leeds buddhist centre

At a recent Practice evening we looked at the two extracts (reproduced below) from T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton and their relevance to meditation. The text is by an order member called Varagosha and is part of a longer article on Eliot’s Four Quartets which can be found in the Western Buddhist Review. The Western Buddhist Review is availible on-line at the Dharmaravastu Retreat Centre web site which can be linked through via our web site on www.leedsbuddhistcentre.org . Its well worth a visit.

Rijumitra

“A Place of Disaffection” The first topic that Eliot communicates in the poem will be a familiar one to anyone who knows anything about Buddhism; an exhortation to live in the present moment, rather than the shadow-lands of past and future, what Eliot calls 'time before and time after'. Eliot contrasts what he calls the 'waste sad time/stretching before and after' with the creative possibilities, beauty and meaning that are accessible to us if we inhabit the present moment. He graphically evokes the semi-conscious twilight state of being lost in memories of the past, or fantasies about an unreal future.

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and Time after

In a dim light...

...Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

This, unfortunately, is an experience probably all too familiar to meditators, a state without mindfulness or awareness, with the meditator so caught up in distractions he has no vantage point to even realise he is distracted. The mind is without direction or meaning, blown along like litter in the gutter.

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

Being lost in the past or future 'allows but a little consciousness', allows but a little mindfulness. However this is not to say that one cannot recall memories or make plans, but one does so not to escape the present, but to integrate or involve the past or future with the present. This then requires an awareness of both the experience - in this case vivid memories Eliot frequently comes back to in the poem of a rose garden, or a village church - and an awareness of oneself, in the present moment. This integration leads, Eliot says, to a sense of time being conquered.”