Treeleaf Zendo

I will now teach you how to stop time, halting right in its tracks the rush of passing time from yesterday to today to tomorrow.

I will also demonstrate how to experience the timeless, as well as all time, pulsing in every moment of time.

It sounds hard, and perhaps a violation of the laws of physics. I assure you that it is neither, nor is it some magical, mysterious, mystical-miraculous other-worldly power. Rather, it is simply a matter of changing how we cut up, delineate, measure and experience time in the gooey stuff between our own ears. The result of doing that alone is truly magical, mystical and miraculous whether in this or any other world.

Time seems to wait for no man, as the seconds become days, months, years, lifetimes, and grand eras of universal time. Somewhere in there, we are granted 70, 80 or so years if lucky. The passing years show in every wrinkle of our skin. I know, having just turned 65, and put in for my government pension this week. Alas, I am sorry to say that my method will not stop that kind of aging at all, will not prevent wrinkles or arthritis, nor let you live a moment more than you do. On the other hand, it will make this life more peaceful, more poignant, which will at least make your years more pleasant and rich no matter how long or short your time in this world. You may realize that it is not simply a matter of long or short.

It will allow you to experience profoundly a face of reality whereby, even as the minute hands and calendar pages turn, there is something free of time in that turning. This facet is quiet and constant amid the change, unborn even as birth and death rise and fall. Though your skin grows flabby and bones flimsy, you are also this that never ages, never dies, never is born, the very ocean ever flowing on and unchanging even as the waves come and go. You are such waves, but you are also the whole ocean. The ocean is the coming and going. Someday, our personal wave will crash upon the shore of mortality, vanishing from sight. However, as the ocean, we flow on and on as this whole sea, and all the other waves too. The water is not something with which we merge because the wave has never once left or been other than the sea all along. In fact, there is no solid “thing” to call the ocean, nothing to grasp and cling to as an idea, for its waters are just change and motion itself, currents and tides which never can be nailed town, held in the hands or frozen for long. Even so, the change itself is as timeless as the ancient ocean, while the timeless is precisely passing time and change.

I am not speaking of the “relativity” that Dr. Einstein discovered when someone moves relative to the observer, most noticeable at near the speed of light or the black hole’s event horizon. Nor is this insight about the fact that reality, at some level, must have a timeless basis to it, a startless start “south of the south pole,” (unless, as the old saying going, “it’s just turtles upon turtles upon turtles of initial causes, turtles all the way down.”) No, the special power I will teach to you will work much the same even if Albert was absolutely wrong, time was fixed or relative, flowed forward or back, and had a first start or not. Maybe it would not work in a totally stagnant and frozen universe, a world truly without time, because nothing could. In that sense, we need life, change, growth, passing events and time in order to taste the timeless.

The technique is surprisingly simple, and not unrelated to the common experience that any of us might have of time’s creeping when we sit in the dentist’s chair or watch the second hand before school recess, while time flies past when we’re having fun. I recall my late mother telling me, as she grew aged, that the years seemed to rush faster later in life, like sands through the hourglass. I consider myself fortunate because, through the practice of Zen, I learned not to experience my own aging that way. Each moment is still, and wholly just what it is, each grain of sand the only grain, all grains, all the other grains, the whole hourglass and some open boundless that holds all that … even as the sands continue to fall relentlessly.

The secret to this technique is a truth known to Zen Masters and, these days, neuro-scientists too. Namely, none of us can experience time (or any aspect of this world, including the things and other people in it, even ourself) except as virtual models fashioned in the “stuff” between our ears. We create a model of past/present/future in various regions of the human brain, and thus we can learn to remodel and change that inner model to alternative perspectives very different and very contrasting with our normal experience of measures of time, yet also thoroughly valid, useful, verifiable and freeing each in their own way. How?

We know that the past was “real” because we were there, whether as children or last week, or even a moment ago. We can read about even older times in history books, or see it in the bones dug up by paleontologists. That is not to be denied. On the other hand, the past can also be described as “now,” but back then. The past is not separate from this razor’s edge of time we experience, as past becomes future, but was precisely this very razor’s edge of change whether ages, years or mere seconds ago. The only reason that it seems apart is because memories and imagined scenes of ancient kings and dinosaurs are fashioned in our heads. Yes, you were that baby or teen, but when you were so, it was still today … much as a boat crossing the Atlantic from Paris to New York is still the same boat, on the same sea, whether sailing near the French shore, or the American shore, or any place in between. Those bygone days may once have been in one sense, there is no doubt. But they also have aspects of being memory, a self-created dream you now dream. Those days are now gone … but neither did they come, and there was never a place apart for them to go (not any more than the sea comes and goes as the boat moves here to there).

