She reads her favourite book and loses herself in it. The story comes to life and her identity is forgotten as she is immersed in its details. The dramas unfold and her emotions are stirred. It does not matter that it is unreal — all of it — playing out by the stroke of a pen as it writes its tale of fiction.

People lose themselves in life by believing wholly in the sequential events of human affairs. They have no presence, no active role, but fall into the motion of one thing after another, reactive from the break of day to the shadows of the night. It is all good and well for their passive role to be there, participating in the dramas, situations, scenarios and all of these complicated stories, but there has to be a remembrance, however slight, that at the end it is not here that meaning and significance is found. Men and women allow themselves, unknowingly, to believe far too much in both this grand play, which is unfolding before their eyes, and their participation as egos with names and qualities which they are somehow convinced matter so greatly.

The paint and the landscape it draws is worth noticing, yet acknowledgment of a painter is the crux of what makes the details ever more sweet. There is no need to relate to everything with sanctimonious feeling, but there is a gratefulness and a sense of awe which should be repeatedly born in the moments that we live. Men should struggle and suffer to their uttermost capacity in order to be here, actively present and actively alive. This woman who reads the book must remember her eyes which dart from left to right, the mind which conjures images, the heart which musters emotions and the body which makes it all possible. The dead nature of our habits allow us to forget what is doing the doing. The reader forgets herself as the reader and men forget the painter by the deep layers of the painting.

Where we look and how deeply we feel the relationship between the object and this vehicle which perceives it — this is the rub. A man falls too often into the motions, becoming, as it were, the movements rather than his participation in a process which requires attention and, dare I say, consciousness. We are far more free and open to being inspired when we are able to garner the strength necessary to take some, or all, of ourselves out of the details. For if you stare at the finger, you lack sight of the moon. And if you stare at the moon, you lack awareness of the finger and the body from which it is part. The people of this world will groove into the channel of water as they are designed, but the individual, in and of himself, is awarded the capacity and gift to become self-aware of the greater dynamic at work.

The dramas will continue and repeat as patterns which will always exist within the human sphere of activity. There is no stopping such a force, for it is supposed to happen in exactly this fashion. A man, himself, is however granted the option to look in many directions at once and to take account and full stock of what is happening in the moment. He can awake himself, even for a moment, and remind the part of him which is genuinely intelligent that it is all happening by a motion of its own, without the personal volition of the myriad of actors who bring it all to bear. This awareness, an inner witness amidst the details of life, is the only deed that will matter when all is said and done. In the end, and so with the beginning, it does not matter what, why or where, but only how the experience of life is met.