For much of my life I’ve been consumed by a sense that I needed to use my time carefully.
Partly this arose from a 35 year dedication to an Eastern philosophy that taught the purposes of human life were, first, self-realization, which led to the ultimate purpose, god-realization. Meaning, after realizing ourself as immaterial soul, we then could make a supernatural journey to eternal existence with God.
Whew! I feel kind of exhausted just describing what used to be how I viewed the purpose of my life.
Serious stuff. The course of my life after death depended on how well I attended to the vows I took at the time of my initiation into this mystical path: hours of daily meditation, no alcohol or recreational drugs, vegetarian diet, no sex outside of marriage, living a clean and moral life.
I worried that I wasn’t using every moment sufficiently wisely. I knew that I had to perform my duties as a husband and father, since I loved my wife and daughter, and didn’t want to let them down. So there was a tension between what I saw as my spiritual life, and what I saw as my worldly life. I wasn’t fanatical about my chosen religion, but I also didn’t want to shortchange the commitment I’d made to my guru.
Even after I’d deconverted from that religion, I still felt that I needed to make my remaining moments count. You know, the “bucket list” sort of thing. What did I want to accomplish before I kicked the bucket, which is slang here in the United States for dying? This created another kind of time pressure, given that I tended to divide my life into frivolous (watch TV) and meaningful (write a blog post) activities.
Thankfully, I’m less inclined to make that sort of division now.
Increasingly, any particular moment seems as important as any other moment. No longer believing in an immaterial Self or Soul helps with this, since who I am now is all that I’m ever going to be. So does my secular disbelief in free will, to be distinguished from my previous religious belief in karma, since what I do at any moment is simply what the universe has determined I do at that moment.
Near the end of Jo Marchant’s book, In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment, she mentioned a book by Dainin Katagiri, Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time. I liked the title, and what Marchant said about the book.
Dogen is notoriously difficult to understand, particularly if starting from a western perspective, because he requires such a different way of thinking about what time even is. One person who translated Dogen’s ideas was the Zen Buddhist teacher Dainin Katagiri. In a book called Each Moment Is the Universe, Katagiri described a cosmos that can only be seen from within, so there’s no external framework or stage.
Nothing lasts beyond the moment, he said, apart from ‘conditions’ that shape how each moment leads to the next.
This reality is essentially unstoppable, dynamic change: creatures live and die; firewood becomes ashes. But this flow of experienced moments is not the same as what we normally think of as ‘before’ and ‘after’. The neat, ticking timelines that we imagine running back into the past and forwards to the future are continually being made and remade along with everything else.
Katagiri also argued that because all life is fundamentally connected, what arises in a moment is not just a particular being or perspective, but all of existence. ‘Right now, right here — all sentient beings come together into the moment and a vast world opens up: past, present, future, earth, trees, planets, moons, and suns.’
Imagine the miracle of the Big Bang being repeated millions of times every second, too fast for us to capture or comprehend. In the flash of every instant, all perceived existence arises at once.
I think it’s fascinating to consider these views in relation to the scientific perspective we’ve been exploring, that all life forms enact their own worlds from moment to moment, in a way that’s constrained by their interconnected evolutionary and biological history.
…You can think of all these perceptions and predictions — worlds upon worlds — as hurtling in and out of existence, too vast and too fast for any of us to capture or comprehend. Dogen called this ‘impermanence’. Nothing has an independent existence, he insisted, and nothing lasts beyond the moment.
Well, earlier tonight I watched TV while eating my dinner. Then I turned to writing this blog post. Next I’ll head off to my habitual hot bath and reading a thriller novel. Each moment arose exactly as the universe determined. Of course, I’m part of the universe, impermanent just as everything else is.
I don’t choose my moments. Nor do they choose me. We simply arise together. Then pass away together.
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I like the preamble of this blog, it says a lot about how one’s mind can and does evolve and open up to contemplating the realities of life, not just Brian’s but everyone’s – unless of course, we are trapped in the cycles of abstract beliefs, hopes and expectations.
I’ve read Dainin Katagiri’s book ‘You Have to Say Something’, but not this one about Dogen’s thoughts. In the past, I enjoyed the books of one of his dharma heirs – Steve Hagen. Particularly, Hagen’s book ‘Buddhism Is Not What You Think’.
Interesting that Marchant likens Katagiri’s (Dogen’s) views to the ‘scientific perspective we’ve been exploring’ in that: “In the flash of every instant, all perceived existence arises at once.” And, “…all life forms enact their own worlds from moment to moment.”
This all accords with the writings of folk like Tollison and Saltzman, who stress that the present moment is all we can ever really know. Also, if we are at all honest with ourselves, this is what must be obvious, though this ‘now moment’ is always being overlayed by the stream of thoughts, beliefs, views and ideas.
If meditation has any value, perhaps it is just this – revealing the reality of the present moment. But it is difficult, given that our minds and experience continually convince us that time moves from the past through the present to the future. How wonderful to know that we are creating this now, this universe every moment, this living – even death, then is part of the impermanent now.
The more you remove me from your situation then you can start to remove yourself. Then the less I, me, mine or ego, the more time for timelessness. Like John the Baptist said , the one who comes after me will be 10 times as great. I wish I could go back in time and teach Jesus and John to keep their heads.
A couple of relevant quotes from Dainin Katagiri: –
“If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today. We always live now. All we have to do is entrust ourselves to the life we now live.”
“Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security. That is why in Buddhism we don’t try to escape from impermanence; we face time itself in our daily living.”
Oh there’s always been a lot of fake Buddhists around too. But the type of guru that becomes a professional preacher is like the infomercial of Sadguru. Now that’s an interesting cat I wouldn’t mind having for a friend but he doesn’t know anymore than I do, he just has a better agent. But the gullible public are the same people who put the current administration into power. You want to know about a moment of eternity that seems to last forever try kicking heroin. Then you’ll be free free at last and glad that moments don’t last forever. Or even 3 days or even 3 weeks. But we still have three lifetimes as backup if it takes longer. Gurinder said that he was getting migraines. But that was 20 years ago. No telling what he’s getting now.
If you can’t stop your mind, but you can get into the habit of living in the space, attending to the space between thoughts, then you can build up the habit of not thinking and being right here and now.
Or more precisely, becoming conscious of that stillness between thoughts, and less so of thought. That is really living in the present moment. Thoughts came from somewhere, and they are moving somewhere else, pushing us usually. Thoughts don’t live in the present.
But that space, that you can expand just by attending to the now and submitting all the rest to your own Master, that is how the distance between you and the creation, and God and everything here disappears. Then you really are moving in an instant where there is no time at all, just eternity. When your consciousness rises above thought (or between it) time disappears. There is no time in “now”.
This is what all that work on “the path” is about. Eliminating the distance between you and the one you Love. And of course the easiest way for most of us is to love someone, our Master, more than ourselves. More important than all our worries and all our rotten logic.
That happens to one degree or another in many ways. And in that moment of love, time evaporates. A single moment is its own eternity.
What you attend to. What you practice attending to.
Could raise you up, or it could make you miserable. You pick.
Find someone you love more than yourself. Get lost in their eyes.
Oh definitely, get lost!
This is like the guy who makes much of having quit drinking, but who is always hitting the bong. One metaphysics traded for another is where you are.
Please stop the Ramana Maharshi act, claiming you don’t believe you have a personal will, and that you don’t believe your every action has moral consequences.