The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through us and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment. The present moment is all there is and all that there will ever be.
Whatever we experience, we experience in this moment, in the now. The now is defined by this experience. It is nothing but the experience of what is right now. The past is that which we cannot experience any more because it is not in the now. The same is true for the future.
We like to take the past into the presence by remembering. Our remembrance creates an image of the past, which is coloured and photoshopped by all possible influences. Sometimes we even “remember” events, which have never happened. As an impressive example we can see reports from survivors of the bombing attack on Dresden in 1945, which has caused the death of some ten thousands of people. Many survivors describe hedgehopper attacks, which they say to have seen, including the type of aircraft. Yet the historical research has proven without doubt that such attacks have never happened around that event and that such airplanes appeared in Dresden.
So we always should keep in mind that the past is only accessible for us as construction. It is a product of our memory and does not have any reality apart from that. We need our past to ensure our identity and to be able to rely on our surroundings. We do not have to invent or discover everything in each moment anew. But we miss the magic of the moment when we hold on to the past.
The future has to bow to the primacy of the presence as well. We create our future out of our fantasy, which is fuelled by our expectations, hopes and fears. Without future we could neither plan nor organize. Yet our future is never subject to our control, at anytime an unexpected event can destroy all our plans. So we need to keep up a good balance between the dreams of our future and the real experiences in the presence.
The time line itself is a construction or better, a principle of construction, a raster according to which we can structure our experience of time. Of course time does not have a spatial form. The time line allows us to plan efficiently like when building a house and every craftsman has a place in a plan so he knows exactly when his work is going to happen, or al least is meant to happen.
Being able to measure time gives us the illusion of governing it, of overpowering it. In reality, it is clear that we have no power over time, but that it has power over us. It is running on and on, whether we like it or not. Sometimes we would like to stop time (according to the aged Faust: “Stay, moment, you are so beautiful”), sometimes we want to push time so that an unpleasant experience is over quickly or a desired event comes sooner. But usually time plays a trick on us: When we want it to stay it moves the quicker, when we wait for Santa Claus it drags on endlessly slow. So we are often angry at time: it is too little of it or too much, but never right.
The only possibility to escape the control of time is by staying in the moment that is to be present moment by moment. This is a skill which only a few people have mastered, but we can come closer to it by meditating, e.g. by mindfully watching the inbreath and outbreath. By this, time loses its importance and we come to terms with it. We acknowledge a dimension which is not subjected to our grasp and hand ourselves over to its flow without the illusion of control.
When we imagine time as a spiral, we are in a spatial imagination as well. But it renders us an image, which is related to ourselves – as we move on as conscious beings, experiencing every moment consciously without linking it to anything in the past or in the future. We are not fixed between the old and the new to come but remain in what is real. The movement of time does us not lead away from us but closer to what we really are.
We acknowledge a dimension which is not subjected to our grasp and hand ourselves over to time without an illusion of being able to grasp and control it.
Eternity is this moment in which I can drop into.
And if I had more time, I could write even more about time ....
No comments:
Post a Comment