What is Happening to Time?

… what is “being in the now?” … and what is “the end of time?”

During my first, unexpected, discovery of being not limited by a fixed time-space perception, a five minute song seemed to last an hour. I could hear every single note arise, climax, and linger; all the notes intermingling and harmonizing with each other. I was in a state of consciousness where I was experiencing far more within the five minute time interval than usual.

These days we can feel a powerful increase in the intensity of experience, of happening, of realizations. This expansion is due to our shifting more towards our right brain hemisphere, away from separation, more into the present. We are becoming more connected.

Our left brain personality, trying to keep up with all the details on its “things to do” list, feels it has less and less time. This obliges us to release our own pressure, to simplify our lives and move towards trust. As we do so, we start to feel how much more we are actually experiencing, expanding, and becoming than ever before. Indeed, each year we seem to be living far more than we ever have.

So what is the “end of time?” Time, as we know it, is linear and moves from the past to the future. To do so it depends, solely, on our mind. Without our minds there is no recollection of the past and no projection of the future. When we stop to heed these, when we fully enter the present moment of now, linear time stands still and expands. What is for the left brain the end of time, is for the right brain the discovery of endlessness. The tiny moment of “now” is a portal into eternity. The ocean falls into the dewdrop.

For the mind this is rather difficult to grasp. It is not that time stretches eternally into the future and the past. Eternity is a zone of timelessness. Time “ends” when we enter the zone of non-time. It is not scary to step out of our mind, into the mindless, timeless state. It is the end of separation. It is re-union. It is blissful.

One ordinary afternoon in Tonga, I was sitting on the porch in our little wooden house above the harbor reading The Power of Now. I reached the part where Eckhart gives techniques for being in the now: portals into the present moment. Just reading those lines, allowing that feeling in, brought my mind to pause. This triggered an extraordinary happening. It felt like a huge space opened up around me, like a lid was lifted off, and I was in a timeless zone of utter peace. From that quiet spaciousness I looked over at my partner, with whom I was going through an extremely difficult period, and I felt an amazing otherworldly love.

This love that we access in the gap transcends that which we normally experience. It has another quality. It is far beyond the intense love we may have in a crush, the deep love we may feel for a soul mate, or even the devotional love we feel for our own children. This is not to belittle whatever we have felt so far, but just to say there is more to come.

… I understood too, from the way this opening had occurred that it was my mind coming to a standstill that had provoked all the previous surreal moments in my life. These gaps had allowed me to enter into the timeless zone: the backdrop of our physical existence.

And within that zone, just behind the scenes, is the state of peace and love we can recall from long ago. It is always there, obscured by the constant activity of our thoughts, silently waiting for our minds to pause.

~ from LOVE IS IN THE AIR

It is only without our mind, spinning out its own little story line, that we can be in the now. That’s why when the car crashes, the bad news breaks, or the silence overcomes us, it creates a gap in our life’s continuity, in our plans and in our thoughts. Stopping is a window to a different dimension.

… My own experiences were varied, due to circumstances, but in essence they were all the same: brief openings to the bigger picture. The silence when I was a teenager sailing with my father, and again by the river bank with my brother and sister; the shock of the car crash and the early morning meeting with the cobra; the uplifting moment in the streets of Kathmandu, and the gap in Tonga where I felt unconditional love.

Only through the portal of now do we access our larger picture. Usually our mind keeps pulling us forwards or back into the past, and we thus spend most of our lives lost in thought. Indeed humanity has been lost in thought since a very long time. It will be very freeing be over the obsessive activity of our left brain fixated mind and to thus return to the state of blissful union which we are all seeking, in one odd way or another. That state is always present ~ it is us who are not!

And it is certainly rather curious that what should be the most natural things in the world have been so far the most elusive to us humans: just to Be, to be Here, and to be Now. Yet, with the pausing of our left brain, any one of us can, at anytime enter instantly, with no preparation or diploma needed, this state of Presence. Indeed, we are already there. We are like the funny drunk who spends all night walking around the outside of the park, holding onto the bars, calling, “Let me out, let me out!”

It can be helpful to know, while we are on our journey to fulfillment that we have already arrived. We are already, on some level, not only everything we have ever aspired to be, but also far greater than we can possibly imagine.

As important and worthwhile as our momentary life story is, it’s just a drop in the cosmic ocean. And we are that cosmic ocean. Keeping this perspective in view, it is all small stuff. Use your mind, enjoy your personality, however don’t get too identified and be intrigued to go beyond them. For you are infinitely more.

Think big. Universal scale. One day we will be faced with a much greater identity, that of our soul. We may become instantly aware of many lifetimes. In the enormity of our soul journey, all our concerns are but details. In the face of that immense cosmic being that we are, our cultural and personal history here is just a minute aspect.

And yet, do not worry, you will still feel “this is me,” for your sense of being you remains exactly the same. Do you still feel like you are the same person inside as when you were young? Your body and all outer conditions have changed but your life force, your sense of “I am,” remains the same. It always will.

~ from WINDOW INTO ETERNITY