I’ve just received a post by David Whyte in my email inbox which relates to this conversation.
“Now' by itself is always an impoverishment; however, ‘now' in conversation with the way the past lives and breathes inside us while our future is felt as a beautiful, ravishing and inviting stranger, can lead us into extraordinary new territory and extraordinary relationships. Holding all three qualities of past, present and future might be a more accurate, realistic and a more consoling understanding of ‘Now’; an understanding that enables us to live a life more easily reached and more possible for all of us.”
I really like the expanding temporal bandwidth idea, in a world where we're constantly being told not to have a sense of the future and the past, because Ram Dass said 'be here now'! Of course this is wisdom too, but like everything, it's too simple if taken literally. Perhaps this is part of what has always drawn me to Indian art, and to working with ancient artefacts, the sense of humans living through time..
This is so true Tamsin, and I think it's because secular Westernised 'mindfulness' practice is stripped of its spiritual contexts. When you sit to meditate in the temple at Samye Ling monastery you are looking up at a wall of a thousand buddhas in front of you, one for every 'kalpa', or aeon; a veritable football stadium of golden Buddhas! They are a (spectacular!) visual reminder that the historical Gautama Buddha was just the Buddha of our particular aeon, and that there have been thousands of others, arising in each 'kalpa' reaching out into an almost inconceivable and dizzying depth of time. So the 'be here now' of sitting practice is understood within this far deeper sense of time.
I’ve just received a post by David Whyte in my email inbox which relates to this conversation.
“Now' by itself is always an impoverishment; however, ‘now' in conversation with the way the past lives and breathes inside us while our future is felt as a beautiful, ravishing and inviting stranger, can lead us into extraordinary new territory and extraordinary relationships. Holding all three qualities of past, present and future might be a more accurate, realistic and a more consoling understanding of ‘Now’; an understanding that enables us to live a life more easily reached and more possible for all of us.”
This is wonderful Alison. Thank you for this. I’ll definitely follow it up and read in full!
Brilliant, every word!
Thank you, but I stand on the shoulders of past giants and only scratch the surface of their deep wisdom.
I'm betting we could have a beautiful conversation about this over a cup of tea 😉
Definitely!
I really like the expanding temporal bandwidth idea, in a world where we're constantly being told not to have a sense of the future and the past, because Ram Dass said 'be here now'! Of course this is wisdom too, but like everything, it's too simple if taken literally. Perhaps this is part of what has always drawn me to Indian art, and to working with ancient artefacts, the sense of humans living through time..
This is so true Tamsin, and I think it's because secular Westernised 'mindfulness' practice is stripped of its spiritual contexts. When you sit to meditate in the temple at Samye Ling monastery you are looking up at a wall of a thousand buddhas in front of you, one for every 'kalpa', or aeon; a veritable football stadium of golden Buddhas! They are a (spectacular!) visual reminder that the historical Gautama Buddha was just the Buddha of our particular aeon, and that there have been thousands of others, arising in each 'kalpa' reaching out into an almost inconceivable and dizzying depth of time. So the 'be here now' of sitting practice is understood within this far deeper sense of time.
That's exactly it, that sense of time stretching back, and often a sense of cycles rather than a straight line too...