Time Traps

(part three)

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.
--Book of Ecclesiastes

All of us are trapped in time. We are too afraid not to accomplish our schedules. We are scared not to live our lives the way we want it, since Life is really too short. So we have tried to make things that can speed up our daily concerns. We multitask, almost wanting to grow more hands than what we have. We have made things instant. We do this in a belief that we don't want to waste so much time.

We are also trapped with how we had spent time. We dread many things in our past that we want to bury them in oblivion. And we tend not to risk because we do not want the past to happen again. We don't want to suffer again from the mistakes we made. We fear that history might repeat itself, so we spend our time preventing the future to repeat our past. All of our actions are driven by the fears of the past and longings of the future. We hardly live in the present.

And how often do we fix people in our minds as if they are still the same people we happened to meet in the past? We criticize, blame, mock, and badmouth them because of the belief that they could not change for the better. And it's funny because we also do these more to ourselves.

Let's again observe the two monks. Troubled and worried, the young monk burst in anger because of two reasons. First, he felt the old monk did something bad; and second, he thought that what the old monk did might hurt them. The young monk is trapped by his illusion of time: the baggage of the past mistake, and the burden of future embarrassment.

We are often in such a mindset that drags our lives and keeps us from living in fullness. Our past baggage makes our hearts heavy, keeping all the resentments, regrets and remorse we have created out of the experiences. Thus, we often recognize them as fate and we see ourselves victims. With these fears in mind, we are so afraid that we think Life won't spare us in the future, and we continue to act as if the past might happen again. And our future becomes just a projection of our past conditioning. Life becomes stagnant in this third universal form of attachment: living in the past and the future.

Time is not some kind of a reference point, in which we only begin to play between past and future. We regret the things we did, blame others for their shortcomings, or maybe we want to repeat the wonderful memories that have left us behind. We think that we must invest on our future, avoiding troubles that we think we cannot avoid. To live this way robs us of the precious gift of the present.

Indeed, Life has its own time, which is very different from ours. We have been living our lives trapped in an illusive time that our calendars and clock show us, and we haven't really experienced what time really is. Time is a misery to someone who runs before deadlines, while it is a mystery to someone who lives his or her life moment to moment. This poses us puzzling questions: What makes time difficult to grasp? Why is it so precious? It's about time to learn more about time.

In the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the author (who was purportedly claimed as Solomon) contemplates on the nature of time. As you read it, it sounds like time is a matter of cycle, of repetitive events that sooner will bore us down. But as it nears the middle of the chapter, it shifts into a new way of seeing: "He [God] has made everything beautiful in his time." (Ecclesiastes 3:11) It leaves us a paradoxical view of time. Our sense of time that makes us shrink into limited deadlines would open us up to God's time, where every minute is an eternity. To do this is to allow the Now now.

This is the premise of Eckhart Tolle's famous book The Power of Now. Tolle elegantly teaches us that Now is "the precious thing there is". To be worried about past and future stops us to see the value of our Now, because this is the only time there is. Allowing the Now is to leave behind the past and future as fragments of our illusory view of life, and living the reality as it is. Letting go - detaching - of our time traps makes us more attached to the most important things in Life. And that is to Love.

Time is the word Rick Warren uses to spell Love in his book The Purpose-Driven Life. Gerald Jampolsky, author of Love is Letting Go of Fear teaches us the same thing, that "our only reality is Love." To Love is experienced neither in the past nor in the future. We can only begin Loving by appreciating that people, thing, and circumstance are all found only in God's time, in this present moment - only Now.

We are the Now that exist in this time and space. Our presence is the present we give to this Life, to the people we Love, to the purpose we live. Let not each minute be wasted on anxiety and worries of future, nor on guilt and blame of the past. Let us not be trapped by the time of our clocks and calendars. Our lifetime is far more valuable than the requirement of chronos, the time of the world. Living our life and being Love are the becoming of kairos, the time of Love. To Love is not to Love yesterday or tomorrow. To Love is to Love Now. This is the only time we have.

