It came to me in meditation today, meditation which has calmed and steadied for now if not deepened: the present moment is empty, but it is empty of the future and of the past.  That is what the discipline of meditation can achieve: temporal immediacy.  In such a state the immediate sensory world is not darkened or voided but more vivid in every detail, and the wholeness that illuminates those details is all the more intense.  Meditation in a dark quiet place is a helpful sensory deprivation, but how often in my best sittings it has led to glimpses of bright, colourful, moving, sunlit scenes and places.  And on the most fortunate of days the temporal clarity that comes with meditation carries over into my perception of the tangible world, so something like an epiphany might briefly illuminate my and the world’s being.  And for that reason, that possibility of insight and joy, the poet and the sitter in zazen can have a common aspiration.

4 July, 2024.