There is Nothing Else

“Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past.” – Dogen Zenji

Are you who you were yesterday, or are you who you will be tomorrow? Do you suppose that tomorrow you can be a better person, or that you were better in the past? Tomorrow never comes, and yesterday is only a memory.

You are an entire expression inside and out of yourself now, without ever trying to be so. Now is the moment for choice. We cannot know what tomorrow brings, nor can we perfect the past. If we are always viewing ourselves as past or future, then we cannot achieve anything.

You are independent of the past and the future. You are independent of time itself. Everything is fundamentally available, and yet there is nothing in existence to be available. You are intertwined in the very nature of your own being, inseparable from all those things that give you the ability to exist.

Past and Future are markers of a limited subjective scope of perception. All the information that is currently available to us is impossible to process all at once, and so we perceive only what we can. We are like a single computer trying to download the entire Internet at once.

And thus we feel disconnected, isolated, cut off from the whole. But how can we be? The vary nature of our existence is the coalescence of so many variables that it would be impossible to determine every single one. If even a single atom were slightly off in its connection to any other atom, we would not exist.

You are but a drop in the ocean, independent only insofar as you think you are. Because you are a single drop, you are never really apart from the rest of the ocean. The only boundaries we have are the ones we create for ourselves. The only thing that stands in the way of finding a powerful sense of inner peace is ourselves.

Peace is knowing that in time everything changes and being open to that change.

Do you think that the trees try to hold onto the wind? Does each leaf attempt to grasp the ungraspable? Why would it make such an effort? And yet so many are holding on to what is long gone. Do the leaves reach for the wind, and beckon it to come closer? Why should it? And yet so many are living for something that may or may not exist. Do not think of yourself, for thinking of the self is by definition a memory of the past. You are not who you are.

You are change.
There is nothing else.