"To study and at times practice what one has learned, is that not a pleasure?" -- Confucius
THE FEAR OF THE FUTURE AND THE HABIT OF WORRYING
from a longer post at Alive on All Channels
"If we observe ourselves when we are worrying, we may see that what we feel is strongly akin to the profound sense of loneliness that afflicts so many of us in our modern culture. When I worry, I feel cut off from my life -- and this sense of being cut off from life is practically a definition of loneliness. It is quite different when we are confronting genuine dangers and genuine possibilities -- that is, possibilities that reflect reality and the real world. Fear of genuine, possible danger, from either nature or people is never a waste of time or energy. On the contrary, such fear engages us in the world of real forces, a world in which we may be defeated but never isolated. "Fear" and "sorrow" are words reflecting man's painful but meaningful encounter with the real world; anxiety and nervousness reflect our capture by a meaningless imaginary reality invented by the mind in service to the revolving automatisms of emotional reaction. In the state of worrying, there is no such thing as thinking in the fully human sense. In this state, thought, which is meant to inform us about the real world, becomes instead a puppet of the emotional reactions.
At this point the ancient wisdom advises us to develop in ourselves an instrument for real thinking and vision, the instrument of the mind, for which man was created. The future simply cannot be seen with the egoistic or anxious mind. We are on earth to do things that only human beings can do, but none of them can be done until we are able to think as a grown-up man or woman thinks. Worrying is not thinking."
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There is a remarkable passage about man's relationship to the future in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It occurs in his most famous essay, "The Over-Soul." In this early work, first published when he was thirty-seven years old, Emerson announces the great, underlying theme that forms the basis of everything he was to write in his long, prodigiously productive life. The idea of the Over-Soul is that the universe, the greatness of nature, is everywhere penetrated by an invisible, conscious Selfhood upon which it, nature, depends. The greatness of nature is this Selfhood in its manifestation. The uniqueness of man is that he is given the possibility and the duty consciously to attend to this Selfhood, this soul, within himself, and to sense throughout his life that this soul is himself.
"Man," writes Emerson, "is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence." Then, speaking of man's relationship to time, he goes on:
"The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies is the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other ..... We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence .......to which every part and particle is related; the eternal ONE....
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And now, speaking specifically of man's relationship to the future, Emerson offers an extraordinary vision of what is means that the future is unknown to us -- what this obvious fact means and what this intrinsic unknowability of the future calls on us to search for within ourselves. In what Emerson writes, we shall see the astonishing idea that the future is unknown in the same sense that the Self is unknown! To remember is the same mystery as to foretell! What we are to be is the same thing as that which we have always been -- in our depths.
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From Thomas Merton's "A Book of Hours"
"What Merton learned, he taught -- that the epiphany of God in time can come to us at any moment, anywhere, whether we are praying or not. It can come at work, on the road, in any situation, because it is a deep and secret movement of the divine spirit within our own, the felt sense of God's own self-discovery in us. The life of contemplation prepares us for such intervals of divine encounter, creating a new experience of time: "le temps vierge" -- one's own time felt at once as abundant fullness and profound emptiness. Like the enigmatic "point vierge," its temporal analog is a point of "nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being." It is an incomparable point of contact with mystery by which we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into infinite reality to awaken as our true self.
Le temps vierge is the time of openness to all that is just as it is. It is healing time when some great and secret mercy works miracle in our woundedness, and so it is compassionate time. In this space of liberty, free of the demands of the world and the ego, all possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices become manifest in a moment of pure potential. This is the different wisdom Merton harvested from the seeds of contemplation nurtured in the soil of the present moment, the near frontier of eternity. In his moments of real presence he came to see what is our to see as well in the temps vierge of quiet praise:
The world and time are the dance of the Lord
in emptiness.
The silence of the spheres in the music of
a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena
of life,
the more we analyze them out into strange finalities
and complex purposes of our own,
the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and
despair.
But it does not matter much,
because no despair or ours can alter the
reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always
there.
Indeed we are in the midst of it,
and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we
want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.
--Thomas Merton
Pray for me now and then.
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