Writing about this topic takes my precious time. But the time I have spent is the amount of Love I am willing to express. The poet Kahlil Gibran asks us: "And is not time even as Love is, undivided and paceless?". Time and Love are both inseparable, and giving our time for Love never traps us, but brings us freedom. For whenever we spend our time in this very moment is our eternity of living in the sacred moment of Love.

Living with Strings

(part three)

Anger and fear entail the need to control. To feel angry and fearful is to seek for external power, a power that can gain others' attention towards the one who feels weak and insecure. This is a common experience for us. Being enraged and terrified, we have the tendencies to act illogically, as we attack others and protect ourselves from the illusion of danger of not being in control. And often we justify our actions like they suppose to happen for the sake of maintaining our external mandate over things, events, and people.

We are so fixated that we think that life do not change. This is one of the foremost illusions of attachment. Our attachment towards a monolithic view of life renders us unprepared for the constant and sudden uncertainty and inevitability of it. Just as how Ian Malcolm, the fictional mathematician of Michael Crichton's famous thriller Jurassic Park, sees the impossibility of running a dinosaur park smoothly based on accurate calculation of events, we must see that Life bears the same chaotic quality and remains naturally unpredictable. One plus one is not always two, as far as Life is concerned. But we seem to continue to control Life. Like a marionette puppeteer, we attach strings onto Life as if we think that we can make it move the way we want it, without bearing in mind that sooner the strings would snap anytime.

Once our smooth sailing lives jerk in ways we do not expect, instead of understanding the nature of change, we are more inclined to blame others for our problems and sufferings. We are succumbed to the devil's temptation of jumping over the cliff and waiting for angels to save us. Simply put, it's much easier to blame others and act with prejudice. We blame our enemies, government, relatives, partners, kids, authorities, and God. Ultimately, the least that we could do is to blame ourselves. So we end up treating ourselves as victims of fate.

"We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness."

This is the second universal form of attachment: the need to change and control people, things and situations. Since we are so afraid or angry with many changes that we do not like, we force people to submit to our whims and manipulate the course of events in favor of our perceived security that things would always be in order as we desire it. We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness. We paralyze our own freedom as we suppress the flow of change with our limited fixations.

Remember our young monk, who, compelled with his anger, blamed the old monk for his action. He felt that he had lost control when he thought his elder companion broke their rules. He forgot that on any muddy road, change is always possible. Likewise, the road of Life presents us possibilities that sometimes defy our fixated perceptions of what is right or wrong. We cannot control it, but we can go along with it. After all, Life has no rules to follow. Neither the strings of fear nor anger can control Life. Life is freedom at its best, given that we can honor and let it be.

And we can see that the need to control is like playing God: it's just impossible. We can only live like God, by allowing and non-interfering with a calm and cool attitude. We allow change to take place in the rhythm of nature and in the hearts of humankind. With this kind of consciousness, we do not anymore treat Life like a marionette. Life now becomes a kite: we allow it to fly with freedom. This is the upside of living with strings. The more we let go of our attachment, the more we become connected. In this kind of freedom, we open ourselves to Love more. As we stop fearing and hating, all the more we stop blaming and controlling. They work vice-versa. We allow anyone and anything to flow and grow. In turn, we also allow ourselves. Eventually, we will express Love with no conditions, and, finally, with no strings attached.

(to be continued)

The Raging Heart

(part two)


Some years ago, in the process of dealing with my anger, I have discovered that anger was my easiest way to react to any situation I encountered that primarily defied my own notions of order and harmony. Anger was my attempt to gain attention from people who seemed not to submit to my control, which allowed me to harness a kind of power where people around me tend to bend on their knees in fear. With anger, I felt an immense force that later transmuted into an appalling helplessness. After throwing thunderbolts of insults and curses, I was left drained and disempowered, let alone stupid of making a lot of mess out of shattered bottles and chairs I hurled in the height of my reactiveness. I felt I had done a nonsense act, which carved within me a huge void filled with remorse of wishing nothing had really happened.

What used to be my deep-seated anger is an ingrained experience of the first universal form of attachment: hating and rejecting negative emotions. It is so universal that no human being can possibly describe oneself free from this attachment. All of us experience this dark and vile force of anger that can consume us uncontrollably. Like the young monk, we hate that we hate; this is the irony that enslaves us in moments of grappling with our unruly emotional monsters.

Long before running amok, an individual who says "nagdilim ang paningin" (Filipino: the sight has darken) has harmed someone not from sound reasoning but from an overwhelming wave of anger. This is the darkness one experiences that makes him or her a dangerous offender. Whatever degree of offense, from verbal to physical violence, it is the pitch black anger that often pushes us to injure others without seeing the consequence of our actions. In the end, the same anger is not anymore directed to others but to ourselves.

"To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment."

We cannot just sever anger from us. It is impossible. Anger is darkness in its full force, coming from this vast fear. While anger is the gravity, fear is the black hole from where it comes. To find ourselves gripped with anger is basically an expression of our fears. We have tried to refuse the existence of fear by trying to wield external power of anger. Angry people are people filled with fear, and they are seeking connections with others and with themselves. Seeing both anger and fear as a call to vulnerability and openness to Love is a unanimous teaching among all spiritual teachers and ancient sages. They are both manifestation of the same dark energy within us, the energy in which both our uncertainties and potentialities aggregate and arise.

The idea that anger and fear should not be present in our lives is illusion at its best. This illusion is our most common attachment. It locks us inside the cycle of anger towards others, then anger towards our anger, and anger towards ourselves. Our target is not to eliminate them, since they would be as pitch black as ever. The darkness they bring needs the light of our understanding. This reduces them from abysmal darkness to a mere shadow we cast. Like Peter Pan, we must begin to stitch up again our wild shadow with us so we can be at peace and return to the state where our hearts remain young and alive.

The paradox of this is to accept our anger and fear in their pure state, letting them adrift in our thoughts and feelings. To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment. You have already cut the cords of their unwanted consequences. It is the very moment when instead of wallowing on the turbulent edges of the storm, you seek the very eye where there is peace and serenity. The first form of our universal attachment has finally been detached. And it is quite interesting that as we detach from this form, we have also successfully detached from the other 3 forms. This is the mystery of their interconnection that we are yet to discover.

(to be continued)





above photo  from PicApp

Understanding Attachment

photo by juan de sant

There is a Zen story, which is told in many versions, about two monks, an old and a young one. It was a rainy day, and they were traveling together down a muddy road, when they came across with a beautiful woman in kimono dress. She wanted to cross the road (or the river), but unable to do so. So the old monk helped her by carrying her on his back. Then both of them left her and walked several distance ahead. On their way to the temple, the young monk felt so uneasy and angered that he burst out and blamed the old monk for carrying the woman, which, to his knowledge, is a grave mistake; for monks do not go near women, let alone carry one. He thought that such an act is dangerous for them as monks, particularly in following their rules of conduct. The old monk calmly responded, "I have left the woman, but why do you still carry her?"

The story is among the well-known koans, or Zen riddles, which provoke both humor and wisdom. In its simplicity and directness, the story has encapsulated what is so called attachment, and how understanding this will allow us to understand detachment (which I discussed in four parts last year). When a friend asked me how to release one's attachment, it would simply be achieved by understanding it. Yet, the way to understand it is quite vague for most of us, since our attachments are blind spots that we rarely identify in our everyday experiences.

The story of two monks captures our 4 most common attachments. These attachments are perhaps universal in nature, for they are all manifesting in many ways in which we feel negative and pessimistic, both sabotage our precious opportunities to become happy and Loving. Identifying them is an arduous task, and calls for one's vigilance and equanimity. Learning our attachments can lead us enough to master the art of detachment, for both are sides of the same coin.

In the following articles, we will explore these 4 attachments, how they grip us and how we can let them go.

Lessons from Cockroaches

There's a winged wanderer in the insect world whose name is infamous in all households. Out of 3,500 species, only Periplaneta americana is the notorious one, known as the American cockroach, often seen scuttling on kitchen counters and sinks. Both adults and kids hate this, of all insects, save the mosquitoes and flies. Even as a child, I really hate seeing it flying around. I would always hit them with my slippers, and rejoice over their dead spattered body. With such morbid act, I used to keep all of them at bay. My friend told me his story on cockroach. He wrathfully kills them one by one, and like a prized collection, he puts them in an empty liquour bottle. It seemed that he collected more than a hundred.

But this abhored creature has an interesting story. For most of us, we haven't yet learned that cockroaches are among the toughest organisms that have remained virtually unevolved throughout natural history. Cockroaches have ruled on Earth long before humans emerged. That enough provokes me to think who the pest really are: is it them or us? In an article on January 1981 edition of National Geographic magazine, cockroaches were hailed as survivors due to many reasons. Cockroaches are not picky when it comes to food. Nothing is different between a fresh fruit and a stinking carcass. They eat whatever is given. Seems like only cockroach has a lot to teach on the quality of acceptance. Cockroaches have sophisticated mouth, well-equipped with powerful jaws and teeth structures; a cross among pairs of scissors and pliers and can openers. This mouth prevents them to starve.

Another thing is, according to insect scientists, spotting a cockroach at your kitchen gives you an estimated of 200 growing population of cockroaches. Expect a village of scavengers living in the darkest, wettest, and deepest corners of the house. Their rapid growth makes pesticides one of the bestselling household commodities. They come in different forms: sprays, chalks, patches, etc. But using all these, still it's impossible to wipe out all cockroaches.

An ideal paradise for cockroaches is a moist place full of garbage. They would feast on anything spoiled and rotten. We have always thought that they are bringers of microbes that may cause infection. But studies have shown that there is little evidence on it. They haven't caused even a single epidemic. It seems that we have always co-existed with cockroaches well.

"They seem to pester your life, but they are messengers of your consciousness. They are the very reflection of your prejudices, troubled choices, and unrelenting ignorance towards learning your Soul."

We often hate them, though they don't even know what hate means. They are always around to eat, that's all. And whether we admit it or not, we have always been their accommodating hosts. We provide them food and shelter out of our own mess and the desire to stack up things we don't need. We want to get rid of them and we seem to be oblivious of the irony of allowing them to thrive. We often deny it, that the moment we see one of them dashing over our meals or hovering over our curtains we have always attracted them to come into our lives. They are messengers of our need for order and cleanliness that we have always neglected. And beyond that they seem to bring the metaphor of a cluttered Soul.

Often, difficult people, sickening things, unwanted situations are all likened to a pest we call cockroach. We all hate them, and do all things to reject them by hook or by crook. We have thought that they often ruin our lives. Yet whatever we do, they stay. They persist as we resist them. Nonetheless, what we call "pest" are long existent even before we perceive them as pest. These pest are the inconsiderate boss, the moneygrubbing parent and relative, the annoying in-law, the disgusting moneylender, the mind-numbing buddy.

Even if you hate them, you can't afford to reject them. Nor you can stand the chance of getting rid of them. They seem to pester your life, but they are messengers of your consciousness. They are the very reflection of your prejudices, troubled choices, and unrelenting ignorance towards learning your Soul. They come to your lives because you need to unclutter your sacred space, to brighten and dry it from the darkness and wetness of unexamined negligence. These "cockroaches" mirror the things you hate about yourself, and they nudge you to "turn the other cheek", so you can stop blaming and see yourself more responsible in overhauling your own frailties. Have you ever been inconsiderate, moneygrubbing, annoying, disgusting and mind-numbing to others? If so, then your hatred towards the pests becomes reversible, and you will begin to understand them. Like the redefined name of God in Moses Code, you can now say "I am that, I am" to whoever and whatever you cast your rejections and hatred. I am that. You can now see clearly, and stop hating anymore.

You don't have to waste your time eliminating your pest. For the pest is you if choose to stay that way, and you attract what you reject. Now, begin to unclutter your Soul, so the cockroaches will naturally go away. The pest you see will not be a pest anymore, but an organism that reminds you of the wonder of life.






Cockroach (photo by Wm Jas)
Anger (photo by shawnchin)