of unfathomable unimaginable scales. Mother Space-Time and Father Entropy alone fully understand its machinations, while crunching the numbers is the domain of deities. A humble wave of light travelling from one dark corner to the other—though in all probability, it’s shape is not of a geometry that is discernable to the human mind, so lacks ‘corners’—would take billions of years to traverse. It is an old container—in fact by definition, as old as time—having seen trillions of dawns. It contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each home to countless more stars, most with their own solar systems. Despite centuries of searching, we are still yet to find sentience beyond the realms of our small blue planet. And yet, as rare as this Earth-evolved sentience seems been, many being have experienced it. Myriad lives have come into being before succumbing to death and entropy. Billions upon billions of individual creatures, over aeons, experiencing this thing we call ‘life.’ Of this multitude of life, a tiny fraction have been human—born during different eras, in different climes, living different lives. We are all just one among the tally of many, both past and present; reminiscent of a small twinkling star nestled with many more in a galaxy, surrounded by countless other galaxies containing the same. While mathematicians no doubt have a name for the sliver of probability defining the infinitesimal coincidence that we even exist at all, comprehending it—truly understanding it—is beyond our frail faculties.

    With all that in mind, it is a wise use of your time to be anything but present?