stepping into the present

 

Hi, Jack, I´m back again. I would like to comment on your initial letter introducing this second course.

 

“If you set out to experience time, do you only experience the events that happen in time?” The zen tradition mentions a “beginners mind”. The zen saying is that “in the beginners mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” If I set out to experience time it seems to me that expressions as ‘beginners mind’ or ‘stepping into the present moment’ describe much more the kind of experience we are talking about. Very much like the Kum Nye instructions: “relax the sense of the “I” doing Kum Nye and let Kum Nye do itself.” This “doing itself” feeling seems to relate to the “experience” of time. The ‘subject’ is there but it is not “controlling”, is just present and open and curious and sensing and surprised by each moment. If I lift my arm controling the movement there is a sense of an “I” doing an “exercise”. But if an arm just floats by itself and there is awareness and stilness and a sense of surprise and ‘not knowing what comes next’… there is not a sense of an “I” any more, and there is not an “event” happening to me. You say that the subject only finds its home in linear time. Is it appropriate to say that the subject is the one who controls in the example given by me? It creates linear time out of a need to ‘control’?

Marcia