This is even easier to see when we consider the future, which has not yet happened, and thus exists thoroughly as imagined “what ifs,” “maybe possiblies,” “best and worst case scenarios,” dreams and dreads and other little films of what might come that we direct and play in the theatre of our neurons. In fact, whatever comes tomorrow, it will also be “now” then too. Where is the future right now if not just in your own mind? The details of what those “now, just laters” will be exist as inner images even fuzzier and more fictive than the remembrances of all the “now, back thens.”

Thus, finally, having taken so much of your precious time, it is now the moment to cut to the chase:

We sit Shikantaza, Just Sitting Zazen, with no goals, no demands, no needs for something thereby to happen. That does not mean, however, that nothing happens. Quite the contrary, something wonderful happens when we untangle, release and let go our thoughts and emotions about yesterday, our thoughts and emotions about tomorrow. We let them be, we let them drift from mind without need for our consideration. We put down the clock, the calendar, the passing sun and other measures.

What then?

One might think that, at such point, one sits in the “now.”

However, let me now remind you of something else, too often and easily forgotten by Zen folks hoping to be “in the now:”

What need for “now” when there is no longer a “not now” with which to compare? It is something like asking about the need and existence of a “dog house” when there never was a dog. Thus, please untangle, release and let go of even some “now.”

What then? Better said, what then is not?

Furthermore, no longer think of time and its passing as somehow separate from here, from you. It is here, for here is the only place. (Please untangle, release and let go all thoughts of here vs. not here, here or there. They too are a dog house with never ever a dog.)

Even if merely for a timeless moment … with no worries about how long or short this measureless state might last … just be so. A single measureless moment is enough for, quite literally, it embodies the infinite passing years.

What is more, one can introduce additional, perfectly valid, alternative mental models of time (and furthermore, learn to experience several at once, as if living all these times and timeless in a single instant): One can taste that each ticking tock of the clock holds all the infinite ages (as if all time and space were stuffed inside), and also that each moment is all other moments (such that last Tuesday in July at 4:00 –is right now– December at midnight in 1492, which –are right now– simultaneously ten billion years ago or a trillion years hence, just in other shape and guise.) Each moment is all moments, the whole thing, each other moment and thing, and something timeless at the heart of all moments. In fact, you can know profoundly that this timeless-time and all its many moments stand not somewhere distant from you, but are your beating heart. Each single beat -is- 1492, now and a trillion years hence. Heck, there’s even a model where the future flows into today and the past as much as the past flows into tomorrow!

Time stops, with no before or after. Each moment is complete, no other moment to add.

But even with such insights into your personal identity as these many ways to know times and timeless open to you, we are not done. Why?

Because, the clock is ticking, the Zendo bell is ringing, we cannot just sit here wasting the whole day! There is food to put on the table, work to be done, laundry to bring in before the rain falls or the sun sets, children to put to bed. We have wrongs done yesterday that need to be learned from and righted, as well as crisis to prevent and projects to work toward for their realization tomorrow. The timeless -is- passing time, just as the sea -is- the currents, tides, rising and falling waves. Knowing that this world has a face free of clocks and calendars does not mean that there are not clocks to wind and deadlines looming. All is true at once.

Thus, our task now is to live in this world of passing time, for a finite number of passing years, though hopefully now realizing that time does not pass, and this passless is all the passing happenings. Though not a moment can ever be wasted, do not waste a moment of it. Use your timeless time well.

Thank you for your time.

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again.
Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past.
You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood
which fully includes past and future,
and is independent of past and future.
Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash
which fully includes future and past. …
They are like winter and spring.
You do not call winter the beginning of spring,
nor summer the end of spring.
– Master Dogen

Arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation.
This moment is the koan.
When practice and realization are without complexity
then the koan is this present moment.
That which is before any trace arises,
the scenery on the other side of time’s destruction,
the activity of all buddhas and patriarchs,
is just this one thing.
– Master Keizan