Thursday, November 13, 2008

In This Moment!


It is amazing how I can run away from this moment. Dash off into the disgusting past or fearful future. All imaginings. This point in time, this moment, can heal the past and inspire the future, for the present holds everything. Wishes and memories hold nothing but fear and illusion. Peace is inside you; the externals are illusions and demons to distract from who you truly are.


--digital painting by Tim, 2008

5 comments:

Cow Sock Arm said...

What is his face? It's granite if it is time!

Cow Sock Arm said...

Or do the externals distract you until you see that they are truly what you are? Just that.

Cow Sock Arm said...

It is impossible to run away from this present moment. Some refer to the past as "gone" and the future as "not gone." Neither actually exists, and they are never truly seen, as you say. The present cannot be run from because it is you running away if you are running away, standing still if you are standing still. The present holds nothing. That is how it is everything. The present can do nothing to re-shape the past or inspire the future, because they are both this present moment. This present moment is a ohysical manifestation all around you, its movement is its breath- and just breathing- this moment and all its action is actually quite still (if you don't separate your self from it). There is no difference between externals and internals. They are precisely the same thing. Siddhartha Gotama said "existence is when the mind-system is aware and discriminating." This is why it is said that life is suffering. And this is why some desire to become extinguished, they have become aware that you can only enjoy life by embracing its many, constant deaths (births, in truth). Illusions (and demons) only exist when you differentiate your self from everything else. So you see there is no death. There is no birth. Our experience is pure transience, we define our selves with attachments, and no thought is truth. Breathing helps.
This is what I wanted to say to you the other day.

Anonymous said...

It's so hard to run way from this moment...you can but our brain cannot...

Cow Sock Arm said...

I've been perusing Bodhidharma's favorite sutra, the Lankavatara, and this is one thing I will break down from it here:

We do not see objective reality for what it is. We place meanings on the things around and inside our bodies, and we call these things ours, or theirs, or here, or not here, or animate, or inanimate. External objects are not real; they are shifting, blending aspects of self. We attach our self to ideas of it at a fix’d perspective point in time, so our self appears to be a bunch of things, when in fact it there is no it; there is just One. We trap our selves in a dualistic view, a fix’d perspective on an unfix’d world that is no home to us and keeps tipping us over because we don’t recognize ourselves as it, or One: one time, one place, one thing, one person, one concept, one all. And this is why it appears to shift.