The Mirage of Time
El Espejismo del Tiempo
A student shares a powerful experience of expansive awareness and asks about the nature of time, leading the teacher to distinguish between intellectual understanding and direct knowing.
The Mirage of Time
A student shares a powerful experience of expansive awareness and asks about the nature of time, leading the teacher to distinguish between intellectual understanding and direct knowing.
Last night I had a really beautiful experience. I don't often smoke cannabis, but I had a small amount and was hanging out in my living room listening to wonderful dance music. I felt the impulse to get up and move, and I closed my eyes and began channeling movement through my body. I started slowly and got deeply into the movement. I felt as though the goddess was dancing through me, pure playfulness, pure joy. The joy of experience was my state of being as I was moving, and the more I moved, the more I generated this joy and love. It was grand and expansive. I was in my full creative expression, experiencing all the levels that showing yourself and shining can be in this world, whether from a pure place or from an egoic place. I was moving through all the layers of what it felt like to actually show yourself, claim your power, state yourself into the world, call in your divinity. I felt so empowered and enlivened and protected and whole.
Then I felt inclined to lean over into a fold, stretching the back of my legs with my hands on the ground. As I changed into that position, I began to get visions of the darkness that exists in the world: all the pain, the suffering, the deep darkness. Somehow I was experiencing that as well, as part of God. When I look at the homeless people and the drug addicts in my city, the destitution and squalor they live in, I realized in that moment that there is a place for that in this world. It exists because it is a part of God that wants to experience that deep pain. The gutters, the rats, the bacteria, the horrible things that happen in this world that we judge: there is a place for that too. The underworld. I recognized that part of the underworld exists in me as well, a part of me that wants to get down and dirty, to be raw and intense. I allowed myself to embrace that through the movement.
Then I came back into the space and recognized the beauty I was in, moving through those levels: the deep, joyful expression, the shining, the divinity within me. I began getting visions of the grandness of this creation. All the layers, all the variety, all the textures and flavors. So many dimensions and ways of expressing, cultures and people. It all fit together in this amazing tapestry of life, and I was at the center of it.
After that, I noticed my state of being began to shift. I experienced myself existing as an invisible space within my visual field. I was the air, the purity, a clearness that was all-encompassing. I was the ether, the space between the heartbeats, the space between the words, between the atoms. Then my mind would come back in and I would forget, start thinking about something else, and then remember what I had been through and move back into that pure space.
It was so profound and beautiful. I loved the storyline that life brought me through: you go from the highs to the lows, then the whole picture, and at the center of it is yourself. It was as though the trees outside and the plants and everything around me were worshiping, not my ego, but my being at the core of this whole dance. Everything was looking back at me as if to say: you are the star, you are the center of this, this is all here for you. This morning I woke up still feeling elated and happy and playful, with a real sense of more joy and groundedness and trust. It was a really wonderful opening.
Thank you for sharing. If you have any specific questions, let me know.
I don't feel like I have any questions. I guess the whole point now is just to go deeper into that allowing. I saw clearly how awakening is not something that happens in the ordinary sense. I heard a quote yesterday: "You don't choose enlightenment. When there is no choice left, what remains is enlightenment." It really feels like something beyond anything I can find, no matter where I travel or look in this world. It is greater than any of the experiences. That feels really safe. I don't feel confused or anything, but if you have any insight that comes to you from this, I'm open to it.
It's good. Thank you.
You said that for an enlightened being, time doesn't exist and space doesn't exist. So if time doesn't exist, then all events are happening simultaneously. It is as if all the events are recorded on a DVD, and to us it appears as though everything is already scripted. There is no causality. Like cartoons: when we watch a cartoon, it appears as if there is causality, but in fact there is none. It is just a sequence of events that appears as causality to us. So to say time doesn't exist also means that, in a way, all events are already predetermined, right from the Big Bang.
The question of direct experience
What is your experience of time?
I am not enlightened yet. I have searched for forty years. I understand non-duality intellectually quite well, but only intellectually. Maybe I live it to some extent, because if it were purely intellectual, it would not have interested me. But I have changed a lot. There is no seeking now. I do not wish things to be other than what they are. Surrender, in Hinduism they call it surrender. Effortless surrender. What was your question? Sorry.
What is your experience of time?
For me, time is just a succession of events. This gives the impression of time. Time doesn't exist, they say. It appears logical.
Intellectual description vs. lived experience
You are explaining time. What is your experience of it?
As I am talking, time is passing.
What are these things you call events? What is actually happening, experientially? You yourself raised the distinction between intellectual understanding and direct knowing. What you have described, a succession of events, is an intellectual understanding of time. Do these events exist?
Apparently, yes, of course.
Do they exist outside of thoughts?
No. Maybe you are saying they don't exist.
The mirage: what exists and what doesn't
This is what I am getting at. You have said a few things: you say something doesn't exist, but what do you mean by existing or not existing? We need to agree on some semantics.
That which is changeless, what the teachers say. That exists. Satcitananda. That which is changing doesn't exist. That is the only way I know to explain it.
Whether it is real or illusory. Now, if you look at a mirage, the reflection of the sky on a road or on sand, you are looking at what appears to be water. Does what you see exist?
No.
Why not? The water doesn't exist, but the mirage does. There is no water, and yet the mirage is there. Water is the false interpretation of the reflection. We mistake the interpretation of what we are perceiving and assume it is water, when it is actually the sky. So the water doesn't exist, but the reflection of the sky does.
This is a metaphor to illustrate what happens with time. Something appears to be something that it is not. Its true nature is different from what we assume. That does not mean it doesn't exist. What we assume it to be doesn't exist, just as we assume the mirage is water, and it is not. The water doesn't exist, but the mirage's true nature does. This applies to time. This applies to everything. The problem is the misinterpretation of its true nature.
Knowing more than you think you know
I have a sense that you know experientially more than you know intellectually. What you may need is to clarify your intellectual understanding so that it aligns with your experiential understanding. Then something is going to connect. There is a knowing already. But there is still a misinterpretation of that knowing, almost an assumption that you don't know, and maybe even a resistance to knowing what you already know.