How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God!

 

Part XII: “Be Here Now”:**  There is No Past, No Future. 

Only the Present

 

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” ― Eckhart Tolle

 

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, which is why we call it the present" — Alice Morse Earle.

 

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment" — Buddha.

 

“Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” [Jesus, Mark 6:34]

 

The spiritual journey never lacks for surprises, both painful and joyful. Some of those surprises occur over decades. This has been the case for me, and one of the most profound insights planted its seed in me in college, popped up from time to time over the years, and has become especially meaningful for me in the last few years. And that is how we view time, and where we put our focus when it comes to time. 

 

Mark Twain once reportedly stated: "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened," which was his reminder to focus on the present rather than wasting psychic worry on things that probably will never occur. 

 

Most of us do not know how to live in the present. Instead, we often feel remorse and guilt about the past. We feel depressed about a future we want but we think will never happen. We spend endless hours worried about all kinds of things that, in theory, could happen, but likely never will.

 

It was in college, as I studied the religions of the world, with a special focus on spirituality and mysticism, that I learned from both Christianity and other religions an approach and process which attempts to leave past and future behind and leads one to, in today’s parlance, “mindfulness,” which is a profound focus on what is “happening” in and around you in the present moment. Miriam Webster defines mindfulness as “the practice of purposely focusing attention on the present moment—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—with a non-judgmental, accepting attitude. It is a mental state that encourages awareness rather than automatic reactions to daily life, reducing stress and increasing emotional regulation.”

 

So, what is it I encountered long years ago when I was in college that has arisen in retirement to give me direction and hope? Normally the process of changing one’s way of thinking or perspective on a particular area of theology is a lengthy, slow-moving process. However, there are occasional times when we encounter something so new and unexpected that this process is accelerated. That happened to me in the early days of 1971, in the second semester of my junior year at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  

 

In college, I had decided to major in philosophy and in my freshman year we considered time from a philosophic point of view. Then, in my second year, 1969, Dr. Larry Alderink from the University of Chicago Divinity School joined the religion department at Concordia to teach World Religions. I jumped at this opportunity to learn about global religions that I knew very little about, such as Islam, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Judaism. I quickly realized that so much of what I thought I knew about these religions was nothing but caricature. 

 

As I was learning about the teachings and practice of these various religions, I was, of course, at the same time, analyzing these new insights as they related to the Christian theology that I carried with me at the time. And that included comparing certain areas of Christian theology with the teachings and revelations of these various ancient religions I was now encountering. 

 

I found myself especially fascinated and intrigued by a particular area of spirituality known as “mysticism.”  Miriam Webster defines Mysticism as “the belief in, and practice of, achieving direct, personal communion or union with ultimate reality, divinity, or spiritual truth, often through contemplation, intuition, or altered states of consciousness. It emphasizes direct experience over dogma, focusing on inward transformation and ineffable knowledge.” Here the emphasis is not on past or future, but on the present. 

 

At that point my only experiences of such mysticism were certain inspiring moments in prayer or worship, but I was not at all familiar with the spiritual disciplines of meditation and contemplation. This changed quickly as Dr. Alderink began pointing me to certain books, all in early in 1971. First came the powerful work by German theologian Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West, in which he compares the Hindu philosopher Shankara and the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, arguing that despite different cultural frameworks, both represent a strikingly similar "speculative mysticism" focused on union with a transcendent, non-rational divine reality. I was fascinated by the way mysticism moved beyond doctrine and belief to the experienced presence of God and the wholeness of the entire universe. 

 

Next in 1971 came another book from Dr. Alderink, this one also by another German, a poet and novelist named Herman Hesse.  In his seminal novel, Siddhartha, Hesse shares the story of a young Hindu in India in his life-long search for enlightenment. His final revelations come as he lives with a ferryman on a river, where he meditates every day. Eventually he realizes a difference between the spirituality and culture of the West compared with the East. If western scientists want to study water, they take a bucket of water out of the river and begin to analyze it. The problem is, in a bucket it is no longer “river.” It ceases to move. Siddhartha then realizes from this a profound truth of life: If we look at life, and try to dissect piece by piece what life is, we are no longer actually living life. We are now in an abstraction about life. Just as you can only know the river by throwing oneself into it and floating with it downstream, so one can only know the truth and depths of life by throwing oneself into it with all of its joys and sorrows, ups and downs, truths and illusions. There is no way to “protect ourselves” from the pain and suffering of lived life. Part of our spiritual journey will be, as it was for St. John of the Cross, “the dark night of the soul” when we feel alone and all seems lost. 

 

As Siddhartha nears death as an old man, he reflects on what he has learned:

 

There is one thought I have had: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into . . . . illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. . . . . But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. . . . Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between the world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion. 

 

With this background explained, Siddhartha then shares his understanding of calling:

 

It seems to me that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

 [Hesse, Siddhartha, pp. 115,119.]

 

Next came a scholar recommended by Dr. Alderink who significantly altered my understanding of life. This was Dr. Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher and theologian who taught in the US the last 20 years of his life. I read several of his books as he, like Otto and Hesse, worked to bridge the gap between western and eastern spirituality. The book that changed my perspective radically was The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, written in 1951, the year after I was born.

 

Google summarizes this book succinctly: “The Wisdom of Insecurity is a classic book that argues the root of human anxiety is the futile pursuit of security in an inherently impermanent world, drawing on Eastern philosophy to suggest that true fulfillment comes from embracing the present moment and accepting uncertainty, by letting go of the need to control the future and instead living fully in the "now," so that one can find genuine peace and spiritual insight.”

 

Watts explains how all of this fits together:

 

This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. The root of the frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the brain. The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment . . . . .

 

[Because] the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of our experienced reality until it is present . . . , it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what they have, and are forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes and assurances. [Watts, Insecurity, pp. 60-61]

 

Watts ends his book by explaining what happens when we are able to let the past and future go and focus on the present: “Free from clutching at themselves, the hands can handle; free form looking after themselves, the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself, thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. It is finished.” [Ibid. 152]

 

**The title of a book by Ram Dass.