This morning I stubbed my toe. Badly. You know, the kind that hurts beyond all reason. The stubbing that convinces you the toe must be broken (it never is). We’re all too familiar with that briefest of delays between the actual physical contact before the searing pain inevitably hits.

And it occurred to me, as I was reeling and grimacing, that the exquisitely awful pain was an intensely pure encounter with consciousness/ awareness/ life/ whatever. The crystal clarity of the agony was as perfectly ‘it’ as the glorious relief that slowly came as the pain eventually subsided.

As intimate an encounter with being as anything else.

The varying flavours of phenomena are all of a piece. Whole, complete and indivisible. None of it can be pulled apart, edited out or separated off from the rest.

At a certain point what we want and what we don’t want dissolves into simply what happens.

The specific qualities of experience pale in comparison to the simple presence of everything, the fact that anything is happening at all.