“There is only one time when it is essential to awaken. That time is now.” – The Buddha
Have you noticed that ‘you’ really never age? That there is a timeless quality to you?
In periods of silence it can be so obvious. The body ages, but I do not. The ‘me’ to which I refer feels ageless – not 20 or 50 or 90, ageless.
Across the years my parents expressed the same sentiment to me, that despite the advance of years they still felt young, that their minds were willing even if their bodies were no longer able. I was too young to understand. Now I see it for myself.
We allow our minds to interject, to associate an aching knee or back with an aging ‘me.’ But if I look closer, that connection isn’t real. The KNEE aches, but it has nothing to do with the me looking at that knee, the me aware of that knee. The awareness of the knee is no different than the awareness of a rose or a bird tearing across the sky. The awareness doesn’t age at all.
As you read this, truly consider for a moment how ‘old’ you feel. Ignore the body’s aches and pains, disregard the weary thoughts of a Monday that clog the mind, and look only at the ‘you’ within. See if there is a concrete sense of age.
I can’t find one.
It is interesting to note that one of the common perceptions of individuals who undergo a near death experience is timelessness – a sense that in death time ceases to exist. As with many other aspects of the NDE, these individuals struggled to find the words to explain it.
“Time did not make any sense. Time did not seem to apply. It seemed irrelevant. It was unattached to anything, the way I was. Time is only relevant when it is relative to the normal orderly sequential aspects of life. So I was there for a moment or for eternity. I cannot say but it felt like a very long time to me.”
The man who most famously altered our perception of time – Albert Einstein – noted, perhaps only half-jokingly, that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.” Yet that is exactly how NDEs are described, a life review “happening all at once – I can’t put it into words, but I saw my entire life instantaneously and from multiple perspectives.”
Time is a funny thing. None of us, for example, can really remember coming ‘online’ as it were. Each of us has vague memories from, say, ages 4 or 5, and those memories flesh out still more as we progressed deeper into elementary school. Yet we existed even before the mind began to tell the story of ‘me,’ didn’t we? I mean, you have baby pictures to prove it, right? Where were ‘you’ before those memories took root?
And does not advancing age reverse the order of things and pluck those same memories one by one, until the ravages of old age – or what we call dementia – claim all of our memories and, by extension, any sense of ‘me’? Once again, I’m here, but I’m not.
Which materially helps to explain that time and mind are inextricably linked and, by extension, that without time I do not exist.
“The mind is time, time is mind, you cannot have one without the other,” says Gilbert Schultz. Or as Eckhart Tolle puts out: “Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are, in fact, inseparable.”
