DAY 5
Life gives us a constant flow of perceptions that we live by. The five senses are the pipeline through which everything flows. But it’s not like a continuous flow of water from a faucet. Sensations are much more like rain, which falls one drop at a time. We make sense of life using fleeting thoughts and sensations. We ignore how evanescent every perception really is—each sensation starts to fade as soon as it is noticed. Every thought has already vanished by the time it registers. By waking up, we stop ignoring what is actually happening all the time. The need to turn fleeting sensations into a running movie or story fades away.
Put a grain of salt or sugar on your tongue. Notice how the taste starts to diminish after the first strong taste sensation. Pay attention to how your salivary glands quickly reacted and how your throat wanted to swallow. This puts you in touch with how brief and temporary experience is. But here’s the real point. Try to taste what was on your tongue before you placed the salt or sugar on it. You can’t. That taste, which you probably didn’t make note of when it occurred, has fled forever. Fleeting perceptions are the texture of life.