Yesterday, I watched “The Groundhog Day“. My rational mind tells me it’s the fourth time I watched it. My experience shows me it’s the first time ever.

I didn’t plan it this way. It just happened. The movie happened. The freshness of the experience happened. The enjoyment of it happened.

I didn’t say to myself: I’ll watch it the night before the Groundhog day and I’ll watch it as if it’s the first day in my life. Or as if it’s the last day in my life. There was no “as is”, there was no effort, no comparing, no pretending.

There apparently is some comparing now that I’m writing about it!

Right now, in writing, I am playing a little game in my mind: I am creating a slight sense of past and a future. But then – did I really watch the movie yesterday? Right now, I can’t recall yesterday. I just have an inner experience of myself watching this movie.

This is the experience I usually call: memory.  But really, it’s just an experience in my mind and the experience as such is right now . There is no past, there is no future - there is just a present experiences that I call past,  or future.

In the movie, most of the time, there is no past and no future either. Only it doesn’t necessarily feel as refreshing and enlightening as you may expect . Rather, it feels like an endless repetition of the same day - like a merry-go-round.

Does your life, or something in your life ever feel like a merry-go-round too? Like a pattern repeating itself over and over and over?

Imagine then you’re riding on a merry-go-round. You are completely fascinated with how it goes round and round and round and round, showing you the same landscape again and again and again and again…

But after a while, it gets boring though, so your mind starts wondering. But that’s not all that entertaining either. You’re bored and frustrated now, you want to do something else, you want to go somewhere else, you want to be something else. Only, at its present pace, there’s no way you can jump off this merry-go-round!

So what can you do? As your frustration builds up and becomes impossible to keep in, you begin to rant, to scream, or cry perhaps. No one’s looking at you and no one’s hearing you so there’s no reason to hold anything back – and you don’t!

…these emotions are like waves, they come and go, again and again…

But then, at some point they seem to loose some of their initial charge - you notice that. And you notice something else is changing too. It’s like your vision has cleared a bit - You see more of what’s around you. It’s been there all the time, but now you notice it. You notice the other people riding with you, and how they’re facial expression is changing all the time, how they’re laughing and crying and screaming too. You notice how different they all are!

And the landscape! Even if by now you’ve seen the same rotating picture at least a hundred times, suddenly you realize you’ve been overlooking a great deal of what is there: Like, this dog trying to catch its own tale.

Or those two old men playing chess.

And this couple, kissing.

And what is it with this angry kid carrying a violin case?

And there, an artist painting your merry-go-round!

This is strange… Even if you know that the speed of it remains the same it feels as if the merry-go-round slows down a bit. In fact, the more you notice it the slower it goes. And as it slows down there are even more details you notice. Like, the smile on the painter’s face, and how his eyes find yours and how it awakens a wonderful, warm feeling in you.

In that moment you notice that the merry go round stands still, and that your body, without you thinking a single thought, gets off the merry-go-round and starts walking towards the painter, while you are enjoying tihs amazing multitude of sensory and extra-sensory impressions that appear in your awareness as your body moves through this landscape. Or maybe it’s the other way round - yes, it is the landscape moving through you, everything is flowing through you now…

And there’s also this soft warmth, this presence of something that is greater than you, that is embracing you, that is you! Something that has been you all the way, as far back as you can think, long before the merry-go-round.

Oh, what has become of the merry-go-round by the way? There was one before but now it’s gone. But then again, now there is no such thing as “before” - all you’re able to experience is this present moment and the way it stretches in all directions. There is no past and no future, no here and no there, no me and no you, no misunderstanding and no understanding:

There is just this being, experiencing this moment.

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