Traffic

Once upon a time, I was living near the Presidio, an old military base and cemetery adjacent to the San Francisco Bay, and there was a charming little city park on its outskirts with a serene and picturesque water feature a few blocks down from my parent’s house, called Mountain Lake Park.

I would often walk the dogs there, and behind the lake, near an abandoned VA hospital, there was a place where one could view all the traffic flowing to and from a tunnel leading up to and away from the Golden Gate Bridge.

One day I found a good place overlooking the road to rest and watch the cars coming and going, and that gave me an opportunity to investigate this mind. Given my somewhat eccentric neural wiring, this respite was to provide the first initiation into the esoteric significance of watching traffic: everything may be in perpetual motion, and yet the witness remains unmoved. The dogs – they just sniffed around for a while and then sat down next to me, blending into the experience without complaint.

The second initiation was like a time-release capsule, because it took some time for the dawning realization that each car was my own thought form, and this recognition in turn led to the third initiation, which is not an idea, a sensation, a memory, or even a perception. Even now, it is not unlike Attar’s drop of water, the secret of which all is formed, and which still is to be pondered over.

All of these initiations happened, but nothing was different as a result. The traffic flows both ways even now, I reckon. It is not good or bad traffic, except to the interpretive mind. Cars go into the tunnel and disappear. Cars emerge from the tunnel and speed by. It is all changing, and no two vehicles are exactly the same.

Each blur of color and motion is an apparently separate story with its own history and destiny, but all of these stories are interconnected, and in essence, all are my own story, the story of consciousness and what it projects. Indeed, why even insert an “I” or “mine”? Isn’t that a rather superfluous addition after all?

There is a beginning-less stretch of traffic, and it never seems to end. This whole stretch of traffic is one piece of light, and includes the whole functioning totality of manifestation, both visible and invisible. It is neither seeking nor non-seeking; it flows, because that is what and how it is — liquid light, flowing beingness. What appears in awareness is not separate from awareness.

If I were to say it is Love, this would also be true, but not in the way mind understands. I am the traffic, but none of it is me. Realizing this, it is not so difficult to let go of mind, and all of its distracting multi-colored traffic. This would not be the end of the matter, however.

In fact, this very mind which comes and goes, which seeks and strives, which wheels along on a Sunday Drive, is also Love — the groundless, rootless open essence of all thoughts, appearances, and traffic.

I love this mind, this mind of Love, and so I release it back to itself, stand up, and walk back home. Love walks home to itself, and it is only Love which receives itself there. Likewise, out on the highway of Love, Love drives back and forth across the bridge of itself, all on a small blue ball that circles a shining star in a solar system adrift on the outer edge of a spinning galaxy, a luminous wonder afloat in one universe among so many, more numerous than grains of sand on an infinite shore. Amazing, eh? What more is there to say?