The Value of Time

I don't pretend to know the value of time. To know how I've wasted it in my life is a source of discomfort for me, and should disqualify any philosophical reflection of its value. It's as though  one were to mistreat one's neighbors terribly and then write a blog post called, "The Value of Neighbors".

But this is the age of populist politics down in the mud with over-dressed, over-trained, overly old ideologues, when one hypocrisy trumps its predecessor, day after day in the psuedo-quasi-meta-news. With the assumption that we are all wrassling in the quamire of our own and other's P.O.O. -- Power Over Others -- with all the mudslinging, face-painting and subterfuge that would imply, I would say this about the value of time.

The simple fact of sitting there, and doing nothing, shows the true contempt we have for time.  The millisecond-slices of time we can observe in the moment of contemplation shows the tricky undercurrent of likes and dislikes, of personal preferences, the creeping pall of unquestioned assumptions, not to mention the pervasive creakiness of embodiment, from the clicking of big-toe joints to the gurgling of pylori up to the dandruff flakes on a comb-over crown.  That we try to ignore these annoying but infallible reminders of impermanence, that they vex us only enough to use dandruff shampoo but not the means of ending cyclic existence itself, shows that we do not value time enough. A single flake of dandruff should be heartbreaking enough to provoke renunciation and savoring this very moment of awareness as a wide-open  portal of liberation, but instead we won't let dandruff or sore feet get to us if we can get to them first, or simply ignore them, and therefore do not appreciate what the present moment -- much less the future -- really might contain.

This is a mistake.

As amazing as phenomena can be, a flow of wasted moments -- moments obscured by trivia, by avoidance of discomfort or pursuit of pleasure, or simply by an irresolute sense of what really matters -- is what occurs at the beginner's level of self-observation in meditation. Even at presumptively 'advanced' levels of practice, it turns out the subtle undercurrent of habit is still part of the contemplative weather. The dangerous undertow even seems necessary, in a way. Fair weather nearly all the time amounts to a desert; an ocean without currents is a swamp. Though some hardy, rare, beautiful critters may find a way to thrive there, a civilized biome cannot.

The highest products of human spiritual endeavor can thrive in desert, but in general, aside from sometimes ripening well in an alpine or deserted region, most Buddha-fruit appear in a jungle in the lowlands, near a river, belonging to a kingdom. So began Buddha Shakyamuni's teaching career with the first turning of the Dharma-wheel. Lord Buddha was born a prince, so he was  a personal product of great cultural refinement. His Shakya lineage was considered ancient even 2,500 years ago. His appearance in the world was like a rare flower or mushroom that appears only when certain long-developing conditions are complete. That is not to say Buddhas are not here already. They are here already, just like an ancient mycelium underground or a primordial banyan forest that hasn't fruited anytime in memory. We call those unripened growths "sentient beings".

Fortunately, for ourselves to savor the Buddha-truffle we do not need to grow one from scratch, or use an alaya-ground-sniffing theoretical pig, as it were.  We have the distilled essence of Buddha-fruit, or Dharma, and skilled fungus-farmers, known as Sangha or in the case of wizardly fruit-breeders, Lamas. The most skilled of those are able to make Mendrup, which is like grafting 1,000 different  scions of new, old and ancient fruit trees all on the same trunk and producing a single type of fruit, just once.

This is an over-extended and mixed-up metaphor, but I'm already out on a branch here, as it were.

This is the value of time, among other things: that the results of Buddhahood, such as the personal effects or artifacts of holy beings, are riper and more beneficial like the best of old wines or cheeses -- or truffles -- if we dig them properly.