Published Sunday, 08 March 2020
Appreciative awareness leads to life;
heedless avoidance is the path to death.
Those who are truly aware are fully alive,
while those who are heedless are as if already dead.Dhammapada v.21
If we presume that true, lasting aliveness is something that we might find in the future, in a place other than right here, we fall out of alignment with the reality of this moment. This is heedlessness. We are only sort of living our lives, with part of us not quite here. Hence the perpetual feeling of there being something missing. That which is missing is well cultivated, appreciative awareness of what is taking place here and now. Our Dhamma teachers encourage us to let go of our fantasies of the future, though this definitely does not mean dismissing imagination. Rather it means being acutely aware that fantasies are fantasies. They are like photographs; they can trigger strong emotions, though when we turn the photograph over it is blank. We are not being asked to let go of anything substantial.