Don’t Recall – Let Go of What Has Passed
Clinging is the cause of your suffering
Tilopa, the great Indian Master, was famous for his six bits of advice. These are also known as the Six Nails. Each nail binds you to the human condition and prevents you from experiencing the freedom that is always yours.
The first is: Don’t Recall: Let Go of What Has Passed.
Look at your life and see how you are always clinging to the past. This is such an automatic response that you do not even recognize that you are clinging.
You get a call from your boss and there is that tone in his voice. You ‘know’ that you will now have to pull an all-nighter. You are clinging.
You eat at a restaurant and the food is out of this world heavenly. You make a mental note of this and that you have to recommend it to your friends. You are clinging.
Your daughter wants to talk about school, and you know that she received poor grades. Maybe she failed a course. You may be correct, but you are clinging.
You are about to make an important speech and you have a new joke ready. You know you will have them rolling in the aisle. You are clinging.
You had a blazing row with your partner. You are still smoldering when you return home and are ready to take up cudgels again. You are clinging.
Wait, wait, wait you are thinking.
This is not clinging. This is merely a remembering of essential information that enables me to function in my life.
Clinging is when I want something that happened in the past to happen again. OK, maybe the restaurant example involves clinging, but not the others.
I certainly do not want the row with my partner to continue. I am definitely not clinging to that.
You are wrong.
Clinging, in the broadest sense, is when something that happened to you, something that is in your memory bank, shapes what you see, think and feel right now.
When you see a chair and know that it is a chair, you are clinging.
I look at my grandson who is twenty months old. When he sees a wild turkey in the backyard, his eyes light up. He does not know yet that it is a wild turkey. He can appreciate it fully in the moment.
Anthony DeMello mentions that when you teach a child that a rainbow is a rainbow, he never sees a rainbow again.
This is deep.
Think about it.
Peace!
