Old Homes

   This evening, I went exploring in the cold night an old home at Marwill Street where I used to live when I was an undergraduate at York. And going into the street, I found a strange sight. I found a new and much bigger house that had been built on top of that old one-storey bungalow from so many years ago.. I am not sure why it would surprise me that this house would have been replaced by now. After all, it was over twenty years ago that I had first moved into the basement apartment at Marwill, as a way of living away from home to go to school at York.. But I felt a bittersweet taste as I saw the tall and 'new' structure standing where that bungalow once was. I wonder if this new structure represents something deep and unfathomable: a kind of life pattern where the impersonal and new overrides the 'cozy' and old. Why does it always look and feel this way?
    I remember reading Schopenhauer's philosophy on the way to university, around 1994-1995, and reflecting on his idea that thoughts become more 'contemplative' as they slip deeper into the past. And why is this? According to Schopenhauer, people are in a much better position to reflect from a distance on what happened in the past, without the interfering factors of struggle "in the present". To relate this concept to Buddhist practice, we can say that every moment is a Pure Land if one lets go of the vexations associated with the present thoughts, which are in turn rooted in the sense of self. Without the strong attachment to self, things can be enjoyed as temporary, fleeing manifestations of mind. But when I engage in an inner struggle with 'me' against the things around me, I am unable to really see things as they are. Only when I am reflecting on what has already happened without attachment am I allowed the distance from self to be able to contemplate that experience, and even enjoy that experience more wholeheartedly.
   How does this relate to my present subject of 'old homes'? I think that seeing where I used to live is a kind of experiment in Schopenhauer's philosophy of 'contemplation'. Did I feel somehow more peaceful to see something from the past come back to me? Not really. I think what really happened was much more complex.. For one, I did feel the regret of not being able to fully taste that moment as it was happening at the time.  In the midst of all my anxiety to succeed in school and to find employment afterward, I had failed to see that everything is always in this present. I am not ''rushing into the future" any more than I am moving away from the past. There really is no time, but the illusion of time passing prevented me from seeing that all of what I experience is in this one timeless 'now' of awareness. It looks as though it was an illusion for me to believe that I was 'going into' a future that never happened.
       But if I really take this teaching to heart, I will know that there was never such as thing as the past, and what happens is always in the unfolding moment of being-here. Though I may believe that I am moving from the past into the future, it is the same mind that registers all the moments--and that mind is not subject to moving whatsoever. If it were subject to moving, there would be no awareness of 'time' in the first place. To know this deeply and feel it intimately is to know that nothing ever leaves, nothing ever arises, nothing ever vanishes, nothing ever stays. Because the mind that sees the house as it is today is the same mind that sees the memory of the house of yesterday. Why feel loss or regret at something that never 'passed by'?