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All There Is

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All there is, is now. It’s a simple statement, but one with many layers of meaning. I have long been a big believer in “that was then and this is now.” One of the best stories illustrating this is about the two ascetic Buddhist monks on a walking trip. It was forbidden for them to have contact with or to touch women, but they came upon a beautiful woman along a riverbank who was stranded and needed to get across. One of the monks simply put her on his back, carried her across the river and continued on with the journey. After a while the second monk could no longer contain himself and rebuked his fellow traveler saying, “How could carry that woman? You know it is forbidden. What could you have been thinking?” The first monk looked at him and said, “Are you still carrying her? I left her at the river.” When someone tries to restart or carry on with an old dispute I sometimes say, “I left that at the river.”

At another level, we all too often waste a great deal of time and energy worrying about the future. Will I meet this or that deadline? What will happen if I don’t? We imagine all kinds of future scenarios, both positive and dire. We have heard much lately of how the mind either looks forward with hope and fear or backward with pride and regret, but is silenced in the now. This is a great advancement in understanding. The awareness that one finds when the mind is silent is the gateway to all that is. But here is another level.

All there is is now, the eternal now. Recently I was reading about cutting edge physics. I won’t pretend to understand all that I read, but I found it fascinating. I was reading how we now know that particles can be seen not only to be in two places at once, but in two times as well, and to affect one is to affect the other. This can be seen as speaking to the problem of past and future lives. If all there is, is now, and if time as we know it only exists in the physical, then past and future lives only appear to be linear when in a physical incarnation. We only experience them as sequential while living one of them. But again, if all there is is now, then we are really having all of these lives simultaneously. So, to make an improvement in oneself in this life is to make an improvement in all of the past and future lives. We’re probably best off concentrating on perfecting this life to the best of our ability and leaving the others to take care of themselves. But it’s a powerful bit of information to know that one step towards improving our now improves all of our lives and quite possibly all of everyone else’s, too.

Now.

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