Saying Goodbye to Past and Future
Much is said about living in the present but not many know that the essence of it is clearing the shadows of past and future. It is a matter of living in such alertness that disallows all irrelevant recall of bygone events. When you are intensely attentive, the self rises not. If it does, it stays not.
The self, the me, is the breeding ground of a whole lot of evils. The self is the desirer and from it arise desires. The self is the one that fears, and from it come forth fears. The self is the agent who owns pride and the problem of pride vanishes if no one owns it.
Not only material possessions but also acquisition of merit is a preoccupation of the conditioned self. Religious or moral merit is what our mind hangs on, many a time. Such a seeking causes guilt or shame when the inner judgment is that we did something wrong. It is of interest to watch the mind in movement at such times. The act and the judgment are two things. The act is often innocent or natural. The judgment is a reflection of our current value system, the bundle of conditionings we are carrying at the moment. A third factor is how react to the inner judgment. Stage one – I did it. Stage two – it was wrong. Stage three – I should not have been wrong.
In luminous attention, we see through the game that the mind is playing. Sri Ramana Maharshi talked of the thief-turned-policeman. The same fellow stole and later was searching for the thief. Who is this ‘one entity’ that acts as the thief first and as the policeman later? Who am I?
Do not just swing from one role to another, in this play of the mind. Stand apart and take a look at the director of the play. What is her overall agenda? Look at the self as a whole. Do not divide it into parts – the good side of me, the bad side and so on. Awareness without a trace of ego is above all such divisions of the good and the bad.
The past and future that tie us down are actually nothing but the resistance that our personal desire offers to a self-judgment within us. As thoughts rise (with their weight of judgment) about what I was or what I will be, lack of attention results in resisting these thoughts. Then we are stuck. Observe the thoughts quietly. They expose themselves in their totality and subside on their own. You then say goodbye to the past and the future.
Swami Chidananda
Monday, January 30, 2006