We can never go back. What lies ahead?

“You can never step in the same ocean twice.” So said Heraclitus, sort of, and so I pondered as I tried to paddle along the “same” Lido Beach I frequented 15 years ago. But everything about Lido Beach and Sarasota has changed – and not just the buildup of buildings, traffic, and human beings, but my memories. Memories are not fixed. And they are distinctly selective and inaccurate, as I discovered many times on this recent trip to Florida, the first time I have been back in 12 years. Driving around with a friend in the car, “I recognize that!”, “Ah, but it wasn’t there last time you were here.” “I’ve never seen that before”, “Well actually you must have driven past it many times.” It was strange what I remembered and what I didn’t, distances alone were totally out of whack with what I remembered, and some places were bigger and others smaller. Some faces had changed almost beyond recognition, some hardly at all. Places I knew intimately and with certainty, I thought, like where I had lived for years, appeared somewhat similar but also weirdly alien and unpredictable, like revisiting a childhood home in a dream. Or tumblewood floating around a deserted parking lot, as a friend put it the other day.

This was all surprisingly entertaining, like Alice in Wonderland. I love thinking about impermanence and here I was walking around in it. You can never go back. We can’t even go back to yesterday, let alone a decade.

It started at Sarasota airport. Upon arriving there I wondered, “Where are all the old people?!” Then I realized they were still here. Only now they were no longer old because they were my age, that is, a normal age! Lol. I was in Florida in my thirties and forties, so that explains that. Now everyone back here in Denver seems young from my perspective, though probably quite a normal age from theirs.

The story of my life

I realized we cannot trust our memories, at least barely at all. Not least because they are remembering something that wasn’t even there to begin with.

We cannot relive the past. We cannot even revisit it. We were never really there; it was just a dream. All that remains are the potentials of the karma we created, which will ripen one day as a bunch of brand new appearances. This means we can release all our memories, not assign so much meaning to them, let alone nostalgia or sense of loss. We can free ourselves up to enjoy the here and now, create the karma for pure and blissful appearances from here on out, and figure out what does have enduring meaning.

I have lived on all the continents except the Antarctic and naturally I, like you, have a whole narrative of memories beginning from childhood. They are the “story of my life”. But they are practically pointless in their selectivity and inaccuracy, and if I visited any single one of those places again, I would quickly discover that I was not visiting it at all. What would I actually be going “back” to?! Every atom of every place has changed countless times, all places are new. It’s the same for all the numberless people (if they’re still alive). It’s the same for me – every atom of this visitor or traveller has changed too many times to count.

It’s the same for all the places, enjoyments, and bodies of samsara over countless lifetimes, both our own and others. We get attached to the places, enjoyments, and bodies of samsara, trying to find some happiness and perhaps lasting value in them, but they are all fleeting and empty. When it comes down to it, as Shantideva asks, what is it that we are so attached to?

“Come back soon!” my very dear friends asked me as I left. And I will go to Florida again because I loved my time there and it felt meaningful; but Florida and my friends and me are all mere imputations of my present mind, nothing behind the labels “Florida” etc, so I will not actually be going back anywhere.

The eternal hourglass of existence

Paradoxically, although we can never step in the same river twice, samsara is also terrifyingly repetitive. We have been everywhere and done everything in the endless expanse of beginningless time, and still we are not free. The same friend quoted Nietzsche at me when we were talking about all of this:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

The crushing, frankly intolerable, nature of samsara is that we have to keep doing this over and over and over again. Buddha gave various lists that encompass all the recurring categories of suffering in samsara, such as birth, ageing, sickness, death, having to part with what we like, having to encounter what we do not like, and failing to satisfy our desires. Or uncertainty, having no satisfaction, having to leave our body over and over again, having to take rebirth over and over again, having to lose status over and over again, and having no companionship. Or manifest pain, pervasive suffering, and changing suffering. Take your pick – any of these are bad enough even once; yet here we are trapped in an eternal hourglass of suffering that is turned upside down again and again. No horror movie or Black Mirror episode could do this justice.

Question for you: If you had to live even this relatively good human life (compared to most) over and over again, even this same day over and over again, could you bear it? Of all the moments of your lives – both meaningless and meaningful – which moment could you bear to live over and over again?

What could we tolerate lasting forever? To me, it could only be the egoless bliss and emptiness of full enlightenment and the ability to benefit each and every living being every day. I am finding this quite the motivator to break free from delusions, self-cherishing, and all ordinary appearances.

Based on renunciation for this constantly changing yet utterly repetitive nature of samsara, this life we luckily have now is the one in which we can break free. Then, seeing how others are also forced to keep running on this never-stopping hamster wheel, we can develop compassion. I do believe that we all have to stop and figure this out before it is too late and the hourglass turns over once more.

What clock are you racing against?

My basic outlook on this is that it’s never going to be done. The nature of the world that we live in — today, especially, but on some level it’s timeless, universal — is that there is more that could profitably be done with our time than we will ever be able to do. There is always something more that you could do….. This is what Benedictine monks understand: You have a work period, but when the bell rings, you put down your work and you go on to the next thing. There’s a real kind of spiritual practice to being able to psychologically, as well as physically, put down the thing that you’re working on just because the bell rang. Not because you finished everything and it’s all done. ~ from this article.

As Buddha put it, samsaric activities are like a man’s beard – it doesn’t matter how much he shaves, the bristles will be right back before he knows it.

In this last article – Stretchy time – I was talking about how time and space are dependent-related in five ways and that we can therefore change them if we develop this wisdom. But first we might want to think about gross impermanence, ie, how much time we have left to figure this all out.

The area in which we mistakenly think we have do loads of time is in our holding onto this life as going on forever, when in point of fact we have a dwindling number of karmic appearances, grains of sand, left. Perhaps this so-called permanent grasping is exacerbated in our modern times as we are very materialistic and try not to think about death and decay if at all possible, distracting ourselves from it in a million pointless ways. As so many of the enjoyments in worldly life depend upon a healthy, attractive, energetic body, we worship youth in this society. We do not worship wisdom.

In our endless preoccupation with the things of this life, rushing around trying to get things done in time for this deadline or that one, we lose sight of our only really important deadline – death itself. We are travellers, refugees really, bound for future lives – in 1978 Venerable Geshe-la told us we were like “tourists in a resort”, which gives some indication how bad the rest of samsara is. What are we packing in the suitcase of our mind that will help us at our next destination?

As a friend said the other day, getting rich in samsara is like getting rich in Monopoly. We can’t take any of this with us when we go. At the time of death, what can really help us? Buddha asked us to think about this, why? Because death awareness allows us to stop grasping at a permanent, solid ego and its preoccupation with the deceptive props of this life, opening up tons more space and spiritual energy in our life.

Over to you. Comments gratefully received.