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Guided Meditation: Awareness of My Limited Time

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening friends, whatever time it might be, mechanical time, local time, wherever you're joining. Lovely to be with you and practice together.

So this week we have been exploring teachings on time, the aspect of time. And we continue today with perhaps one of the most apparent to me and to many, to the Buddha—well, most apparent, I'll just leave it at that—aspect of time, which is the brevity of human life, and what a short time relatively we have on this planet, in this life, in this birth.

And the teachings on time, especially with the brevity of life, the Buddhist teachings have to do with the ethical dimension and the cultivation dimension. As in, time is short. How am I spending my time? Or, if this was the last moment of my life, how would I want to be cultivating my heart and mind in this moment? So there's always this cultivation, this wisdom aspect that the Buddha brings in together with the practice of brevity of time. It's not just, "Oh, I'm going to die, I have limited time" in panic, but "How well am I spending my time? How am I cultivating my mind and heart?"

So with that as the frame for today exploring time, let's start meditating together.

So arriving. Arriving in the body in this moment in time. Turning our gaze inward. Turning the gaze of awareness towards the body, towards the touch points, towards the body. Sitting and being breathed. And towards the sensations of the breath in the body.

And for the first few minutes, inviting the breath, the sensations of the breath within the body, to serve as the anchor. The length of the breath, the time, the length of the breath. Bringing awareness to the length of the in-breath and the out-breath.

And now, I'd like to invite you to drop in this reflection in the body. Not so much in the head; it's not a thinking practice, but drop the reflection in the body. Let it reverberate: If my life was as long as it takes to breathe in after breathing out, or as long as it takes to breathe out after having breathed in. If my life is the length of this breath, the time it takes, the length of this breath, and this is all the time I have. How do I want to be cultivating, to be present to the teachings of the Buddha? Teachings on wisdom, kindness, compassion, non-harming, presence, letting go, awareness. How do I want to be? How do I want my heart and mind to be? If this is all the time there is, the length of a whole in-breath or the length of a whole out-breath. It is all the time there is. What if this was the only time I had? How does it change and shift this moment's presence, awareness, state of heart and mind?

Let there be an intimacy with the immediacy of this moment. And also in these teachings, the Buddha brings about, conjures up spiritual urgency. If this is all the time I have, would I let my mind wander? Would I allow myself to be resentful or angry? How would I want the state of heart and mind to be cultivated? I'm only alive for the duration of one in-breath or one out-breath.

Intimacy with the brevity of time. Intimacy with the brevity of time in the duration of just this in-breath. What if I were only alive, my remaining lifespan is the remainder of this in-breath or this out-breath, the time it takes to breathe out. Notice the time. Intimacy with brevity. And how do I want my heart and mind state to be right now, this brief moment in time? What if the entirety of your lifespan was the length of this in-breath, the length of this out-breath?

And as we bring this time for our sitting practice to a close, appreciating that we showed up and dedicated this time to cultivating our hearts and minds for the benefit of all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free, including ourselves.

Dharmette: Time (4 of 5) The Days and Nights Are Relentlessly Passing

Greetings everyone.

The topic that we've been exploring this week has been the topic of time, exploring time. And this morning we continue with one of the important teachings of the Buddha on the brevity of human life and how do we want to spend our time.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the guided meditation, when the Buddha conjures up and brings an awareness, a teaching of the brevity of human life, there's always an ethical, a wisdom teaching with it. It's so life is short. How do I want to spend my time? If this is the last moment that I'm living, if this is my remaining lifespan, how do I want to be? How do I want my heart and mind to be? How do I want to attend to the Blessed One's teachings?

The quote I want to start with actually is one of my favorite Buddha teachings. It's from the Anguttara Nikaya^[1]—AN 10.48 in the Pali Canon^[2]—and the teaching is this: "The days and nights are relentlessly passing. How well am I spending my time? This should be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth." So the days and nights are relentlessly passing. How well am I spending my time?

When I heard this in a dharma talk almost 20 years ago, actually more than 20 years ago, it really shook me. It really shook me. The days and nights are relentlessly passing. How well am I spending my time? And I remember writing this on a piece of paper and putting it on my bathroom mirror, and I saw it every day. And it brought really this sense of spiritual urgency.

And in this way again, as you see, the Buddha is bringing in the brevity of time and pairing this with the wisdom question or the ethical question: How well am I spending my time? What am I doing with my time? It's not just that the days and nights are relentlessly passing, let's go party. But how well am I spending my time?

Similarly, in the teaching in the Maranasati Sutta^[3]—Mindfulness of Death Sutta, which actually I brought into the guided meditation, which is Anguttara Nikaya 6.19—the Buddha when he's teaching the monks, he's teaching them that the best way to really practice death awareness, the limitedness of life awareness, is to consider that: "Okay, what if I might only live for the interval that it takes to breathe out after breathing in, or breathe in after breathing out?" And if this is the only interval of time I have. So again, Buddha is bringing awareness to the duration of time being alive. Your lifespan is just this breath. Remaining lifespan is just this in-breath or just this out-breath. Then, the remainder of the phrase is, "How would I attend? How do I attend to the Blessed One's instructions?" Basically, how would I live? How would I cultivate my mind and heart considering that this is all the time I have? What state of heart and mind do I want to be in in this brevity of time? So time is always, of course, paired with this awareness, to be aware of our hearts and minds and how we're cultivating.

