The Five Remembrances

When we look at a blossom and notice its scent, it is easy to think “here is a flower; once it was a seed”. Our eyes see the surfaces of things, and our minds name them: this, that. Yet if we observe the blossom and the seed with greater awareness, we understand that the blossom is only this moment of Flower. In a few days Flower will be expressed differently: it will be transformed into many seeds, vibrant with life and ready to sprout.

There was sun, rain and fertile earth for the seed to germinate; there were breezes to announce the ripeness of the plant, and butterflies and bees to pollinate the flower; there were autumn afternoons to ripen and dry the seed; and winter’s rest to carry the seeds back to the soil. Sprout, root, blossom, seed, the ceaseless river of life in all of the flower elements – the parts our eyes see and our minds say are “flower” – as well as the non-flower elements that are part of its Being: the rain, sun, soil, breeze, bees, autumn/dry, winter/die. Aging is not something that happens to the flower, it is the nature of the Flower.

We, too, are the same river of life, river of change. We are the seed of our father and our mother. We are our parents in seed form, just as they are the continuation of their parents in seed. We are formed of the spark of life continuing through many generations of ancestors, flower with the elements of earth that collect in the form of our bodies, and all of these non-self elements are transformed into new seed, in all the forms life takes, human or otherwise.

When we see only with our eyes, a wrinkle is frightening, a gray hair is frightening. We try to hide our changes, because we think the seed is not the flower. We may be afraid of pain.

We are easily caught in the notion of individuality, of objects. They have forms which we can see at a distance, or hear, or hold in our arms or our hands. You may be reading these words on the screen of a cell phone or a tablet, for example, or on a laptop or desktop computer. These are clearly not part of your body. You might be holding them on a sheet of paper or in a book. You bought the book, it isn’t part of your body, and you say that it belongs to you.

Cell phone, book, boot, root, house, car, pet, partner, city, nation, world. There is suffering along the sharp edges of every separated thing, and in the mistaken notion that somehow they belong to you. When someone steals the expensive cell phone, I suffer; when the pages of my book turn yellow I suffer. When the root rots and the house decays, the pet or the partner leaves you, or there is conflict in the world, you suffer.

The body is an object, and the mind creates a notion that the body somehow belongs to us. In fact, all of our wonderful parts, including the mind and its thoughts, are codependent elements of our being, but we are naturally caught in the idea of ownership. Because of this, there is suffering along the distinct edges of the body, and when the body is unwell, when it shows signs of decline, there is anxiety and there is fear.