Children’s Story
The Buddha told this parable:
A man travelling through the mountains suddenly found himself being chased by a huge hungry tiger. He ran and ran until he came to the edge of a cliff. There, with nowhere else to go, he caught hold of a thick vine and swung himself over the edge. Above him the tiger growled. Below him he heard a sound, and looked down to see another tiger waiting for him at the bottom of the vine. Two mice, a white mouse and a black mouse, scrambled out from the Cliffside and began to gnaw at the vine. The traveller could see they were quickly eating through it. Then in front of him on the cliff side a delicious smell caught his attention. Ah, a luscious wild strawberry! Holding onto the vine with one hand, he reached and picked the berry with the other. How delicious!

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In January, as part of a sermon, I read a few extracts from the book ‘What We Believe but Cannot Prove’, which is a series of essays by leading thinkers setting out the things they think are true, but for which, as yet, there is no real evidence. One of the most interesting essays in the book is by a man called Kai Krause who has a doctorate in philosophy, and who works in photography and film. This is his first paragraph:
I have always felt, but cannot prove, that Zen is wrong. Then is right. Everything is not about the now, as in ‘the here and now’, ‘living for the moment’, and so on. On the contrary: I believe that everything is about the before then and the back then. It is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not the moment.
The advice he gives us as a consequence of this theory is:
Spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realised, dreams not yet come true. Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you deliberately create. And at the same time relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them. Make plans and take pictures.
Now this is rank heresy, and as far as heresies go it is at the top of premier league. Forget about the so-called Unitarian heresy that God is a unity not a trinity; forget those heresies and controversies about the person and work of Jesus Christ, whether we are saved by faith or by works, or any of a hundred other contentious topics that have exercised the ingenuity of countless theologians for two thousand years. These are small fry in comparison with Krause’s opinion. In two short pages he has overturned what must be the central tenet of every spiritual system ever devised: namely, that the past and the future are dangerous distractions, and only the present moment should occupy our attention.
We find this insistence on the importance of ‘now’ in all forms of Buddhism, but especially, as Krause notes, in Zen Buddhism. ‘If not now, when?’ ask the Zen Buddhists, and Buddhist meditation techniques are little more than attempts to bring us to an awareness of the present. The story I told the children is one of Zen Buddhism’s most famous stories, and illustrates the conviction that our greatest delight is found in the present, not in the past or the future.
The Sufis, who belong to the Muslim tradition, call themselves ‘Sons of the time present’, and within Christianity we find the same emphasis. In our second reading today we heard the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount in which we are told that we should let tomorrow worry about itself, and that each day has enough trouble of its own (Matthew 6:25-34). On another occasion, Jesus says that we should ‘let the dead bury their own dead’ (Matthew 8:22), meaning we should leave the past alone and get on with the business of the present. In Luke’s Gospel (Chapter 12), we find the story of the rich man who filled his barns to overflowing and was looking forward to a life of ease, but who died before he could enjoy the fruits of his labours. In the prayer of Jesus, we ask God to supply us with our ‘daily bread’, just enough for today with no thought of tomorrow. And St. Paul tells us that ‘now is the acceptable time’ (Romans 13:11).
In the Jewish tradition we find that Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back (Genesis 19:26), and in the Book of Exodus, we read that the manna provided by God lasts for only a day, after which it turns putrid and begins to stink (Exodus 16:20).
Our opening words this morning ‘Look to this day’, are taken from the Hindu tradition. Even the secular existentialists would say much the same thing.
In the contemporary world, Eckhart Tolle is representing these venerable and ubiquitous ideas in his best-selling book The Power of Now, which according to no less an authority than Oprah Winfrey, ‘Can transform your thinking (and give you) more joy right now’.
So, who is right? Eckhart Tolle and an illustrious list of gurus stretching from Abraham to Oprah Winfrey, or the brave but obscure Dr. Kai Krause?
This is a big topic, and I can’t hope to do it justice in what remains of this address. What follows are just a few random observations.
The first observation I would make is this: although Krause seems to stand alone, he is definitely not alone. In fact, he is really expressing the majority opinion. What Krause says we should do is what we do do, most of us, most of the time. We all ‘make plans and take pictures’, if we understand ‘take pictures’ in its widest sense of recording incidents, either on film or on the mind, as an aid to recalling them at a subsequent time. Krause is simply articulating the unexpressed philosophy of the whole human race, but while the great spiritual teachers have invariably cautioned us against it, he is endorsing it, and telling us to do consciously what we are already doing unconsciously.
Looking in excited anticipation towards the future is a constant human preoccupation, and our need to do it is capitalised upon by the advertisers, who know that the human being finds it very hard to live without something to look forward to. That’s why Christmas advertising begins in September, and summer holiday advertising starts on St. Stephen’s Day. In fact, holiday adverts seem to start before Christmas these days, because the psychologists are aware that we are sick of Christmas before it arrives. The fact that reality rarely matches anticipation is not lost on Krause, but he says that we should continue to anticipate anyway, because ‘nothing is ever as beautiful as its observation seen through the rose-coloured glasses of anticipation. The toddler’s hoped-for Santa Claus of Christmas Eve turns out to be a fat guy with a fashion issue.’ Krause seems to think that we should ignore such disappointments, but how can we? They continue throughout life, and the glasses gradually lose their rose-colour as all but the hopelessly optimistic among us begin to realise, almost as an immutable law, that things rarely turn out as we expect. And even when things seem to live up to their promise, as soon as some longed for occasion arrives we become aware that it will eventually come to an end; that every joyous event is tinged by thoughts of its transience. So, the millionaire may have achieved his goal, but he is constantly nagged by the thought that he will not live long enough to spend all his money; the much anticipated weekend away is overshadowed by the prospect of work on Monday morning. When I was teaching, I always found that the school holidays affected me in curious ways. Friday night before a normal weekend was always wonderful – two whole days without work - , but the final Friday of the summer holidays, when there were only two more days to go before school resumed, was desperately depressing. Two days off in both cases, but each occasioning a different response. What Krause is telling us to do is to deny our experience of the discrepancy between anticipation and reality, and to live in a constant state of self-deception.
Anticipation is delightful, but we shouldn’t rely upon it for our happiness. Remember, as Samuel Beckett told us, Godot never comes; or, as John Lennon sang, ‘Life is what happens while you’re making plans’. Or, as my mother used to say to her infuriatingly impatient son, ‘Stop wishing your life away!’
Similarly with memory, the ‘taking photographs’ part of Krause’s recipe for happiness. It is true, as the old song says, that ‘they can’t take that away from me’, meaning that the things I have experienced are stored in my memory and cannot be erased. I have ‘photographs’ of them, printed on paper, or printed on my mind. But memory is a double-edged sword, especially to those of us who are growing older. Memories of youthful indiscretions, when one’s hair was dark – when one had hair! – when one’s appetites were insatiable and one’s energy inexhaustible, come tinged with sadness to the fragile and the dyspeptic. Now, my balance gone, I step gingerly out of the shower in order to prevent some catastrophic fall, and I can barely eat a sausage or drink two pints of Guinness without worrying whether I’ll be up all night with heartburn!
Thomas Hardy wrote a beautiful poem, whose sentiments will be immediately comprehensible to all who’ve reached ‘a certain age’, and which Kai Krause would do well to ponder.
I look into my glass,
And view my wasted skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’

