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The Past within the Present: Freedom from the Order of Time

One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain reasons for this joy, we can understand how the word “death” has no meaning for him: situated outside time, why should he fear for the future?

With such an experience of intimacy across time — one minute in duration for Proust and briefer for most students of the Way — there is recreated in us, in order that we might genuinely experience it, the person freed from the order of time.

Implicit in Proust’s account of “the person freed from the order of time” is the suggestion that our true nature consists of being free from time’s tyranny and that as we age and are corrupted by the world, we lose contact with the timeless essence that is in fact us. When we encounter our timeless essence, the word “death” has no meaning for us, and if we are “situated outside time” — which is to say that we are not other than the moment in its vastness — why indeed would we fear for the future? We are already it.

Our experience of bodily change and its irreversibility persuades us that time is passing. We see this in ourselves, and we see it in others. All of us are immersed in the mundane stream of birth and death, where we are swept up to death’s wall to be frisked and finally robbed of all that we have. In these senses the passage of time, which has all things passing away, is unquestionable, even axiomatic.

We are all subject to the ravages of passing time, and yet it is precisely in the midst of change and decline that we experience liberation from it. Any moment in time’s passage is — immediately — “the moment of all moments” whether we are there for it, or not — and we are mostly not.

We are all subject to the ravages of passing time, and yet it is precisely in the midst of change and decline that we experience liberation from it. Any moment in time’s passage is — immediately — “the moment of all moments” whether we are there for it, or not — and we are mostly not.

After his initial experience on tasting the few morsels of cake soaked in lime tea, Marcel investigates the experience, attempting to renew it. However, each time he tastes the tea it gives diminishing returns.  Surely, the truth lies within himself, not in the cup. The path opens right there with that insight.  

Examination of one’s mind is a good first step, but the truth is not within the reach of the intellect, as Proust demonstrates when he embarks on a remorseless analysis of the limitations of the intellect as it strives to come to terms with this profound experience. He tries to see how some moment from the dead past might have connected with the ecstasy occasioned by tasting a crumb of the madeleine, and this has him on the edge of abandoning his quest.

The vivid reality of Combray resurrected is timeless. The past comes to life as the present, even as it transcends both past and present. In terms of Proust’s novelistic vision, it provides a foreglimpse of the quest and the immense journey to reclaim the past that is À la recherche du temps perdu. However, Proust, consummate artist that he is, doesn’t dwell on this experience; rather he immediately plunges his protagonist back into the dissatisfactions and unrequitements of his mundane life. Likewise we let go of our own glimpses of the timeless and enter again the riptides of our daily life. We can’t and shouldn’t contrive to sustain the harmony.

“One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the person freed from the order of time” — how do you manifest your own freedom from the order of time?

“Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are.” Throughout our investigations of the timeless yet fleeting moment, we have given sense to the notion of the past within the present; now let us look at the less likely notion of the future in the present. 

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells

Slessor eschews linear clock time (the “time that is moved by little fidget wheels”) in favor of time envisaged as “the flood that does not flow,” which is to say a notion of time beyond any sense of movement or passage.
Time as evoked by Slessor conveys such dammed-up immensity and is a compelling image for the encompassing moment where — between the bell strikes of a ship’s hour — the poet lives many lives, as well as the one life of that roistering wild boy, Joe Lynch.

Many hundreds of years ago in an Arabian fairytale, a man dipped his head into a basin of magic water. In the few moments between submerging his face and withdrawing it, he dreamed that he had sailed on seven voyages, and was cast up in a shipwreck, captured by pirates, discovered a diamond as big as a turkey’s egg, married a princess, fought in many battles, and was brought to execution.
After he had lived this whole lifetime, he opened his eyes and shook the water from his face and found himself amongst a laughing group of people, with everything around him exactly as it had been before he had dipped his head in the water five seconds before.

Slessor uses this story to exemplify the theme of “a lifetime in a moment” — a prominent matter in this book — to evoke the notion that the whole span of a human life can be imagined and even vicariously experienced in a flash of thought as brief as the three-second interval between the double ding-ding and the single ding of the ship’s bell. Within that interval, a sequence from a very different time scale is interposed, compressing about thirty years of human life into those three seconds.

various insights into the nature of time — chiefly around the themes of the past within the present and the past as the present, as they occur in the writings of Dogen and the literary works of Borges, Slessor, and Proust.
A prevailing theme of this book has been the timeless immensity of this fleeting moment, which gathers in the limitless past and unimaginable future, while being not other than each of us: equally timeless, yet transient.

“A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments.”

Time is like a moving platform that man rides on. The problem, as Eliot sees it, is that we forget the sights, colors, people, and places that we encounter along the way. We cannot know what we do not seek

This is why we must revisit the places that we have taken for granted and learn to rediscover them. There, in the droning nuisance of cyclical folly, we are rewarded with the discovery that soul can only come to know itself in time.  

When we find true freedom, we are liberated from the burden of our separated self with its blinkered view of reality conditioned by its need to be in control. To find true freedom is to find intimacy with what is current, rather than darting about everywhere in the pursuit of a happiness that tends to be elusive, most especially when we pursue it.

How do you find true freedom in the challenging circumstances of your workplace?

The Zen Way comes down to us partly through stories, and this is especially true of the koan path itself. In its best expression, Zen is rarely literal — I am tempted to say, never literal. 