So today, exploring that our time is short, our life is short. We have not been in existence, each one of us, in this shape or form, in these causes and conditions, in this body, in this birth. We were not born, we were not existing for billions of years. Consider that in terms of time, billions of years we were not in existence. For eternity, we're not in existence. Here we are, a flash of lightning. In the cosmic scale, it's a flash of lightning. Of course, our lives are so short. So short, a flash of lightning, and then we will not exist also. We will be non-existent for billions of years. So here we are, aware, conscious, with agency, with some co-created agency—that's another topic altogether—and here we are. And how do we want to cultivate our hearts and minds, our life, for the benefit of ourselves and the benefit of others this brevity of time.

Actually, another thing I want to bring in is what I just mentioned, bringing awareness to the brevity of our time. If we don't bring awareness to the brevity of our time—because most of us live, we all do, we live as if we're going to live forever—we do things that really only make sense in light of eternity. The way we waste our time, especially in modern life, with scrolling and with just social media and various things, or doomscrolling, or getting riled up about something. Taking birth as an angry person who's just fuming about something someone said some time ago. The ways that we spend our lives really make sense sometimes if we were eternal beings, but we are not. So bringing awareness to the limitedness of our time helps us live a more awakened life instead of just wasting these precious, precious, precious moments of life.

And it's not just so much spending them. It's that, as Heidegger^[4], the philosopher who wrote about time a lot—Being and Time is a magnificent volume that he wrote—we are time. It's not like we have time. It's not a commodity. It's not like I have a mug or I have something. Time is all I am, all we are. We unfold in time. So when we're not aware of our time and how we're spending our time, and this precious resource that is our time, we are basically not aware of ourselves. We're not aware of our life. We are wasting ourselves, our lives. So every moment that our attention is hijacked by social media, for example, and that we're going to check email and then we get distracted and it becomes five minutes of this and becomes 30 minutes of a YouTube video, we are spending... it's our life that is becoming basically a log that is being burnt on the altar of social media. We become the fuel, our life, our being, our limited resource that is us.

So bringing awareness to the limitedness of our time and mindfulness of death is the way to do that, which is really the way to bring fine, nuanced awareness to the preciousness of this moment, this breath right here. With the ethical perspective, of course, with the ethical aspect: How do I want to be? How do I want to spend my time?

And the spiritual urgency that this practice brings in is a spiritual urgency without anxiety. So I mentioned, I think on the first day, the quality of saṃvega^[5]. When we contemplate the brevity of our time, it naturally brings in, as I mentioned to you when I heard that quote 20 years ago: "The days and nights are relentlessly passing, how well am I spending my time?" It brought spiritual urgency for me, saṃvega in Pali. Another time I was not a dharma teacher, I was a practitioner, I was a scientist, I was at Berkeley doing research in AI. So that was a sense of, "Oh, how well am I spending my time?"

So spiritual urgency. And there's another Buddhist teaching I want to bring in here, and the Buddha says, "Practice as if your hair were on fire." Actually, the original is "practice as if your turban was on fire," but most of us don't wear a turban. So, "practice as if your hair were on fire," which is not the idea of practicing in a frantic way, but the idea is to practice with wholeheartedness. Because when your hair is on fire, there is a wholeheartedness. There is an intensity of giving ourselves to this practice, to waking up, to cultivating our hearts and minds for the benefit of everyone. So this wholeheartedness is really... it's not like, "Oh, I will practice tomorrow," or endlessly distracting ourselves. And the Buddha again has another teaching in the Dhammapada^[6], that one who forgets about the brevity of life is basically like a fool who's picking flowers in a flood. So it's such a poignant image.

So much more to say, and maybe I'll just end with a story I wanted to bring in earlier. And again, this story is from Einstein's Dreams, a book by Alan Lightman^[7] that I've been bringing in the past couple of days. And in this book, there is a world in which the entirety of human life happens in one day. So people are born at midnight and then they die at midnight. So everything—birth, schooling, love affairs, marriage, professions, old age—everything must be fit within one transit of the sun. And in this world, time is too precious. A life is a moment in a season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. And in the story, finally, when old age comes, a person discovers that they know no one because there hasn't been time.

So the genius of the story is that it helps us feel what we ordinarily resist feeling: that our life is already extraordinarily brief. It's just that we normalize it.

So with that, friends, thank you for your practice. Thanks for your awareness. I want to invite you today to really bring in this reflection: The days and nights are relentlessly passing. How well am I spending my time in this moment? All right, thank you friends. Take care and looking forward to tomorrow for the culmination of our week together.