DAY 17
If you want to know who enforces the rules of virtual reality, the clock is a good place to start. The tick-tock of clock time slices life into segments of seconds, minutes, and hours. Once you identify with clock time, your life passes in seconds, minutes, and hours. Such an existence is mechanical and routine. Breaking out of virtual reality, now has to become a state of awareness, not a slice of bread. When you wake up, now is a presence; it is the unbroken experience of being here.
Experiencing this presence, you witness how the stream of consciousness delivers a sequence of fleeting sensations and perceptions. Dividing this stream of activity into seconds, minutes, and hours is a mental construct only. When you are awake, you pay more attention to the presence of awareness than to the fleeting events taking place in the mind.
Mental activity is very clingy. You have a stake in the thoughts, sensations, images, and feelings that pass through your mind. But you don’t have to have a stake in those thoughts, sensations, images, and feelings. Imagine that you are sitting on a commuter train looking out the window. As the scenery rushes by, you don’t see it by picking out each building, tree, car, or person. It’s all just the passing scenery. If you happen to notice something that stands out, it passes just as quickly as the things you don’t notice. Now instead of windows, substitute your eyes. You are sitting behind them watching the passing scenery. When you adopt this position, which is known as “witnessing,” you approximate for a moment what the permanent state of being awake is like.