I was walking back from my friend's place through New Farm last night and I was a little bit drunk and I started really wanting a cigarette. I quit more than a month ago now, and it's the first real craving I've had. Anyway, I became fixated on it and started debating as to whether I should buy a packet... you know, for JUST ONE. Heh.
But then I realised that the issue wasn't that I wanted a cigarette, it was that I was focussed on this issue as if it were a constant - as though it were an established and stable, concrete thing - my wanting of it, which is nonsense, because nothing is static in life, and as soon as I realised that my longing was transient, it disappeared and I became really happy. And then I had this thought, which tipped me into ecstatic joy and sent me running through the park and swinging off tree branches:-
We are each of us riding the razor's edge of time like surfers on a wave which has come from nothing, and is going to nothing. Though we may feel as if we are separated by age & distance & sex & country & class & religion & an almost infinite array of perceptions, we are bound by the truth of each fresh moment born spontaneously and inconvertibly in our awarenesses; it only exists as we exist to witness it, and we share it, on a deeply personal and individual realm, with each and every other living and non-living thing on this planet, at exactly the same time, at exactly the same instant.
The world, not just your perception of it, but my perception, his perception, her perception, its perception - EVERYTHING, is created afresh every, single, fraction of an instant. It didn't exist before you stepped into it, and it doesn't exist once you leave it. We are flying a space shuttle through an axiom of pure existence.