Surprised and stunned, almost, I am this morning as I contemplate something ‘that happened’ recently. Funny thing this, as everything is happening now simultaneously, the organization of reality, the way the brain and awareness join together to display this view before and all around me, including within me. And yet there is something I’ve so commonly accepted as real, something called the past and the ordering of the past. I stand in pause here in relationship to the nature of this emerging consciousness.

What is memory but a dancing of consciousness related to and organized in a way that somehow feels familiar in that moment? Can it be said that the past is memory? Can it be said that we can access the past, as if to measure something of the now against it? I found myself stepping into that field and recognized a Ticket Taker there, wanting a fee for passage, an agreement that how I remember something is reliable enough to exchange against, as if it were a store house that had every protection against any of the contents changing, diminishing, or perishing, as all tangible things do.

How often have I left something ‘behind’ me thinking, assuming, believing that it would still be there to lean into another time when I might need it again? Such is the nature of the conditioned mind. And isn’t a wonder that we rely so heavily on something that is completely unreliable?

I find I’m drawn to this image of the Ticket Taker. The word ‘ticket’ had some energy for me and I looked it up to find that it came originally from the word etiquette or ‘a list of ceremonial observances of a court’, such that a ticket is a ‘permit’ issued by some body or a set of measures to uphold. I’m intrigued how readily that this ticket taker archetype resonates with the feel of the conditioned mind. It’s as if there is a doorway into the conditioned mind that I could pay my ceremonial observances to in order to get entry or not. Thanks to the Ticket Taker today, I chose to pause and not to appease the court, this particular court of the recent past, leaving what is and what was to simply commingle in their mutual simultaneity.