The Eternal Present and Accomplishment

Today I read a comment about Zen.  The writer was saying that being in the present wouldn't work because, if we didn't anticipate the future, we wouldn't have any reason to get up in the morning.  I've often heard this objection.  But let's examine the assumptions behind it for a moment.

Do we really get up in the morning only because we anticipate the future?  What if we had nothing in particular happening that day or in the foreseeable future?  Wouldn't we still get up?  The body sleeps for seven or eight hours and it is rested.  It wants to move.  That is why we get up.  Only people who are very depressed or sick do not want to get up in the morning.

So why is this idea such a common one?  Because the mind wants to imagine that it controls the life.  And part of the way it maintains control is by telling this story.  The mind wants us to believe that its projects are the only thing that makes life worth living. 

Has anyone who has ever woken up to the Eternal Present found that he or she no longer wanted to get up in the morning?  The truth is that one wants to get up all the more -- because now life can be experienced first-hand, not just through ideas about it -- now life is more, not less, than the mind imagined before -- infinitely more! 

ENLIGHTENMENT AS THE ETERNAL PRESENT

I recently finished reading a little book called, Special Karma, by Merry White Benezra. I have no acquaintance with this author, but both she and I did Rinzai Zen in our twenties. Rinzai is the kind of Zen in which students are given progressively more difficult koans---word puzzles for which there is no logical answer---and have to discover a response that comes from their whole being, not just their mind. I never passed a koan myself, but I well remember the naïve belief that if I worked very hard, I would pass all the koans and attain enlightenment in no time!

Of course, more sophisticated meditators will be quick to point out that enlightenment is not in the future and that such thinking is therefore erroneous. In Soto, the other main branch of Zen, one just sits with, as Suzuki Roshi put it, “beginner's mind.” Becoming one with sitting itself, in the present, one feels no need to attain something called “enlightenment” in the imaginary future.

Yet sometimes this way of approaching meditation can also result in missing the most essential thing. Most people think of the “present” as an instant sandwiched between past and future. But the “eternal present” is something quite different: not a moment in time but beyond time (and yet encompassing all time). And so, although we may sit on a cushion and feel peaceful because, after all, few demands are being made on us in this situation, we don't necessarily discover the outside-of-time, deeper dimension of consciousness through this kind of practice.

At this point, someone may say, “But there is no enlightenment anyway: it's just a thought, an illusory goal to keep the mind engaged.” And yes, as a thought, a belief in a future event, enlightenment is a fiction.

Still, there is that moment when the bottom falls out of consciousness. (At least, that's one way to put it.) You thought your consciousness had a certain depth, a certain limit---and what a surprise to find out that it's infinite! That moment when we discover that we are both nothing and everything at the same time needs a name. Some call it “enlightenment”; others might opt for “awakening.” The word doesn't much matter. But to the extent that we are thinking in time, this “event” happens to us. Only when the mind ceases for a moment and we discover that the “real” world is beyond the mind do we see that the idea we had of enlightenment, like all other ideas, is a creation of thought.