Prior Worlds

Lately, I’ve pondered one of the stranger aspects of getting older. It’s not just that there’s more water under the bridge, so to speak, but that so many preceding events no longer have external reference points. A memory from thirty or forty years ago can appear in the mind with remarkable clarity, while much of the stuff that informed it is no more.

In my case, I’m on the West Coast, while many of my formative experiences happened back East. At this point, entire neighborhoods have transformed beyond recognition. Individual places no longer exist. Some of the people involved are still part of my life, others are gone, and as we get older, often permanently.

Once upon a time, those worlds were essentially self-confirming. The experiences lined up with the external container. Now there are only the memories, along with whatever feelings arise when they appear.

It’s not melancholy or nostalgia, exactly, so much as a kind of ontological vertigo. Things that once seemed like unquestionable markers of reality become increasingly difficult to distinguish from dreams. And yet they happened.

A few posts back, I briefly mentioned a Buddhist concept known in Tibetan as nyam. Nyams are states that can arise in contemplation, such as bliss, clarity, nonconceptuality, spaciousness and so forth. It’s important to note that they aren’t fake. They’re experiences. But like all experiences, they’re temporary, and therefore shouldn’t be confused with realization, which can accommodate every variety of appearance without depending on or being reducible to any of them.

Personally, I’ve had nyams that at the time seemed quite significant. Astonishing, even revelatory. I can recall that they happened, but I’m unable to reconstruct them in a way that makes them solid. I’m very happy about that. Because anything I can fabricate is simply another appearance, as ephemeral as the rest.

There are plenty of nyam-like moments in ordinary life, even if we aren’t clinging to them as evidence of spiritual development. Falling in love certainly qualifies. The body gets loaded with chemicals that create all kinds of heart-mind feels. Certain psychedelic encounters might qualify. I’ve had musical nyams, linguistic ones, moments of suddenly understanding something. And there’s the flip side: periods of disconnection. Which is actually impossible, as even that feeling is mutually dependent.

Brass tacks: every “thing” that appears, internally or externally, is in flux. If it’s like this, stick around long enough and it’ll be like that. Then everything changes again. That’s just fine. Because what is presently “there” is what we can directly relate to—not some conceptual projection of what was or might be.

Human beings can’t help but canonize and reify. That’s just what we do. Experiences become markers: This is when I finally understood. This is when everything changed. This is how I know I’ve gotten somewhere. These signposts aren’t necessarily unhelpful. They can provide orientation. But we can also put far too much on them. If we’re sitting there trying our damnedest to get enlightened as though enlightenment is a thing, we may miss our lives.

Getting older means accumulating a certain amount of evidence that there’s nothing durable about any of this. Perhaps some of the wisdom associated with aging comes from tasting this directly through the process. We can’t reconstruct the causal chain, but we can recognize how all of these moments and experiences arise and dissolve within the wide-open space of awareness. And then, perhaps, “real” and “impermanent” don’t have to be so polarized.

These days, I’m more aware of the bittersweet and occasionally unsettling feeling of more and more of life falling into the rearview. Prior worlds become inaccessible except through memory. The seeming solidity of what has passed loses its context over time. Eventually even memory melts away, evaporating into the same spaciousness.

There’s no instruction here. I’m just sharing a little about how it feels for me to contemplate the traces of what has come and gone. Perhaps there’s an invitation to appreciate how none of it can really be held, even as it unfolds. Up to you.

If that’s the way of it, there’s really no struggle. No need to fear. No need to hope, either. But plenty of opportunities to appreciate, participate, and relax within the unfolding.