201. Don't Wait

Link to Table of Contents

Don't wait - From The Five Invitations

p18 The Death in Samarra story, again.
p21 Yea! The story I keep telling about the sand painting at the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park back in 1991. He's using it while talking about change and the impermanence of all things, but I use it to talk about work and the value of doing things, even ephemeral things, well. Different perspectives on the same thing, I guess.

He also writes, "Each moment is born and dies." Well, yes and no. It might be more accurate to say that the "moment" is an illusion -- that everything is either in the past or the future. "Now" is a fiction. Perhaps the point of meditation is to take you out of time entirely, into the instant between. The place where Paloma's flower petal falls and Levin scythes.

Sometimes you need to turn the page... I mean literally, 

p22 The museum staff viewed the mandala as an irreplaceable work of art, a precious object. To the monks, the mandala was a process whose value and beauty existed in its teaching on impermanence and non-attachment.

In an everyday sense, we have the same experience the monks did in making the mandala when we cook. I love baking bread -- the measuring, the mixing, the juggling of pans, the kneading, the rising of the dough, the bread browning in the oven, the cutting of the loaf, and the buttering of it. Then the bread is gone. We partake in a mini-celebration of impermanence with every well-prepared meal consumed with enjoyment.

And I always like to recall that I would not have learned about the mandala if the crazy woman hadn't tried to destroy it. She was a key part of the story. (I'm not going to mention it all the time, but Ostaseski continues to only mention Gauri virtues. The crazy woman was clearly under Kali's spell.)

Writers who can't read?

I had "Rhinestone Cowboy" stuck in my ear earlier today, which got me thinking about musicians who can't read music, like Glen Campbell and Tory Amos. Campbell was just a performer, near as I can tell, but Amos and others also create music. 

You would think that there would also be "writers" who work the same way, but I can't think of any. Maybe Homer. 

The Five...

p52 Remember what I was saying about how Now is an illusion? 

We speak of living in the present moment, But where is this moment to be found? Is it a nanosecond that punctuates the space between past and future? To paraphrase St. Augustine, now is neither in time nor out of time. The elusive present moment is not measured by the tick-tock time of a clock, which we humans invented, nor is it separate from past or future. There is no time line, at least not as we conventionally think about it.
...

p53 ...The present moment includes all time; it is the all-inclusive now. The present moment could best be described as the flow of life. We are continually being shaped by it, and we are shaping it through the way we meet and respond to it. 

Don't wait is an encouragement to step fully into life. Don't miss this moment waiting for the next one to arrive. Don't wait to act on what is most important. Don't get stuck in the hope for a better past or future; be present.

I think he's already mentioned the truism about never being able to step into the same river twice, but now, I think, we are being asked to swim in that river of change.

I've finished all the sections in this first chapter, "Don't Wait," but I need to go back and review something from earlier in the chapter. The subject here is identity and if transformations that precede death (or accompany illness) are of value in general or just in this context.