Time and death
death and we do not know life. We know the turmoils, the anxieties, the guilt, the fears, the appalling contradictions and conflicts, but we do not know what living is. And we only know death as something to be dreaded, feared; we put it away and do not talk about it, and we escape into some form of belief, like flying saucers, or reincarnation, or something else.
So, there is a dying and, therefore, a living when time, space and distance are understood in terms of the unknown. Our minds work in terms of the known, and we move from the known to the known; and when death cuts off this continuity of the known with the known, we are frightened. What we want is comfort, not the understanding of the living with something we do not know.
So, the known is yesterday. We do not know what tomorrow is. We project the past, through the present, into the future; and hope and despair are born. But to comprehend the thing called death, which must be something extraordinary, unknowable, unthinkable, unimaginable, one must learn about it, one must live with it, one must come to it without knowledge and without fear.
And I say it is possible, that one can die to the many yesterdays. After all, the many yesterdays are pleasure and pain. And when you die to yesterday, the mind is empty; and it is frightened of that emptiness and so it begins again, going from one known to another. But if one can die to pleasure and pain… then the mind is without time and space.
