“We must never forget that nations and countries belong to their people, not to their governments. No matter how enduring or powerful they might seem at any given time, governments will come and go, but the people will always remain.” The Dalai Lama
I read the above quote from the Dalai Lama and it got me thinking about the whole idea of time. Many of us count on the certitude of some key words, because they help define our relationship to the world around us. We take great comfort in the precise nature of time, until we really think about it. It is actually a tool we use to navigate through our lives, providing order and sidestepping chaos.
There are two ways to look at words. The big one is their definition, easily found in dictionaries. However, what they mean to each of us is a singular kind of thing. This uniqueness changes as we change and stillness is one way to bear witness to this dance of meaning. I really can’t say for certain at what point in my life I started thinking about things like this. When I found my life falling apart at around thirty is probably good enough for this purpose.
For me, when the rules of my life game stopped working, I kept drawing the Go To Jail card. I had lost my footing, walking on the quicksand of uncertainty. I spent around a decade in therapy and somewhere in there, I began developing a friendship with the Buddha. I was not looking for God, just a way to redefine what I had taken for granted that no longer worked.
Therapy alters your thinking about your life, a proactive approach to change. To me, a Zen practice is a visceral, pre-conscious embrace of life as it is, not to be confused with obligatory acceptance. My mind was stuck in past patterns, which got reexamined on the couch, actually a chair. It is very liberating to be freed from the constraints of the past, but it is a matter of what you do going forward that counts. It is like pedaling really hard to get a better view and then, when you get there, you realize you are looking at a canvas with nothing on it.
Somewhere along the way, all of that internal activity led me to the cushion and trying to do nothing at all. I started writing my own dictionary, understanding there is a new edition with each breath. Myopia ever so slowly began to be replaced by a way of looking at things from a distance. The farther you get away, the clearer the view and the harder it is to describe. This sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. The difference between gravity and weightlessness changes how we get from here to there, but we still get there.
Being exposed to death at a young age, with the passing of my father, made me feel different than all my friends. Over time, this feeling grew, making me wonder what this life is all about. I was unsettled for many years because of it. Unknowingly, I was already on a path that descrambled my life omelette, taking me back to the egg itself. What I have learned is not meant for words. Explaining a riddle doesn’t answer it.
Yes, I know I am writing about all this, but these aren’t facts, they are ephemeral moments, transcribed with invisible ink. It is like describing the appropriate way to sit in meditation. While you can follow the physical description, there are no rules for your mind. The reason is because what you discover defies a formulaic description.
It’s kind of a funny business. The more you learn about Zen, the less you know. Sitting and learning were interconnected for me. It was about doing and thinking about the doing. What set me off this time was that quote from the Dalai Lama. It was about the long view of what we are all dealing with right now. I find myself falling into the trap of tracking one detail after the next and being absorbed by it, falling down the rabbit hole of knee jerk responses.
In my practice, when I initially came across the question of what was my face before birth, I was confused. The idea that all life is a continuum really threw me. Every single thing, from yesterday’s dinosaur to tomorrow’s blade of grass are connected, past, present and future are one. Now, the danger is spending too much trying to make sense of it. The antidote to all this is to just sit. Humility is a side-bar symptom of this way of looking at things.
Sometimes, I forget there are two ways to look at virtually everything in our lives. There is the small view, our every day, one- foot-in-front-of-the-other way to navigate in our world. It is like waking up each day and getting on the same merry-go-round. The truth is what you experience on the ride. For me, this singular way of engaging my world began to break down, leading me into therapy, while seeking something more for the balance of my time here. Closing in on my forties, the voice of mortality began to increase in volume, pushing me into places I was afraid to go before. I reluctantly went along for the ride to Who Knows?
One way to temporarily stop the ride is to dismount and sit quietly, shutting off the rhythmic, organ grinder and bringing the wooden horses to a halt. I sometimes wonder which came first, sitting and letting the mind run around in its own circle until it tires, or the big view.
When we are still, the mind is suddenly liberated. It is like shuffling the deck and turning over the cards in perfect order. Trying to find a place for ourselves in this infinite universe, with no beginning or end, takes us past mundanity to a magical place that defies definition. Like the Dali Lama, you look at what is going on right now and you see past it to a timeless time.
I need reminders from people like him and from the Buddha not to bury my spirit in the meanderings of the monkey mind. What happens every day is very important and it is impossible to remain unaffected by it. Trust me, I am not advocating for nihilism. In a way, it is almost the opposite. I am talking about taking away the mirror and asking you what you see.
Getting back to the dinosaur and the blade of grass, we are just visiting. Looking at time as some finite measure may help us get through the day, but we are equally as well served thinking about it as a story without end. You and I, we are part of the grand design, coming together long before we got here and continuing long after we leave. Sitting quietly, following the breath in and out, we get to see the invisible and hear the silence.
“Governments will come and go, but the people will always remain.”
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https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/17082257-sit-on-this