WHERE IS IT?
Something is missing. We have this feeling everyday. Perhaps it is in our past, we think. We remember, then, all the events gone by, all the good times especially, such as that picnic with our family out at the lake when we were six years old, that baseball game when our team won against all odds, that first "serious" date in high school. The trouble is, there IS no past. Bring out the past and show it to me, the Buddha said. All there is is memory. Memory, though, is selective, hence unreliable. It is not in the end what is missing in our lives.
Well, then, perhaps what we are looking for is in our future. Eckhart Tolle, the contemporary spiritual teacher, explains that we are forever looking for the next thing, reaching for something out there in the next instant. The next moment holds the secret. Alan Watts tells us that we are programmed for the future, that what we are seeking lies in our first day at school, in our high school graduation, in our college graduation, in our first job, in our marriage, in our kids, in our grandkids, in our retirement. It is always just out of reach. Yet, bring out the future and show it to me, the Buddha says. Once again the problem is that there IS no future. All there is is anticipation, planning, expectation, which like the past is unreliable. This is to say, how can we know what our circumstances, much less we ourselves, will be like at a given point in the future, will be like even one hour from now. We may be dead by then.
No, what is missing is the present. What is missing for us is "now." Only the present exists, one breath, one heart beat at a time. “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle when he speaks of now as “Isness,” what actually "is.” Alan Watts says, “There’s no place to be but here and now. There’s no way to be anywhere else. Remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present," he says. "Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”
And in the present, in the "now," we find what finally we have been missing. It is happiness. We are naturally happy but rarely know it because typically we are every place other than now. Mahayana Buddhism states that nirvana is samsara. Happiness is everyday reality, which is to say, it is here, now.
Well, then, perhaps what we are looking for is in our future. Eckhart Tolle, the contemporary spiritual teacher, explains that we are forever looking for the next thing, reaching for something out there in the next instant. The next moment holds the secret. Alan Watts tells us that we are programmed for the future, that what we are seeking lies in our first day at school, in our high school graduation, in our college graduation, in our first job, in our marriage, in our kids, in our grandkids, in our retirement. It is always just out of reach. Yet, bring out the future and show it to me, the Buddha says. Once again the problem is that there IS no future. All there is is anticipation, planning, expectation, which like the past is unreliable. This is to say, how can we know what our circumstances, much less we ourselves, will be like at a given point in the future, will be like even one hour from now. We may be dead by then.
No, what is missing is the present. What is missing for us is "now." Only the present exists, one breath, one heart beat at a time. “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle when he speaks of now as “Isness,” what actually "is.” Alan Watts says, “There’s no place to be but here and now. There’s no way to be anywhere else. Remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present," he says. "Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”
And in the present, in the "now," we find what finally we have been missing. It is happiness. We are naturally happy but rarely know it because typically we are every place other than now. Mahayana Buddhism states that nirvana is samsara. Happiness is everyday reality, which is to say, it is here, now.
posted by Donald L. Simons at
8:17 AM
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