Most of us don't understand the nature of time and our place within it, and so we know nothing of timelessness, save for those rare instances when we encounter transcendent beauty and are transported out of our usual train of thought in time, into the timeless.
But for those of us who wish for a more fulfilled and fulfilling life, we can begin by trying to understand our current relationship with time and how it impacts our everyday experience.
We often feel anxious and stressed to get things done. But no matter how many times we rush to obey that inner tyranny, our reward is that we get to do it again. I call this self-harming cycle "doing hard time."
To "do hard time" is to be stalked by the clock of our own making. For example, we're stalked by our past, made up of images we revisit in memory of times when we were hurt or embarrassed, or opportunities we missed. And we're stalked by the future and what we must do to attain imagined success. So rather than timelessness, we experience the construct of our present level of being -- the image of then and when arising from a divided consciousness that believes it will be okay "when" and if it can get this done "then."
We're stalked by a clock that won't stop ticking, always trying to outrun what we've never been able to outrun in the past, recreating disturbing events that come back around again and again in a new form. What we've failed to realize is that we really aren't under the thumb of time. It seems like we are with all our responsibilities and all our plans to achieve. But the fact is, we're really serving an unconscious, divided mind that imagines a wholeness to come, and then resists anyone and any condition perceived as a threat to that image.
So everything about our well-being hinges on a perception of being separate from life and responsible for ensuring that we find our own way back to what we've imagined will make us whole. Meanwhile, every act of imagination arises from a level of consciousness that is identified with that image. That is its identity in the moment. But the image and the identity belong to a divided consciousness that cannot see it is what it tries to complete itself through, which can never lead to the completion it seeks.
Because of our relationship to what is essentially an illusion, a fabrication of a mind asleep to itself and dreaming up its own kingdom, we are apart from the true Vine of life, of love, of the creative force as it pours itself down into all of the branches of creation, ultimately pouring into us intelligence, love, light, and understanding.
Let's make this personal. Have you ever been at work, at home, with others, when suddenly you felt anxiety? A sense of inadequacy? Loneliness? And perhaps the minute that negative energy started to move through your body, you suddenly recognized that you've had this same reaction a thousand times before!
Hopefully we've all had moments like this and can begin to see they reveal a seemingly inescapable reincarnation of the consciousness that's responsible for the recurrence of this reaction. As time passes, this reaction will continue to repeat itself until we can recognize the deeper lesson that is hidden in a deeper order of time.
In that moment when we are open to this revelation, able to receive that deeper transformative lesson, it is because we are outside the train of thought that always leads to the familiar old reaction.
Following the usual train of thought on the horizontal line of time is the continuation and reflection of the consciousness responsible for it. And that cannot answer our deeper needs because what we need is not along the horizontal line of time. What we need is a conscious vertical departure from the whole idea of a time to come, of when and then -- into the timelessness of the perfectly present moment.
Instead of trying to complete the moment through what anxiety, fear, or anger tell us to do, we must be completely present to those thoughts, completely present to that pain -- a pain that promises freedom in a time to come but is really the continuation of the consciousness that is pain itself because it lives apart from the true source of life.
This may sound impossible. When the clock starts to stalk and we feel stress and anxiety, we wonder what will happen if we don't do again what has never freed us in the past, but we hope may work this time. Keep moving forward anyway. If you work with this new knowledge, one day a fear will wash over you and you'll realize, "Fear is telling me what will happen to me if I don't do what it wants. But I don't have to listen to fear. If I do, the same thing will happen as has happened every time in the past."
We'll never find the part of us that already knows what we need if fear is our guide. That higher consciousness is already within us. It belongs to the Vine and we are its branches. Our task is not to try to understand how to connect ourselves to it, but to discover where we continue to be deceived by serving what we fear when we're stalked by the clock that is a creation of our own consciousness.
We have endless opportunities to stop the cycle of useless thought that never resolves anything. Part of the Divine journey is a ceaseless opportunity to receive the deeper lessons that already exist in a deeper level of time that is just waiting for us! Our task is simply to wait in the right place with it.
