The sense of lack is accompanied by every desire. The desires to achieve, to acquire riches, to avoid death and destruction, or to transcend the material world are all bondage. The sense of lack requires something from what is, from experience and consciousness. That requirement makes living sticky, literally stuck to what’s arising. What’s arising is, however, impermanent. To require anything from impermanence produces the pleasure of finding and the pain of losing.

Consciousness is beyond space and time. For some reason, the mind thinks it is an entity existing within space and time. It then proceeds to understand consciousness as a limited entity also, that consciousness exits within a body, and that body exists within space and time, between the past and future, among a universe of locatable objects. This is a dream. The dream seems very real, so this experience of space and time is taken very seriously. For the mind, space and time might be reality. Such is not the case.

The early evening light is mysterious. It has a sense of uncertainty, and contained within that uncertainty is potential. Unrealized, the potential is freedom. It is quite like the early morning light. It is liminal, in between, not here yet not there. It has the sense of the non-local, non-linear, as if it can be anywhere all at once.

The street light comes on. Human civilization has a peculiar desire to seek light, all the while ignoring the natural necessity and rhythm of darkness. It might come from ancestry, heredity, the cavemen and hunter gatherers, but in a civilization with such advanced technologies, some deep-seated ignorance still direct human endeavors, and one such ignorance is this ceaseless search.