“Better a day with a vision of Nirvana than a hundred years of blindness to the truth”.

This verse points to the importance of wholeheartedly giving ourselves into each moment.

In the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice encounters a white rabbit. He anxiously takes out his watch from his waistcoat pocket muttering, “Oh dear, I shall be too late!” Like the white rabbit, our society is obsessed with time. We complain there are not enough hours in the day. We often observe that time seems to be passing far too quickly.

However, when there is a sudden change in our lives, perhaps in the form of an accident or serious illness, we may suddenly realise the inessential. Driven by discontent and desire we have lost touch with each precious moment in pursuit of self-fulfillment.

A man was training under a master. One day he plucked up the courage to ask him how he dealt with angry, jealous, greedy or lustful thoughts. The master smiled and promised to give him an answer in a few days. The next day the man once more attended the temple. The master took the man aside. He said that he had something of great importance to tell him. He told him that he had had an intuition: the man would die the next day at 6 o‘clock. He said that he had decided to tell him this so that the man would have time to prepare himself. The man was deeply shocked. He returned home and wrote his will. He informed his family and friends. They were very sad when they heard the news and immediately came round to his house. When the man saw their unhappy faces, he told them he wanted to spend the last few hours enjoying their company. He told them how much he loved and appreciated them. They talked about all the happy times they had spent together. When they had said their ‘good-byes’, he began to think of all the people he had wronged or quarrelled with. He phoned them, apologised, and made his peace with them. That night he decided not to sleep. He went quietly into the garden and sat under a tree. He looked up at the silent glittering stars. He looked up at the shining moon. At 5 o’clock, he went indoors and lay down on this bed. He closed his eyes. Suddenly there was a loud knock on the front door. It was his master. The man thanked him for coming to be with him as he lay dying. The master smiled and said he had a confession to make. Before he could reveal the nature of it the man interrupted him. He said, “Thank you, but I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t matter. I’m feeling very peaceful and content. If you tell me, perhaps I’ll start to feel angry with you. I prefer to die in peace”.

The master smiled again and said, “But that’s the point. You are not going to die in the immediate future. I made the story up”. The man was very puzzled. The master asked, “During yesterday and the last few hours , did you have any angry, jealous, lustful or greedy thought”? The man began to understand and he answered, “Not one; when I believed I was about to die, I didn’t want to dwell on insignificant things”. The master smiled and said, “Now you have the answer to your question. I live my life as if every moment is my last”.

‘I’ am made up of thoughts of yesterday and thoughts of tomorrow. In fact, the illusion of ‘me’ and the illusion of time are one and the same thing. We identify with our thoughts. We dwell on memories of the past and these either cause regret or give us a feeling of fulfillment. We dream of the future, hoping our plans will come to fruition. Underpinning this hope is a deep fear that perhaps they won’t; this is ‘blindness to the truth’. When we are preoccupied with thoughts of the past and future, we fail to recognise the quiet space between them which is the present moment. This is what the master was pointing to at the end of the story.

When we sit Zazen, we may catch a glimpse of this quiet spaciousness. This space between thoughts is the eternal present. It is this moment NOW. It is totally free of time. There is only this NOW, eternally. This is the ‘vision of Nirvana’.

As everything comes to be and ceases to be, we always live in uncertainty. This scares ‘me’. ‘I’ am always trying to resolve it. When I attempt to take control of situations, I am saying ‘no’ to this ‘not knowing’. We fill our heads with hopes and dreams for the future. When we say ‘yes’ to the fear, we stop ‘making pictures’ of future possibilities. We wholeheartedly embrace it as it arises. We invite it to ‘burn me away’. As we wholeheartedly give ourselves away into the daily time table and to the emotional energy, then ‘I’ disappears. Choiceless Awareness opens. There is ‘at-one-ment ‘with all. We are no longer separate.

Perhaps we are waiting for a loved one’s cancer biopsy results. We wholeheartedly give ourselves away into sitting in the waiting room. We wholeheartedly embrace the fear as it arises. The open heart is one with the carers and patients also waiting. We exchange smiles and we become one with the nurse’s voice as she calls our name. We are not alone. Gratitude flows for all the care and warmth surrounding us.

As Longfellow said:

“Fear not each sudden sound and shock,

T’is of the wave and not the rock”.