When do we have space? When do we have time? These seem scarce. In this society, one is made to feel irresponsible and unproductive for seeking time for its sake. I was, and still am someone who has chosen a path that restricts this time, and someone who used to be, but to a lesser degree now, worried about it.
One night after weeks of tensions and worries, tasks and demands, projects to finish and new ideas to pursue, people to agrravate and be aggravated by, my mind intent on getting to the bottom of something and turning over in such a way as to knot the stomach. I had a dream. In this dream, a very clear voice, clearer than I've ever heard, said 'Just Be.'
This is not as hard as I thought it would be. Not hard to do, easy to lose and forget.Just Be. I'm not going to lie and say it was very challenging hard work to implement this advice. In fact if you approach this advice as a project, you are already breaking the advice. Just Be.
Writing is enormously fun for me, do that which is enormously fun for you. But this is not a self-help course. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. That's Rumi, who nonetheless I have found to be more self-helping than any self-proclaimed help. Anyway, like I said, this is time to relax. Do your really think this is the time to worry about the cruel world? The world is not so cruel when you have a moment to breathe. You must honour that gift.
When the clock ticks from one moment to the next, does that moment become the past, extinguished forever? Does the world and universe of that moment no longer exist except in memory or historical record?
Or did the last moment simple become this one? Is the past still here? Does everything that exists contain the sigularity at the beginning? Is energy ever destroyed? Does any moment ever pass, can time be broken? Everything is as it was. And it always was changing. That's how we remember it, as happening.
In a conversation, one can stop time and we call that intimacy. In a meditation the same. It is seeing it from inside, rather than viewing the world as an observer. From the inside, time is a field. Moments do not pass, moment is. This is not to ask one to see only what is happening now as important. This is to see what is happening now part of the past unbroken. It is not to forget the past, it is to see today as its becoming - all of it. We are shaped by history. In the very precise timeline, we can say that what we see is the past. The time it takes for light to travel through space. When we look to the stars, we see a past of long, long ago. Or should we say that what we are seeing as a star, is not a pin, but light that has travelled. Seeing things for what they are means travelling backward through time, things in the current moment are composed of the past. Nothing is extinguished except in minds.
Minds can be inside or outside the universe. When inside, they experience time as a field. When outside, the experience time as a line. Coming inside and outside is experienced as a circle, cycles of waking and sleeping, objective positive tasks, reflections and daydreams, time pressure and free space. Agency, that is action that affects the timeline, is experienced as a spiral, a returning way. What happens after death is similar to time experienced as a field. This is the expanse, the eternity, unchanging sense of home and belonging in the universe. This is as the world is busy with agency and pattens, a freedom. If there is somewhere to go or be, that is where you go. The universe moves, you move, yet peace returns to you and it is the overwhelming embrace. It is not that you drop your job, or even change outward habits. There is simply a freedom and peace that follows you wherever you go. It is that ever-presence. You go away, but it does not. When the religions call the faithul to remembrance, the faithful call themselves to openness, trust, faith, expanse, unwavering presence inside the Friend. The world can bring pain, that pain rests in this presence. It is truly not time in the end, but home.
We have arrived at the start of this story.
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