• There are still tickets available for my May 17th (4-6pm) Concert in North San Juan, CA (tickets available here).
• Spots are still open for the June 13/14 non-residential retreat I’m doing in London (for details, email me at: john@johnastin.com)
EVERYTHING SLIPS AWAY
(from the book, This Extraordinary Moment)
No matter how hard we may try, there’s really no way to determine what this moment is.
While we’re constantly drawing conclusions about experience, we can’t actually pull it off for as soon as we engage in some interpretation, the very thing we imagine we’ve defined has shifted into something else owing to its ever-changing, dynamic nature.
The fact is that everything is in a state of constant, unstoppable flux and flow, incapable of being held in place, impossible to keep from vanishing and becoming the next instant, the next appearance…
For these next few moments, simply notice how everything slips away.
Thoughts appear and then vanish in an instant.
Momentary eruptions of feeling arise and then dissolve, transforming themselves into the next thing.
Sounds and sights emerge and then fade away. Like a river, experience is forever on the move, never holding still, always becoming something else.
Thoughts, feelings, and sensations appear, then disappear in a single, indistinguishable movement, a dance of endless dynamism and unstoppable change.
Notice how it is simply not possible to hold anything in place, to keep what is from mutating.
We speak of trying to let go of what troubles us, but the reality is that letting go is already the nature of things. Nothing need be done to make this so.
The release of things is effortless and spontaneous; it requires no doing for it is the unavoidable nature of everything to let go of itself, every instant.
Feel the reality of this. See how there can be no holding on to experience owing to its relentlessly transient nature, every moment slipping away, regardless of how we may try to orient ourselves to it.
Our experiences disappear of their own accord. We needn’t do anything to bring this about.
With the perception you are having right now, just try to keep it in place, try to hold it here, see if you can stop it from morphing into the next experience. It cannot be done.
Feel the wondrous freedom of this, the impossibility of ever holding on to anything.