In Zen we don’t seek literal truth; rather, we seek the mythic as it comes to us through images and archetypes — whatever will inspire our lives and encourage us to deepen in the Way and to awaken. Phillip’s account, with its elements of mystery and fantasy, is just such an archetypal story.

Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and on and on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.

When we are ideologically driven and prone to rant, it is good to remember that the harder we try to drive our position home, the more inclined its opposite is likely to appear, if not in our own heart, then in the silence of our friends"

My great day came and went, I do not know how. Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.

“My great day” conveys the sense of a special or memorable day, a day long awaited — a day longed for. Such days pass, and pass all too quickly. Porchia refers to his great day, but in Zen terms “the great day” is each or any day, even a day when we feel miserable, confined, and cold. On such a day, the glory is not elsewhere — the rain darkens the veranda, my feet are cold. There is the haunting sense that Porchia with his image of the great day is invoking our life, which does not pass through childhood nor through old age.
The passing of Porchia’s great day evokes the world of contingency: his great day’s uniqueness, its singular unrepeatability. At the same time, the day’s not passing through dawn and not passing through dusk evokes the timeless.

Koans will change your idea of who you are, and this will require courage. If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.

On the hillside, he had felt quite certain that he was going to win. At that moment, in the wind and the vast land, he was small and unimportant, and this sense of his unimportance allowed him to be clear about what needed to be done. Being important now seemed to him to be just a prejudice that confined him.
Once he forgot about having a special point to his life, he felt remarkably free for an emperor. There were some complications. On certain days he considered leaving his room but couldn’t find a reason to. He still gave interviews at court before dawn but was sometimes beset by a sense of unreality. Shedding his old beliefs had not been so hard. He hadn’t done anything to achieve his new way of seeing things; it was a gift from wind and war. Having opinions about life—ideas about being an emperor, about his own dignity and the motives of his ministers, having to dislike this person and admire that one—pained him now; he could feel these familiar attitudes as walls crowding around him. Yet some understanding, he was certain, eluded him. He did what was necessary out of duty and didn’t mourn his old certainties, but he lacked delight. There had to be more to life than the freedom of pointlessness.

 He didn’t have the air of one deprived or poor; the main contrast with the ministers was not in how he dressed. In a place where everyone wanted something, he did not. The ministers’ rank was displayed by differences in insignia and dress; the sage made no claims about rank. He didn’t either push himself forward into the emperor’s notice or pull himself back into hiding. He stood quietly, and his presence affected the court until everyone fell silent. 

The old teachers thought that not to know is to step into life without repeating yourself. It is to forget the prejudices and comparisons that say, “I’m better than you, I’m worse than you, I’m good at this, I’m bad at that.” If you practice “don’t know” mind for long enough, perhaps you can learn how to be good at anything.
While emptiness is what’s left when you take away the thoughts and beliefs that you have constructed around an event, not knowing is a way to move in the absence of such thoughts. It’s a creative possibility. Not knowing who you are allows you to meet an event without pretending it is something else—something that happened before. Then you might experience just what is happening: something unpredictable, delightful, dangerous, safe—eating a taco or walking down the street

When something precious is damaged, almost everyone tries at first to mend it. For example, if you had had a terrible experience, or lost someone dear to you, you may think that you will not be able to survive or that you will never be happy again. It is easy to imagine that. However, if you rely on the inconceivable, you cannot know what will happen. What you can conceive of might take away your life. On the other hand, what you cannot conceive of might give you your life and even unexpected joy.

When a woman’s child died, she immediately knew that it would now be impossible to witness tomorrow and everything past tomorrow—high school graduation, marriage, grandchildren. Conceiving of things has its uses, but in this case, everything she expected led to pain. It was as if she were trying to wish the fan back into wholeness, or to imagine a way to fix the broken fan. However hard she tried, it couldn’t be restored. She found that she could only depend upon what was inconceivable.

When she accepted that her life was now outside anything she had ever imagined, there was no reason for living, and, at the same time, there was no reason why she couldn’t survive or feel joy. Many people say things like, “My children give my life meaning,” or, “My grandchildren give me a reason to live.” This mother discovered, on the contrary, that the search for meaning led to unbearable sorrow. She had to live merely for the sake of life, without justifications or achievements. She found that she was willing to do this. It also came to her that taking this path was generous to her daughter.

She could think of her daughter with happiness, the way she used to wonder about her child’s day in school. She could even speak with her child in her mind the way she did when she first knew she was pregnant. She did not have to think that her daughter’s life was flawed or incomplete or that it came out wrong in the end. The perfection she had seen in her daughter as a baby extended to the girl’s whole life, and even to her death. That was bringing the rhinoceros. Holding the thought of what should have or could have happened was trying to mend the broken fan. She was not who she had expected to be. In that way, she lived on and found a valuable life for herself. People often thought of her as kind and steady; she didn’t think of herself at all. This too was bringing the rhinoceros.

IT IS NATURAL to look for the things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in a now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life. 

When you observe common things closely they have an emphatic quality, a thusness that is like a charge around them and which is both beautiful and satisfying. To see the way the corners of the room meet or the light bounces off a floorboard is enough of a reason for life. Painters understand that the interesting object is the round glass, the box, the rusty down-pipe and that there is no need to reach for a meaning beyond what is visible. By their beauty, objects bring the eye of the beholder into contact with infinity.