A Rather Personal Time Being Story

Do not think that time simply flies away.

Do not understand flying as the only function of time.

If time simply flew away,

A separation would exist between you and time.

So, if you understand time as only passing,

Then you do not understand the time being.

Consider embracing blueness

The earth’s aura & your awareness:

For the time being –

The entire earth and the boundless sky.

Time is not merely ticking.

Earth & sky not some kind of trivial time-pass

Sandwiched between one previous death

& the life unfolding from it,

Or one life & the unavoidable death at its end.

Albeit of substance unmade,

Non-fabricated as such

Their forms aren’t simply ‘empty’.

Neither is time’s continuous self-timing,

This ungraspable uninterrupted flickering,

Which appears as ‘you’ & ‘I’ & the ‘world’

Empty in the sense of being ‘nothing’,

But empty only in the sense of

Remaining out of reach

For anyone to control

What they cannot grasp:

Just being so.

Thus they call it naked:

Hiding nothing

& remaining true to nature

As the Buddha discovered:

Breathe in, breathe out

Fathomless blue sky.

Naked like this,

Fully lunar eclipsed & similarly

From the beginningless start

Exposed to the sun of the dharma

Without even knowing

Anything about such matters for years,

When I first appeared to have arrived

Like all the blind buddhas

Who are being born

To this and many worlds every day,

Eyes covered with the muck after

The previous time had imploded

Fully in their face.

And so

For the present time being,

I fell misplaced, cut off from

Perennial timeline

Now somewhere down there

Some sixty odd years,

Almost a lifetime ago

& in a way such fall is hard

To imagine & to bear.

They also report that I cried & I cried

Often at night when I was a baby

But not for food. I don’t recall food.

I cried more for the need to be touched

In the unfathomable ways

That still lingered pristine & rainbow

Unreachably clear:

Time being’s umbilical cord.

I still can remember

Black screaming loneliness

As I never felt home in my crib

Among these people

Among that particular country’s

Bombed out to ruins

& even today still guilt-ridden souls.

So I eventually left home

But couldn’t leave time

Only went on exploring

Time’s self-timing,

Which as Dogen says

Is the same as exploring the world

& vice versa all interconnected

Chambers of echoes.

Like when I twisted and turned according to

A certain French time being:

Somehow merging with place & people,

Myself becoming

The sounds their throats make when they

So decidedly voice an opinion,

Also for the food, the wine, the vanity,

For the charming gestures of self-mocking

Self-importance…

Yet, in the end, I refrained

From wedding Marianne

Even though I had courted her

And taken her to bed

At different times

Manifesting in various bodies

And always in time being’s particular

Buddha-like dispassionate

Tender passion

Love at its truest when it just so happens

Not sticky & cling-foil messy.

Like later

For some time being

I had to have a go

At the sharing a light bulb

California experience:

The holy cow of Americanized dharma –

(or should we say ‘drama’)

Buddhism with a drawl

As expounded by Masters of Business Administration &

Jurisprudence Doctors;

Meeting all the lovely people

Who in those years ago

Without exception

Were all exhibiting

This incomparable eagerness

For doing everything exactly right

But by going against all of

Tradition’s instructions

Or in the other extreme

By toeing the line

More closely than to the letter

& as a result,

Doing much of it exactly wrong,

(If just like them

We were to erroneously believe that

‘Right’ & ‘wrong’ were absolutes,

Rather than treacherously

Shifting Saharan sand dunes).

I even got married to self-righteousness

Fully buying into it three times

In spiritual & worldly ways

From sea to shining sea.

But later inevitably had to file for divorce.

I then

Came to live on earth’s

Especially designated chaos universe

That goes by the name of

Incredibly messy India.

Being here has been great

As for the time being the affair has been

Conducted in the careful manner of

Porcupines mating

& since I am not born a porcupine,

This is the kind of union

That I will never successfully complete:

No non-Indian can really unite with

Present day India.

Trust me,

Here is where for the time being

Inbreeding is strictly the norm.

