The Present Moment

With palms together,
Godd Morning Sangha,

Typically I sit half lotus with left ankle on right thigh. My body has accommodated this stable position and I settle into it easily. Such habits are not good and we should arouse outrselves from them. This morning I sat reversing this half lotus and felt my body not settle. This tension assists me in staying in the moment and not falling asleep in the habit of body and mind.

I have talked at some length about birth and death. Coming and going, as it were, the processes of the life cycle of the universe. These are but imaginings. The past, as does the future, do not exist except in the mind's eye. They are chimera and take us away from what is real, this very moment.

Process is a delusion. We only understand it when we take our mind's eye and leap out of the immediate moment as if to say we can thus see a panorama of time. Each moment contains all others, past and future. All birth and death are here right now. Yet how false this is. As each birth and death, each thought coming and going, are fiction.

We live only in the moment and are asleep all other times. This moment presents itself the universe as it is and only can be. A hand goes out, we offer a dollar. A child cries, we offer our breast. We are hungry, we eat, when we are sleepy, we sleep. We do what we do as it is to be done.

In this a community of the moment arises. A faith-based community that assumes we each are present and doing what needs to be done. We call this community sangha. It becomes our ground. Just as the Buddha offers us a way, and the Dharma, a teaching on reality, the Sangha provides the foundation.

Be well.