Man has evolved a complex mind. Mind that thinks in terms of thoughts. The mind wants everything in the world. Once it acquires everything of the world, the mind says that it wants more even when nothing is left in the world. A man’s mind has psychological time and space. It does not get filled with things. A thinker thinks thoughts to birth a vast future in front of a man. The vast future is space where the mind walks through thinking. And to walk into that vast space of the future, time is needed. The time that a man has also created in his mind. In the beginning when the day would turn into night and night into day, the sense of what is ‘ahead’ and what is ‘behind’ evolved in the man. Later centuries invented the sense of time and space. Thus, man has evolved a sense of space that evolved the sense of time and a sense of measurement of space by time.
The sense that the whole future stands in front of you is not a mere sense of the future. You are the pure sense and you only are the sense of future. Understand it like these things that are lying in the space have no past no future. They exist timelessly. For you, things exist only when you pay attention to use them. Otherwise, they are not. The human mind thinks there is a future. Therefore there is time. But things are unlike the mind.
The watch that tells chronological time is a great invention that plans your time of the future. Your plans are planned by a watch or say calendar. But do you think that a man ever travels towards the future? Is the future the direction of a man?
Is there any future direction to go?
In reality, there is only one directionless direction in that direction the sense of time and sense of space becomes one, and the sense of time disappears.
Time is a measurement of the change of space around you. Time is human comprehension. If you wish to move into your future time is necessary. But to live you don’t need any calendar of a watch or future. Time changes our life into a life of hope. When you exist in the moment, then there is the next moment and the second next moment. Even the term ‘moment’ is an invention of your own comprehension so that our mind can understand. If the sense of time departs from your mind, you forget day and night. A greater sense will fall upon you. You attain the sense of being. The present moment is the comprehension of your sense of being. When you will stop calculating in terms of yesterdays or tomorrows, you let things be.
Your mind calculates time. Calculation of time has to drop. You become habitual of calculating. This calculation then calculates your life. Your watch calculates your life. It passes a verdict on you that your life is worth 70 years or 90 years. The moment that is present is infinite. A man lives in infinity. The mind lives in time. In time one who is born will die and will be young and old. But the one who does not go by the watch and does not let the watch calculate his life. That one lives in the moment. And we only a one moment at hand. And there is nothing more than a moment needed to live a life.
Existence does not give us life beyond a moment. A moment is not an entity of time but an entity of infinity. There is no second moment. The second moment is the discovery of our mind. No matter you go from backwards to forward or forward to backward that movement is your watch. That watch is your artificial moment. Because you are a slave to your watch. The watch tells you when it is 2 pm and suddenly, you begin feeling hungry and salivating in expectation of food as a Pavlov Dog syndrome reflex. It means that you are a slave to your watch. You think that evening is not passing and it will begin passing when it is 9 pm. When you are in bliss or you are playing then hours go by and you disengage from the sense of time, you go into bliss. The moment you regain the sense of time you are caught by anxiety. Your mind instantly recreates all problems of the future. This sense of watch is also the bane of mankind. Watch is a utilitarian we should use it. Scientists discovered that the pineal gland works as a biological clock in humans and animals. That which is our clock is our consciousness. Consciousness is a big clock that deciphers infinite milliseconds of a second. It is our internal system of making sense of time.
We have evolved ourselves historically thinking that we live in time. The time that is spread into the future. We do live in time but that which is present. We neither live in time nor lived in history. Time is an artificial imposition. A man has calculated the future by mathematical comprehension.
You and life are one. The change that you see around is not you. This change is measured in terms of time. You don’t change your circumstances change. Screens change. Summer winter, day-night, elated miserable, A and B. Screens keep changing and you think your time is running fast. You say time is powerful, bad times, good times and so on. You breed your insecurities because of it. Then you invent the God of the future. That is a state in which Jesus said ‘in the kingdom of God there shall be time no longer’.
Your screens will keep changing but you don’t. You are not the screen you are the one who is watching the film. Changing scenes on screen is life and that which does not change is you. Zen masters sit silently and let the world change around them. Buddha invented the middle path. But if you went into time like the pendulum of your alarm clock, it will take you one side extreme up and its back thrust will take you up into the other extreme. When you have dukkha (sorrow), that one extreme generates backflow into sukkha (happiness). But in the middle path your watch shuts down and time is no longer. Let the film of the world go around you, you be the watcher.
Look at the tree how it stands. Do you think the tree has the sense of time? From seed to a big tree to flowers. It saps energy water, it dances in wild breezes and when the air stops blowing it becomes a silent monk. Humans are exactly like trees. We have been endowed with walking. Because of walking, we have developed a sense of seeing. Trees do see like we do but from the entire body. We ran the risk of either eaten or starved to death. Being right side of survival our senses were evolved for walking distances. Humans have changed that into time. Our existence is exactly like this tree, timeless.
The author is a spiritual teacher and advisor on policy, governance and leadership. He can be contacted at arunavlokitta@gmail.com