Rule 28: The Illusionary Power of Time

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 ....

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

Rule 20: Becoming the Flow

Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.

Sometimes we cling to expectations, the further into the future the better till we get dizzy. We think: When we know what will happen in two, five or ten years, we can make the best decisions now. But the further we look into the future, the unsafer the ground gets. When you look at the smoke that arises from an incense stick you notice that the first range it takes, a few centimeters, goes right up, and then the smoke starts to curl in ever new patterns. This is an example from chaos theory which could prove that there is no possibility to calculate what would follow after the first phase of order, whether the smoke goes in this or another direction, the curls get smaller or bigger etc.

Similar is our experience with the future. What is more in distance gets fuzzy and uncertain and vanishes in unpredictability. But many have the unbroken urge to get to know what will happen then. So they consult fortune tellers and clairvoyants who should tell them what will be. Of course we should know that these prophecies are sometimes accurate and sometimes not. And we cannot know ahead which statements will be accurate and which fall among the error rate.

So we have to get involved with the mystery of future. The less we let our expectations take place and shape in our head, the easier we can accept what future has planned for us. The dominance of the linear time is an achievement of the latest centuries. In tribes who live in close contact with nature, a cyclical thinking prevails which is free of hierarchies of judgment. The spring is just different and not better than the summer, and the follow up of these seasons is one of the reliabilities.

Due to the small scale of the life circle the number of possible changes was limited. While we can chose among thousands of possibilities to spend our vacations in any degree of distance and while we can build up inner images and expectations with all those possibilities, the spacious radius for people from early stages of cultural evolution is defined by the strength of their feet and by the distance they can manage in one or at most several days to walk one way and back.

The more we have developed out of this form of living and of consciousness the more could happen in future, what blocks our plans and expectations. So we feel forced to invest more into the control of the future by trying to turn off all the risks which could linger there. And it seems that we succeed even less to control this future as by our very efforts to control it becomes even more complex.

When we dare the step from anxieties into wisdom, this means that we entrust ourselves with reality and its challenges. Reality does not allow control and does not follow our expectations. So it is advisable, to waive control and expectations as far as we manage to do so. In cases in which it is not possible we are controlled by an inner fear. When we accept this fear we can weaken its power and allow more of the trust into the flow of life.

For life flows whether we trust it or not. It takes us all along and carries us all the way whether we assume that the rudder is in our hands or we realize that the steering movements of our hands are also part of the flow. In realizing this, we are the flow.

The first step into the flow results from an inner decision. We may discover that in the deepest sense all decisions are not directed by our consciously experience of wanting but by sources beyond our recognition. Yet we can keep the “illusion” of conscious self aware decisions in order to keep up the social responsibility which is connected to the outcomes of any decision.

Sometimes we regret decisions and would prefer to reverse them as soon as we notice what went wrong. We feel overstrained with these decisions and want to avoid the consequences. But what has happened, has happened, history cannot be reversed. We should translate quarreling about the past which does not exist anymore into learning about how we can act differently now and in the future. When we trust the flow we know that we have the power to master all challenges which will come up during the journey, as every river masters the way to the ocean whatever obstacles it encounters.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com