Daily Quote, Wednesday May 20, 2009.
Good morning everyone,
My money would be on sun today but you never know! :-)
In my reflections on today's quote:
Isn't it interesting how time is both a means of postponing action and also looked upon as the means through which action can take place. Indeed, the latter is the handmaiden of the former. If we are becoming still now we will always be becoming become still, never actually still. Is it not that the ego only desires to become, to actualise, never to be? To be would mean the end of the ego, for in just being there is no becoming.
If you do not understand the present now, will you understand it in the future?
The present is the eternal. Through time, the timeless is not experienced. 'The now' is ever existent; even if you escape into future, 'the now' is ever present. The present is the doorway to the past. If you do not understand the present now, will you understand it in the future? What you are now you will be, if the present is not understood. Understanding comes only through the present: postponement does not yield comprehension. Time is transcended only in the stillness of the present. This tranquility is not to be gained through time, through 'becoming' tranquil; there must be stillness, not the becoming still. We look to time as a means to become. This becoming is endless: it is not the eternal, the timeless. The becoming is endless conflict, leading to illusion. In the stillness of the present is the eternal.
Colllected Works, Vol. IV - 12
There's a simplicity to these ideas that seems to come down to the age-old balance between action and contemplation. In a time & society of frantic activity, we seem especially to need the call to contemplation repeated often and variously. I find K's ideas echoed in John Gray's "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals", esp. his final chapter. To quote Gray, "Contemplation is not the willed stillness of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments. When we turn away from our all-too-human yearnings we turn back to mortal things. Not moral hopes or mystical dreams but groundless facts are the true objects of contemplation." What I appreciate about the recently posted quotes is their admission that past and future do act on us - and profoundly - yet K. makes space for their influence within the essential present moment. Present awareness and recognition of both conditioning (the past) and ambition/fear (the future) have a place, seemingly, within contemplation.
ReplyDelete-nicole