I’ve been watching how this body-mind is organically moved into action, the way emotions trickle or flood in and movement occurs. These inputs, sensations, threads of thought, are not consciously chosen. They simply appear.

The sensations and thoughts create the many flavors of life, the delicious bits I savor, the inedible mouthfuls I attempt to spit out, all of the inspirations of life and living.

As I rub my forefinger across my hand—slowly sensually quickly gently roughly—different experiences appear. It’s the same with thoughts, with any sensation, with emotions that tug the heart or preface a simple mental squabble or a mind-altering battle. Each unique combination crafts a different experience, offering new horizons to explore, new insights to reveal, for this specific combination has never been seen and felt before. It, like us in every moment, is brand new.

Sometimes the movement that takes place involves sitting down to write, other times it is merely a single thought, soliciting action with its come-hither hip-swing, woefully joyfully pleading its case. It feels familiar only because I attribute the past to the present. I am conditioned to wash it with memory and call it by the past’s name.

Life is so very fascinating when I know what to look for, when I genuinely accept the actuality that this is an extremely intricate, absolutely visceral, highly impressive illusion. Believing, trusting in its solid reality, a separate me alone in the world, is the stuff of nightmares, the foundation for all the evils imaginable.

What I find mind-blowing though, is when the automatic movement defies the well-worn patterns and simple observation of the impetus to move appears instead. Why that happens, I do not know. For some of us it does, for others the idea is foreign, so foreign in fact that those who speak of it are deemed insane. Perhaps trusting that it is possible is a prerequisite, although I don’t think so.

In the beginning it occurred when I least expected it, when I had given up entirely. It seemed to be a fresh taste of reality offered up to keep me engaged with the game. Whether it really was, I don’t know. It was just the story I told myself to explain the unexplainable.

It felt like conscious choice but gradually the movement of non-movement, the apparent choice, that which is but another thought, dissolved into simple beingness.

Life continued to spill emotions into the body. Thoughts occurred, sometimes a freaking train of thoughts, but the movement stopped, even the urge to move dissipated, leaving the identification with the observer to languish in the dust.

The more often it happens the flip, what feels like an awareness shift when I am looking at an optical illusion, is seen to be more natural than the illusion held up by the many impetuses that construct the facade of identification.

Thoughts don’t stop, but attendance to the thoughts stop. Awareness is all. It’s similar to what appears to happen with Sophia when I tap her on the nose with a toy. She instantly stops, patiently watches, eyes in sync with the toy, not waiting for her chance to pounce or trying to figure out what it going to happen next, but here, now basic dog-dogging.

Awareness, not awareness of a person in motion, a person aware or something, not even awareness of a person, period, takes center stage. Everything drops except awareness which never drops, which is never not present. The world goes on, thoughts arise and pass on by, emotions materialize and fade away. Life lifes. This one I call myself is clearly seen to be part of the grand illusion.

And then the illusion flips again, back to personhood, although identification is never the same. I am in the game and not of it, not in the same way, not with the solidity that was.

Flip flop, flip flop, flip.

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY