Piet to Heloisa and Rod
Dear Rod and Heloisa,
Being still in Japan, my days are out of sync with
respect to
Rod in the U.S. and
Heloisa
in Brazil.
So I decided to run Rod's one-day experiment from noon to noon,
11/6-11/7
instead. That had the interesting effect of including a night's sleep
in the middle.
When I woke up this morning, vivid dream memories were lingering, many
more
than usual. I saw three options: I could continue dressing myself up
with my
normal habits and identifications; or I could try to remember my many
dreams;
or I could try to remain in the openness available in between waking
and
sleeping.
I tried to
remain in
the openness, but pretty soon I realized that my normal thought
processes had
started up again. I recognized the sense of `me' trying to be something
far
wider, but that trying had become a fantasy, about an openness that `I'
was now
trying to obtain.
At that
point I saw
clearly the difference between the `four times' that Buddhist
literature talks
about: the past, present and future in serial time, and the `fourth
time', what
I have called timelessness. What happened, I think, was: a glimpse of
timelessness offered itself in between sleeping and waking; I tried to
avoid
falling into memories of the past, and I also tried to avoid falling
into the
habitual serial present, and instead I fell into a future fantasy about
trying
to reach a future state of timelessness.
I had to
laugh about
the paradoxes upon paradoxes, with an `I' as defined in serial time
trying to
reach for a future in which to be more real and more timeless! How
pernicious
our time-bound habits are.
I then saw
the
different nature of the four times more clearly. I could remember my
many
dreams, and indeed I did so later, but I could not re-enter those
dreams: I was
only dealing with present memories of the past. I could also try to
reach for
future deep insights, but by definition those would out of reach: I was
only
dealing with present attempts pertaining to possible future insights.
So there I
was:
seemingly caught in the present, with past and future sealed off and
all
attempts to deal with them more ways to find myself locked in the
present, and
the fourth time doubly locked away; wishing to reach for the fourth
time
immediately degenerated in placing it habitually but mistakenly into
the future.
So what to do with the fourth time, separated even from that future
from which
I was already separated?
The answer
came by
itself, as an intuition rather than a thought, an insight that was more
of an
immediate clarity rather than the outcome of a process. The fourth time
could
not be reached, indeed; but not because it was off limits, but rather
because
it already constituted everything else, as the basis or origin for the
whole
show of serial time. I laughed again. How simple!
Piet