We are beginning our exploration of Delusion, one of The Three Poisons that keep us from awakening. (The other two are Greed and Aversion.) As we count down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, the concept of calendar and clock time seems a perfect place to start our investigation — not because we are beginning a new topic, but because calendar/clock time is a kind of delusion! Wha??? Why? Consider that time is a convenient agreement we made as a human community, an agreement we rely on. How would we have meetings and travel on planes and trains without it? But it is just an agreement. When we take it to be absolute reality, that’s a powerful delusion that doesn’t serve us.
The natural world of which we are an intrinsic part is all rhythms, cycles, seasons, circular patterns of arising and falling away — all of which, if we pay attention, teach us about the nature of impermanence and the interconnectedness of all life. This deep understanding is key to awakening.
But in our culture we distract ourselves with a made up system of linear time. Instead of appreciating it for the convenience it provides, we perceive it as a solid reality, as if we are all on this timeline that stretches into the distant past and distant future. Does it run left to right? right to left? up or down? Stop and think for a moment how you perceive your own timeline and world history.
Calendar and clock time were never meant to supersede nature’s rhythms. But it has done just that for so many of us, fostering a forgetfulness of our intrinsic nature. We have come to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, operating on a totally different wavelength. Of course this varies to a great degree, person to person and culture to culture. But for most of us it takes effort to stay connected, doesn’t it? It takes a conscious choice to give ourselves the gift of our own natural rhythms that our ancestors took for granted. Otherwise we succumb to the easy effortless drone of the distinctly human construct of the clock and calendar time world we have co-created. Can we appreciate the great gift of what we have created without falling for the delusion that it is reality?
If we can’t see through that delusion, we set ourselves up to be shocked when the natural way of things makes itself known to us. How resistant we are to the rhythms of nature, whether it’s the seasons coming and going or our own very natural mortality.
Clever as we are, we create workarounds like electric lighting to extend daylight into the night, reinforcing our feeling of being apart from and impervious to nature. Our scientists work to extend our lives because we can’t face the thought of aging and dying, making room for generations to come.
So as we approach the ‘New Year’, if we believe it is real, we vest it with almost magical powers. Resolutions are only for the New Year. Say you make a resolution to start eating healthier or exercising more in the coming year. Doesn’t that set you up for gobbling up the chocolate cake and being a couch potato up until the stroke of midnight on December 31st?
And if on January 2nd or 3rd you find that the habit of gobbling and lounging is harder to break than you thought, do you feel like you’ve blown it? Maybe next year, you say.
I was thinking how many years ago I was able to give up smoking on New Year’s. So I have believed that, whether a real thing or not, the concept of turning over a new year and turning over a new leaf are intertwined. But the friend I quit with didn’t manage to do so for more than a few days, may she rest in peace.
So what was the difference? The main difference is that my motivation was to get my body into healthy hospitable baby-making mode. I wanted to get pregnant. It was that deep biological intention that sustained me and kept me from ever smoking again. New Year’s was a mere convenient starting point.
Understanding that calendar/clock time is a convenience and not a reality helps us to recognize our own delusion when we, for example, ‘can’t wait for this awful year to be over’. We throw away whole days, weeks and months when we say things like ‘I’m having a bad week.’ Or ‘I got up on the wrong side of the bed and now this day is shot.’
We can see how firmly we believe in it when we ask the clock instead of our stomach whether it is time to eat. It’s skillful to notice all the ways we put this made-up system in charge of our lives instead of staying in tune with nature’s rhythms, cycles and seasons. How much more skillful it is to stay present in this moment, resetting wise intentions again and again, instead of waiting around until the clock or calendar dictates your efforts.
Notice if this collective useful agreement about the clock and calendar takes on the semblance of absolute reality in your life. See if there’s any room for acknowledging nature’s cyclical seasonal arising and falling away. If so, see if that helps you to embrace the nature of impermanence and your intrinsic interconnectedness with all life.
And, oh yes, Happy New Year!!!
Just ten days after the winter solstice — which few people even notice let alone celebrate — everyone around the world celebrates this totally arbitrary change from one year to the next. On the solstice, we have a brief celebration at the neighbors, watching the sun set and making a toast. Beyond that, to make things even more clear, they created a series of holes in the stone railing of their west facing balcony, where on the solstices and equinoxes they set metal stakes that register the shadows cast by the setting sun. One stake aligns with each of the three others in turn, the furthest left on the winter solstice, the furthest right on the summer solstice, and the middle one on both the equinoxes.