The late Japenese Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama, in Opening the Hand of Thought, tells of being in the country and seeing a hill with trees on its side. He was able to see a temple through the trees. He asked a local villager about it. The man said the previous temple burned down, and this rebuilt temple was on a much smaller scale.
Guided by the villager, Uchiyama climbed a large stone stairway. Reaching the end, he looked at a large-scale temple, not small at all and as though not built recently. He wondered about what the guide had told him and asked when the temple had burned down. The villager said in the 13th Century.
Uchiyama burst out laughing, for the villager's aggrieved tone had indicated to Uchiyama that it had burned down recently. The villagers, generation after generation, had bequeathed the memory of the former temple and its loss to them. They were still carrying that loss, as though recent, present. In the present, some seven hundred years since, they were stuck to the grieving, or, maybe better, the grief was sticking to them.
The villagers could not well appreciate the present temple, imposing and beautiful, for it was not some other way, another temple: not the first temple. The present temple was not the memory, it stood before them. The memory was more important. The sadness of a loss was more real to them than the gift of the present.
Uchiyama relates this to our being fixated on the past, which keeps us from appreciating life here, now. Life is alive right where you are reading this, nowhere else. You can feel aliveness where you are now reading this, if you are prepared to do so.
* * *
The self is the universal self, the whole self. Some call it soul or spirit but say we have a soul, or spirit, as though it lives inside a body. My body was cut open several times, and no one found a soul or spirit inside.
You and I are not souls, we are the soul, for the self is a whole manifesting as parts, as a tree does. We are spirit. A tree displays roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and some trees with flowers. Treeness is for the tree is. Without treeness, there would be no tree. And the tree does not live in the past of trees or its own past. It is solely, wholly present.
We can live like trees. That is why we engage a spiritual path, to grow to be more and more like trees. We have been trained not to live like trees, so we train to live like trees. Few live like trees, so we do not have much around us to encourage us or validate our effort. Most persons would not want us to live like trees. They would think it odd. I am still learning to live like trees. The more like a tree I live, the more free and joyful, the more in love. Are you learning to live like a tree?
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Generations pass down happenings, fact or fiction or partly both, from long ago as though they happened to us, or, at least, we are to act as though they did, such is our identification with what we are taught and told. And we each can be caught by what we see to have happened to us in our past. Rather than live from self, we live from memory, collective or personal. Memory - thought evoking emotion - clings to us, and we to it.
This clinging dilutes our experiences and cramps life. We can live inside memories esteemed secular or sacred, personal or collective, right or wrong. That is a small world - better, a closet.
* * *
The past is sticky, though it remains thought. When we hold to it, it sticks to us, and we stick to it. It can feel more real than what is right before us. Persons can live decades, until death, hugging a remembrance that only sustains misery.
Hugging to the past, we live in a fiction, we become fictional. This fixation on what was can happen as persons or groups of persons, like religions and nations. We forfeit authenticity when losing ourselves to collective identities. The universal self is forgotten.
We can, however, honor what was without merging with it or manipulating it to make us feel loyal and chosen - as opposed to others who appear unlike or think unlike us. The past is not a refuge, no matter how sacred or right we claim it is.
* * *
A man my dad worked with could not stop clinging to his mother, who had passed on. He dreamed and dreamed about her. Finally, in a dream, she told him it was time for him to let go of her. He did, and the dreams came to an end. He could honor her memory without clinging to her memory. His dreams were a sign of his not moving on with his life. Letting go meant coming into the present and, yes, not forgetting or ceasing to love his mother, but a new relationship with the memory of her - and, I say, with her, too.
* * *
How sad that people huddle together in ideological prisons - thought gangs - affirming each other in an us against them elitism - religiously, politically, racially, sexually ... - it is godless, though often aligned with the claims of godliness. These cultish groups appeal to a dead past and want a return to that which is no more and cannot be again. It is in the head, not in the heart.
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As for those who believe in God... Now... there is no God was or will be. If there is God, God is. That God is, is not what you think or can think God is. All you think about God comes from the past and what others have said, written, and told. You have not one original thought about God, as you do not have an original thought about yourself. So, you will not enjoy intimacy with God, yourself, or anything in your mind, only in the heart. The mind is filled with past, the heart is present. Do you see?
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photographs.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
