I cannot do. I cannot not do. Amaya does what she does. She fascinates me. She has no control over what she does or doesn’t do. She isn’t doing her life — This Is. Amaya is the illusion of a somebody. This illusion allows for the playing of the game: no gamepiece, no movement around the board. It is the receptacle for and the outpouring of karma in action, the forgetting and remembering of what the game actually is. Without this spectacular illusion there would be no experiencing of all the many facets of embodied life: beauty and sorrow, ecstasy and grief, busyness and boredom, growth and decline, divinity and humanity.

Does illusion mean not real? In one way yes, another way no. The appearance of separation, of being a stand-alone individuated self is but illusion but that is often misunderstood. While the separate self made of matter in a world of matter is illusion, is not actual factual, the experience of that appearance is absolutely real.

We are experiencing, pure and unchanging. And yet, the objects of experiencing constantly change. Feelings, sensations, perceptions, thoughts come and go in us, a roll call of variation. What doesn’t change? The experiencing? There’s a reason we sense we are ageless, why at 92 my mother said that something inside her still felt like she was 16. There is a reason why we can’t quite catch the present moment, why it always seems to be paradoxical — as soon as it we catch it, it expands, it moves on. We are Experiencing. We are Here with no ability to be there. We are Now and unable to be then. Now is not a moment along a line in linear time. Here is not contained by walls, by feet or miles, a place in space but spaceless, timeless, dimensionless nowness — Experiencing experiencing itself. The present moment as such does not exist other than as You!