Are You Living in the Past?
Posted: Saturday, June 04, 2011
by e
Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation
There’s an old saying how a young man has no past so he drives fast cars to catch his future - and an old man has no future so he sits in his rocking chair trying to hold onto his past.
This has some truth to it. There comes a time when we get beyond the stage of reliving our past in actuality, and only relive it in memoirs. We either lack the energy, the money, or the interest to actually do it all over again, so we sit back and remember the good times. It’s amazing how the mind erases the bad ones.
What’s wrong anyway with living in the past or planning our future? It’s great fun! Planning a vacation is almost as good as taking one, sometimes even better. And what’s wrong with remembering our past? We might embellish it a bit as we get older, as the stories get better, but so what? What else do we have to do when we get old other than live in our memories?
But memories are bitter-sweet aren’t they? Old photos reveal how time changes everything, and how we can’t really hold on to much before time erases it. Just snapshots of a life that has passed as quickly as a flash of lightening, written on white sands with a tide rising. But there are other problems with memories and plans.
It’s not that memories and plans are bad per se, but when a person is trying to learn to meditate, memories and plans come up in the form of thoughts. We think about the past, we think about the future. Sometimes we think about the near future: (When is this damn meditation session going to end, my knees are killing me!) or the near past: (Wow, I just saw some brilliant colors!)
The problem with this is that when we stop to remember the colors, they disappear! When we move the mind by thinking, either about what just happened or what is going to happen, we completely miss this moment.
We take ourselves out of the moment where reality is happening, and place the mind into either a past or future fantasy. The past and future are always just a dream. The past is never exactly remembered as it actually happened, and the future, well, whatever you imagine it to be, it will be different from that. The only thing that is real is the now.
When a mind is not trained in meditation, the now happens much too quickly to notice. The untrained mind will catch it after it happened as a memory, and while it is remembering that last moment, it completely misses the reality of the next. So it never lives in reality, only in images of the past. That means the mind is constantly caught in copies and files, not originals, so to speak. Thought, all thoughts, are nothing but dead computer files. And as Einstein once observed, “Insanity (is) doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
There is never any true creativity through thinking. Thinking is a problem solver, a conflict solver, and as such is never creative. Thinking is not you, it is only a part of the mind that depends completely on memory. It is the part that creates an ego self. It can put the past together in different ways and seem creative, but true creativity is not that. True creativity happens when the mind is absent of thoughts and there is direct insight, Those are the AHA moments that we remember so clearly in our lives, usually where our life changed forever.
Why do you think writers, suffering from writers block, go into the forests and mountains by themselves? To empty their heads of all the baggage! To instill some new creativity! and it works.
When we learn to touch this thoughtless creativity, all kinds of new and amazing opportunities present themselves. No longer lost in the daze of memories, we jump off the rocking chair and dive into a mind that is as young as a new universe. No aging here. Aging in the brain? Yes, but never in the mind.
Mind is what continues after the body dies, and a mind cleared of the baggage and confusion of the past and future is a mind that continues in unbelievable ways and to amazing destinations. This is what the sages whisper about and the contemplative saints spend their entire lives searching for - the unencumbered mind that can see eternity in each moment. The unencumbered mind that comes face to face with the ultimate.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)As a teenager my mind was always in the clouds (so to speak) But there were times when I took walks in the forest to clear my mind. However I believe reality as we know it is responsible for our state of mind.
If we clear our mind of all the garbage it takes on through the course of a day we still have to face reality. "things as they are"Hi David, Thank you so much! I think the trouble is that most of us refuse to face reality just because it is so harsh. We look away and invent diversions and imaginations for our security. But there is no real security in that, we are just postponing the inevitable when we can no longer escape. Better, I believe, to face reality bravely while we can without escaping. This is what meditation is all about. Once we face it, we can transcend material reality and become totally free. This is the basis of true religion and always has been. You might want to check out my last comment to Bruce on my “Jesus is the SON OF GOD! The Buddha was, ho hum, merely a man article.
Best …….e
I guess I'm a control freak, I shudder at the thought of even one moment of unencumbered solitude from the trials and tribulations which life presents me with on a daily basis. I don't know, maybe I'm afraid of what I might find, who I may see, or maybe I'm just afraid I might not be able to come back. Either way like I keep saying, maybe someday, maybe sometime. Peace.Thanks David!
Who comes back to what? If we look at life realistically, the harshness of life, without escaping into illusion, we aren't quite as afraid not to come back. Also, if we have insight into what we believe to be ourselves - the one presumably in control - we see that such a thing does not exist. If we had control, we could tell our bodies not to age and become sick. Ego only exists as a fantasy in our Minds. Can you see the beauty of this? Not only is it true, but it relieves us of our imagined responsibility toward this fictitious self and towards its immortality. We become free from all of that. All the fear dissipates. The idea of a secure self, a me and mine, is replaced by moment to moment awareness, wisdom, and insight that knows no fear because fear can only be based on the future. In the reality of "now" fear has no foothold.I absolutely see the beauty in that, believe, respect, and even aspire to someday attain that, or even the overbearing desire to begin that journey, but it's like leaving a marriage that you are totally happy with for something that is better. You love that person with all your heart and would even give your life for them and you're abandoning them, almost unconscionable. Ok, maybe not that dramatic, hehe but it could be. Besides I'm not much of a "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence" kinda guy anyway. From where I'm standing home girl may have some warts, but she's beautiful to me. PeaceYou can hold on to the things that you are used to, and still become free. What will happen is that your attachments will almost unnoticeabley fade away as they are replaced with something more fulfilling and substantial. It's kind of like telling a little boy that he has to stop playing with his toys. He would become frightened because that's all he knows. But in a few years, he gains insight into merely toys, sees the irrelevancey of toys, and begins to get interested in the real thing. Know what I mean? Sit down every morning, do a few yoga stretches (keeps the body healthy) then watch your body breathing until you can know every in breath and every out breath for ten minutes, and in time, you will see what I mean.
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