For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

As the ageing Hardy was well aware, but as the youthful Krause has yet to learn, memories of past achievements only serve to intensify the pain of present incapacities.
Nor is it possible, as Krause seems to assume, that we should remember only the pleasurable occasions of the past. The past is a package deal, the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful, the exhilarating and the embarrassing are mixed inextricably together. They call it ‘baggage’ in pop psychology circles, and it’s not a bad term, because it invariably weighs us down. The Buddhists tell the story of two monks, an old one and a young one, who come across a beautiful young woman standing by the riverside, unable to cross. The old monk carries her across on his shoulders and leaves her, thankful and dry, on the other side. The two monks walk on in silence, but an hour or so later, the young monk says to his companion, ‘What do you think you were doing carrying that young woman across the river? Don’t you know that your action violates the moral code of our order?’ The old monk replied, ‘I left the young woman by the river bank. Are you still carrying her?’ If we dwell on the past, we give our baggage power over us, and this is a danger which all the spiritual traditions warn us against.
As to Krause’s suggestion that we should frequently look at the photographs we’ve taken, and talk about our memories to those around us, I suspect that he is really joking. This is a sure-fire recipe for global boredom. Other people’s memories – unless they are recounted with a bit of wit and style (and they rarely are) – are among the most tedious things anyone can be expected to listen to. In Yorkshire, we say that some people tell a story ‘from the thread to the needle’ meaning that they tell you every single relentless detail: ‘Was it Tuesday? No, I think it was Wednesday. No wait a minute, I tell a lie, it was Tuesday because Coronation Street wasn’t on.......etc’ In an episode of Will and Grace, Will is talking to Karen about his brother, when Karen stops him and says, ‘Hold on there honey. I’m barely interested in you. What makes you think I’ll be interested in your brother?’ Who on earth does Krause think is going to be prepared to listen to our rambling reminiscences?
I, like you, no doubt, will continue to ‘make plans and take pictures’, to live in the past and the future. We can’t help it. What the spiritual traditions tell us, however, is that we should try to break the hold that both of these aspects of Time’s tyranny have upon us, and bring ourselves closer to an appreciation and enjoyment of the present. I thank Kai Krause for his deliberately provocative (and maybe slightly tongue in cheek) suggestions, but I must say, (in what must be the ultimate in patronising statements), that, for now at least, I’ll continue to stick with Jesus and the Buddha.

Bill Darlison
Dublin Unitarian Church 8th June, 2006