So

Time being Indian comes right down

To a blood thing

Passed down in rather narrow lines.

Strangers have to stay out.

But as I love nothing more than

Minding my own business

I don’t mind standing apart.

At least, here they let me rest

In mind undisturbed,

As in India everyone leaves the non-Indian

Like myself alone.

Even though they derive fantastic pleasures

When they endlessly meddle

In each other’s particular being in time,

Which is a great sport in these parts, I mean,

Meddling: for the time being.

Nothing there is but time…

And here they seem to have

A lot of it to waste.

Bodhidharma on the other hand,

Now he’s a very different character.

He is an Indian from a time,

Before India took on the appearance

Of being muddled & befuddled

By the one and only god delusion,

& thus Bodhidharma is always his own man:

Even now

A completely straight shooter.

He never wastes a moment.

He comes right to the point:

You ask. – That is your mind.

I answer. – That is my mind.

If I had no mind, how could I ever answer?

If you had no mind, how could you ask?

That which asks is your mind.

Whatever you do, that’s your mind, that’s your buddha.

Beyond this mind,

You’ll never find another buddha.

The reality of your own self-nature

Is what is meant by mind.

These are the sharp edged

Timelines along which

In this lifetime

I have been teetering

& groping in search

For some kind of solid wall

To lean on & solid floor

To walk on:

Where actually

There are neither wall nor floor

Only time being’s myriad bodies,

Voices & activities –

If that… but THAT

Is absolutely solid.

All of it,

What we separate as

Past present & future times

What we call

Dogen, Bodhidharma &

So many more from India and Tibet

That I have read from or about

& personally met

In this fantasy life and & listened to them:

Is itself the mind talking

& thus the guru talking

In luminous presence for the time being;

The guru breathing, eating, shitting & walking,

The guru teaching in tune with the times

By example & action most powerfully

As words are mostly weak:

The guru for real when in robes,

& even more real

When with ease pointing out

The difference between the finger

& the moon; the guru

When unclad, stark naked & decidedly mad.

And this guru never dies.

With such guru in particular

That I know & even befriended

In naked uninhibited ease

There is neither room nor need

For pretending that I am merely a

Westerner uneasy in my skin

Because I have no fancy roots to show

& no dharma pedigree.

There really is no need to shape-shift into the

Costume ball version of a Tibetan yogi.

What for?

What sense does it make for time

To kowtow to time

In the near or distant future

When they are but time & also the past?

Blades of grass on the other hand

They have humbly tuned into time:

Blades of grass

Easily and selflessly

Prostrate to earth moved by wind.

And indeed, mind enjoys such

Timeless acts of devotion

& entertains great respect for

Its own vastness.

So there is not much cause to wonder

Where this might eventually lead,

This particular time being story of mine

With the four country circus,

With Dogen & Bodhidharma

With Padmasambhava & his consorts:

I mean, having gone forward and backward

And all around

In time for sixty plus years,

If we count this one life alone,

Considering that every year

Time itself is not only NOT flying away

But in fact, NOT at all diminishing,

Never being less in time.

Never being less presence,

Less Iove:

The gurus

The buddhas

The dakinis,

The protectors –

The sea of time

Wisdom-compassion

For the time being

Never waxing, never waning.

∞∞∞∞∞

The Buddha himself says that

Leaving one’s fantasy home & country

Constitutes half of the way of enlightenment.

The other half then is to enact

The seeming opposite:

Never leaving home at all but

Abiding as mind split open

All the way to nature or

What they describe as the

‘Heart of sadness’

That feels it all without

Position & agenda

And further on

Through unchartered

Oceans of dharma time.

Which is so full of laughter, dance and embrace

But also weeping over every instance

When immeasurably many beings are lost in thinking

That they were cut off from the life giving waters:

From time being’s womb.

To grasp this truly: every being that exists in the entire world

Is linked together as moments in time,

And at the same time they exist as individual moments of time,

They are your time being.

Life is death.

Death is life.

And understanding this

For us is truly

A matter of

Life and death.