The End of Expectancy

By Michael Erlewine

The seeds of the future are best planted in the present. We do much planting seeds and gardening the mind of the future.

Casting seeds forward in time that will ripen, like karma, yet that is different. Of course that’s what karma is, yet I’m not talking about that here or at least not much.

Seeding the future with expectancy is a habit that most of us share. In particular, the seeds of hope come to mind. We have all struggled with that. Is hope a good thing or not a good thing?

As I read the dharma texts, it does not seem a good thing because it’s bundled right in there with hope and fear as things to NOT depend on.

We don’t hope to fear, but do we fear to hope? Is hope a substitute for action and acting. Casting our net into the future and drawing on hope and expectancy to hold our attention is considered a backward approach.

A shotgun of words, a scattershot at that, perforates the finer membranes that separate the future from the present moment, poking holes in the future that are like portals that we imagine we can see through. That’s in my book is an illusion, just another bad habit.

The future may be a crystal ball, but perhaps more like those Magic 8-Balls that we used to have as kids. As the great Mahasiddha Tilopa said in his classic “Words of Advice,” “Don’t Invite the Future.” Tilopa is saying something to us here.

Stay in the lane of the ‘Present Moment’ is the message. Don’t water down the water, so to speak. Let the future accumulate until it emerges full-blown as the present, NOW. In other words, don’t rob the cradle of the future.

And equally Tilopa said “Don’t Prolong the Past,” meaning don’t attempt to resuscitate what has already passed. As an archivist of popular culture by trade, I kind of know exactly about what in the past points out the future and what can be left behind and I go with that.

Tilopa is trying to corral or contain us to the present moment, and turn us away from both the past and the future. And then he has the insight to point out not to alter this present moment, but instead to just relax just as it is. Yes. Yet even that is not a slam dunk or a walk in the park.

Trying to relax is an oxymoron that needs a koan to lubricate it.

Shakespeare was a state of mind. We don’t have to channel Shakespeare to make sense with our words. Every ‘singleton’ turns out to be a cluster and a group, given time. Let’s call it a tribe. Emerson, in his essay on “History” wrote:

“All inquiry into antiquity is the desire to do away with this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place, the Here and the Now. Belzoni (an archeologist) digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motivated, and to ends to which he, himself, should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are NOW.”

It’s a process of working our will toward and into a space where the clash of consonants and the moan of vowels collide and immerse together in meaning. Shakespeare took us there and now, centuries later, we can find our own way there too.

Loosing upon ourselves the rain of wisdom and bathing in the rarified language we all share. It’s nothing special but it may be special to us.

Cracking the code of a time release capsule to flower our path back to where we came from, a cycle or circle and whole, spinning synergy as we go. We weave by day what we unravel by night in the torus of life.

I don’t need what I don’t have to be complete. My god is no beggar, making the ends meet. The ends already meet, just as a falling drop of water pulls together and shapes itself.

[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]

EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here are the links: SpiritGrooves.net.

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As Bodhicitta is so precious,

May those without it now create it,

May those who have it not destroy it,

And may it ever grow and flourish.