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For The Time Being, All Is Time

from On The Arc of the Beautiful Decay by West Riding

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The final tracks title is an indirect reference to one of Eihei Dogen's most difficult fascicles, "Uji" or "Being Time." In this fascicle, Dogen asserts that we are NOT individual beings caught up in and subjected to a linear concept of time, a cycle of past-present-future that despite our best efforts to reverse it or slow it down, or to "live our best lives" in a stressed-out constant pursuit of comfort of happiness, continues to progress, completely unconcerned with the stress and fear it causes humanity.
Instead, Dogen says, we ARE time. The constant flux of birth and decay that permeates every single moment of our being IS the passage of time, IS indicative of the fact that "time" and "being" cannot be separated.

And because of this, thoughts of past and future are folly, because the past is the present, and the present is the future, there is no separation. A sort of hyper-focused attention on the present moment, then, is the surest way to be free of the cycle of birth and death, because each moment is simply that moment, and exists in its own "dharma position" as Dogen states. In another part of his treatise "Genjokoan," Dogen asserts that speaking of firewood as before and ash as after is likewise wrong thinking - that firewood is in its dharma position of firewood, and ash is in its dharma position of ash. There was no inherent past for the ash, and no inherent future for the firewood, they simply exist in that moment in that state, just as it is. In that sense then, past and future are subjugated to what is essentially one eternal present moment, that while it is ever-changing, never ceases to simply BE this present moment. And so with that, everything is time...for the time being. Not "time being" in the usual way we use the term, to mean "temporarily," but rather "for the time...BEING." We simply are BEING for a time, and that time is now.

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from On The Arc of the Beautiful Decay, released February 15, 2024

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West Riding Portland, Oregon

West Riding (aka James M Gregg) produces ambient, neo-classical and cinematic music inspired by quiet mountains, intrepid journeys and Zen koans, as well as artists such as Olafur Arnalds, Phillip Glass, Max Richter, Arve Henriksen, Hans Zimmer, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Gustav Mahler and many more westriding.net ... more

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