Mindfulness in a way is the opposite of grasping, or attachment, or identification. And it can go very, very deep when we allow ourselves, because what we start to see — if we slow down a little bit and pay attention — is how it is a kind of conditioned phenomenon, like a machine, the mind spins this stuff out in a very orderly way by habit — thoughts, fantasies and memories. The world works in certain conditioned patterns, and that’s it’s nature, and it’s all impermanent and quite ungraspable. Where is yesterday? What happened to your weekend? Where is it? What happened to 1984, your 20’s, or whatever it was — where did they go? They all disappeared, gone. Isn’t that an amazing thing?
It’s a very profound thing to start to be aware of life coming out of nothing and disappearing into nothing. A day appears for awhile, and then it’s gone. It can’t be grasped, it’s like a bird flying. You cannot hold time and fundamentally you can’t hold yourself.
–Jack Kornfield
A Mindful Life / Kathryn Harper
express : discover : renew : create
I must disagree with the view of the author in this instance, who asserts that the past and the future are “nothingness”. This leads to the definition of existence as only that which is “now”. My view is that the entire past and future are real, and are existing in the space/time dimensions, just as the “now-instant” is existing in the space/time dimensions. Mindfulness is actually an awareness of the co-existence of the entire space/time continuum along with the “now-instant”. The differences between the “now-instant” and the rest of the co-existence are that the future is difficult to perceive, and that the perception of the past depends on how one’s brain has dealt with the vast quantity of data from the past, in selectively filling its limited-capacity memory.
Bill
Interesting point, Bill. While the past and future may exist on a continuum, what attracted me about this quote is the reminder that the present is where we exist mostly. There have been times in my life where I thought mostly of the past or future, dreaming of anything but the moment I was in at the time, and I missed engaging fully in my life. Even now there are many times in a day where I leave the moment, i.e., become mindless instead of mindful. I like the reminder to be present.
And the other point this quote emphasized is that the past isn’t at our disposal. Nor is the future. They are “nothing” in that we cannot touch them, live in them, reconstruct them. They exist in one’s mind and possibly in another dimension we do not yet know how to access. Therefore, the place where being most fully exists is in each moment as it happens. That’s what I find interesting to ponder.
Yes, indeed, our “present instant” is given to us as the opportunity…indeed the necessity…of making a choice about our “instant activity”. It is an interesting feature of how choice opportunities continually unfold for us, as the sequence of “present instants” rolls forward along the time line.
The fact that the past is not at our disposal does not inhibit our memory of it, or our perception of it, in and of itself, but rather, it is the consequence of the way the human mind is organized and operational, that the past is partially obscured. It is also in the perception of the future that the human mind is not organized and operational to fully perceive it, although clairvoyance is the term given to those instances when a glimpse of the future is perceived.
I also think that leaving “the instant moment” and letting one’s mind wander, is not mindlessness, and is not to be disparaged…it is rather an opportunity for the mind…which, by the way, is always functioning….to operate with more options, options which are possibly more expansive, than one actually has when the sensory inputs of the “instant moment” demand a focus of the mind on the present.
Bill