When, if not now?

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Michael Gray

What does it mean to refer to the “now” as a “moment”?  After all it is always now, never not now.   As soon as I refer to a moment it seems that I am viewing time as broken into many moments, like the shards of a shattered mirror.  From there it is a quick jump to organizing those moments into a linear sequence of time fragments, each separated from all the other fragments, some of which lie in the past, some of which are waiting around the corner in the future.

Being located in a ‘now’ doesn’t seem to require this string of moments.  Feeling present in this now  feels like standing in a tower that overlooks a forest of time, and from there I can view the life of the world as it reaches across the horizon in all directions.

Moments seem more like tokens with which I  place my bets in the casino of wants and fears and broken promices.  It’s as if I need a bank roll to compensate for my exile from the forest of time.

If time is the dance of life. it sometimes feels like the dance of a robot programmed to do only the 2-step.  But on a good day, provided courtesy of time, my dance may become the natural expression of a sense that I am part of it all.   Then my small self  (which clings to  moments like a rat clings to the wreckage from a sinking ocean liner) no longer needs to search for a life-raft in time.  After all, in a time without moments, everything is already floating and there is nothing hidden beneath the surface.

Happy 2014.  which I hope will arrive like fresh snow on the branches of  our lives.

Michael G

 

 

About Michael Gray

I first started studying TSK in the mid 1980's and have since attended a number of retreats and workshops at the Nyingma Institute, in both TSK and Buddhist themes. I participated in the life-changing Human Development Training Program in 1991, and upon returning to Albuquerque co-founded an organization, Friends in Time (with a friend who has Lou Gehrig's Disease), which continues to serve people with similiar disabilities. I contributed an essay to "A New Way of Being"--the last one in the book--in which I describe how learning to honor who I have been has broadened and deepened my openness to present experience. I live in New Mexico with my wife and two sons.
This entry was posted in General TSK Discussions and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to When, if not now?

  1. Karin Tommack says:
    January 1, 2014 at 6:47 am

    Dear Michael,
    reading your notes it reminds me on my experience with practising the exercises 18-22 from the first TSK-book, which I was trying to do again and again. Often I thought my concentration and focus is not strong enough, but nevertheless each time a strong feeling of aliveness was arising in this very moment: it is difficult to describe, what is really happening. It feels like a floating in a somehow timeless moment with endless possibilities sparkling like stars in the sky.
    Wishing you a happy New Year with many timeless moments.
    Karin

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *