Today I began to understand the deep relation between time and fear, between time and control. If the swirling, distracting thoughts are mostly, in my case at least, expressions of fear and anxiety for the future, plans and stratagems and dialogues that I imagine will give me some control over that future, then the way I think of and imagine time is at the centre of the way I experience my power, my freedom, my helplessness, my ego.
Although, as in so many recent sittings, I soon today encountered a feeling of failure, of shallow and lacking concentration, of uncontrollable thoughts and emotions, the fragments of ego, I had about halfway through zazen a sudden new awareness of time. Recent readings (especially The Book of Master Lieh) have urged me to recognize that there is only this present instant of time—that there is no past, and no future. If there is no past, then loss is total: cause for further anguish. But if there is no future, then fear and anxiety and the desperate strategizing they trigger are absurd. We can have no control whatsoever over something that doesn’t even exist. And this is not the same at all as having no control over something that does exist and will definitely arrive.
Isn’t all anxiety, aren’t all fears, paradoxically grounded in the illusion that we can, and therefore we should, find the means of controlling the future—that is, controlling the present moment and its impact on us by planning ahead in such a way as to save ourselves? Would we be anxious and frightened if we did not have the least illusion or expectation of control—and beyond that, if we did not believe that “the future” actually existed? Nothing can be more frightening than surrendering the illusion of—and therefore all searching for—control over the future. This is the expression of egolessness that we see symbolized so often in Buddhist koans and commentaries when we are asked to take one step forward from the top of a hundred-foot pole.* But I suppose that terrifying step is made easier if we truly recognize that the future doesn’t exist—that this present moment of surrender is all there is. The demand is extreme. But at least I feel I have understood some connection between the importunate thoughts that so often intrude into calm sitting and the way I have always imagined “Time,” and my relation to it.
* As in the Wumenguan 46: “Master Shishuang said, ‘Atop a hundred-foot pole, how do you step forward?’” (translated by Thomas Cleary as “Unlocking the Zen Koan” in Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 4 (pp. 400-01).
13 September, 2023.