ON "TIME" (draft 9/6/19)
My thoughts here emerge from my studies of Eckhart Tolle (The Power Of Now), Lao Tsu (The Tao De Ching), and Alan Watts (Podcasts and YouTube, The Way Of Zen), among others, in addition to my own numerous journeys into Spirit and to Consciousness itself.
It is vital, in talking about human time (for we are the only species who have invented such a concept), to really get down first what an illusion it is. In reality, there are only two planes, if you will: the present moment, and eternity.
First, the present moment. It is all there is for us. All past moments exist in our reality in only one place: our memories. Similarly, any future moment or moments in our reality, exist only in our anticipatory minds. Notice my use of "in our reality"...past and future do exist in one other place. I will discuss this further below*. I view the present moment as a giant Universal puzzle. In the present instant, all the pieces of the puzzle snap into place, into existence, for a brief flash. At this instant, everything in its in place, perfectly positioned, or it would be otherwise, of course. John Lennon even hinted at this in "All You Need Is Love" when he wrote, "there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be''...in other words, you are here, now, because you cannot be anywhere else, now, and you can't be anywhere BUT now.
Therefore, everything is always perfect in the present moment. There are no problems in the present moment, as has been stated through the ages in Hindu and Taoist thought, and also more modernly by my favorite authors. But think of the implications of this: If every present moment is perfect, that means EVERY moment has been perfect. It means every future moment will be perfect. Which means your life has been and will continue to be perfect. Worries, regrets, anyone?
This does not mean you have not made "mistakes", or "hurt others' feelings", etc...nor does it mean you have not had successes and brought others joy. But living in the Now means to live without judging it. What good is such categorization? "It" is what it is...it has no choice. It is supposed to be here. So don't treat it as a problem. Accept it as the Universe's offering to you.
Then, secondly, is the other side of the Now: Eternity. Which exists in two phases, as I have mentioned: the present moment (for that moment is neither coming nor going...it is here...and since it is not coming or going, it is eternal, it is always now), and that other "zone" known as the Spirit World, the quantum potantial field, etc. All things that have ever happened or will ever happen are already here "in storage". They come into our reality only when intended. And only Consciousness (which we all share) can perform this intention.
Further, I now discuss the illusion of time as linear, of time "in motion". This is truly both the biggest trick and the biggest gift of our human condition. All motion that we see is a result of memory alone! That is, only the present moment is actually here. All past moments are in our memory banks, where we string them together in linear fashion to create motion, to "make sense" of it all. So basically, what you see as the flow of life is a trick of the memory alone! So people who have lost this ability to remember past moments literallty see each moment in the Now and have no reference for how it relates to "past moments, or might relate to "future" moments. How amazing, and probably how frightening. My mother lost her ability to recognize me near her end, as I came out of the Now where there was no past reference for indentification.
*As I said, past and future do exist in one other place: the Spirit World, the quantum potential field, or, if you like, Eternity. For there is no time in those three places, only potentials. Everythign that has happened in the Now is stored here. And, as I mentioned above, things "yet to be" ""come out of "potential being" into "actual being" whenever intention is applied to the field of potential. They are kept in our reality by continued intention. What/who does the intenting? Consciousness...yours, mine, ours, everyone's, everything's. It is all here because it is meant to be here, as I've said. In other blogs, I discuss how this Consciousness is the Source of all. It is what is: the Hebrew name for God: I Am Who Am, for example. We all share this consciousness and so are the creators of our reality (you've heard this before), and everyone else's as well.
So there you have it. There really is no time, but there is Now and there is Always...and what we perceive as the flow of life is actually the continuous, mind-made string of now-moment memories, tied in order for our comprehension. There is Now, and there is Always...once you fully grasp this, life becomes an enlightened adventure. You can fully embrace and appreciate the illusion, as its creator. :)
THE HIGHER POWER
Many programs in place to help people try to overcome addicitons ask their participants to try to seek strength from their "Higher Power". This phrase is designed to stay away from the terms commonly used by organized religions to promote their version of the "Creator (the Intelligence that Designed and Sustains the Universe)". The terms (God, Allah, etc.), of course, also carry with them innumerable preconceptions, many built into our subconscious minds from birth, which cause various groups to pit their version of "God" against the others' "God"....what a victory for the human ego! Not a helpful concept for finding peace and strength in the middle of a personal storm...
If one believes God is an untouchable, all-powerful white male with a Santa Claus beard and a piercing stare (a more westernized version, I admit)...well, how does a mere human relate to THAT! That was one image of my own religious upbringing. Even the introduction of Jesus as intermediary has lost its impact, since the deification of Jesus in the following centuries also placed him pretty much outside of our reach as a human being we can relate to.
Other religions have their versions of God, or Gods, as well. The mind needs imagery! But the most evolved spiritual disciplines always try to teach that God is more a centering point in consciousness, rather than a specific being. Jesus speaks of this centering point as the "kingdom of heaven within you". It's also been named "mindfulness", "nirvana", etc. Since I was raised a Catholic, I will speak to that aspect here.
Jesus apparently came to Earth to teach people how to escape the concept of the "all-powerful and remote" GOD of his upbringing, to overturn the secular (in all but name) religious order, to help people realize that, as most spiritual discplines maintain, each of us contains within us the exact consciousness that IS "God". It seems as if every major religion began with a small group of people who were able to visit with the spirits and perform miraculous deeds, but then those who could not do this took advantage of the few and established a social order, a business...and quashed the spiritualists in the process.
Remember! This is the teaching of the ages from many spirit masters of all known cultures: each one of us IS God! In other blogs and sections of this site, I describe how Consciousness is THE source of All That Is, and since we have that consciousness within us, we likewise have "God" and "the Kingdom of Heaven" within us...we ARE those!
So that is this Higher Power (better described as INNER power) people are asked to get in touch with. But one can immediately see the major problem here. In our deepest subconscious minds, many of us are taught that both God and Jesus, for example, are perfect beings totally out of our reach. "Lord, I am not worthy to recieve you..." we say before taking the "Body of Christ" in the Cathlolic Mass. But the point is, and what Jesus taught was, we ARE, each of us, that body of Christ! How can we be unworthy when we ARE Christ!?
To be more precise, we each are the "Christ Consciousness"...our physical existence is a trick of the mind, in essence. So to access this Higher Power, we first have to realize it is not some unattainable and far off deity in another dimension. WE are, at our core, the Higher Power ourselves. WE access it by going INWARDS, not Outwards or upwards. We go beyond the limitations of our programmed mind. Let me explain a little further.
Elsewhere in these pages, I describe what I KNOW to be the Truth about our existence, having experienced it myself in many shamanic journeys, which experiences reflect exactly what is taught by spirit masters through the ages: the universal "consciousness", which I call the Great Mother, creates and sustains the matter/energy/spirit world. Every being and every thing is born of and maintained by this one consciousness. So guess what!? That consciousness is YOUR consciouness. YOU are, in my terms, the Great Mother at your core, and a physical being with a name only, and very temporarily.
So once you find a discipline that convinces you of this ( you shouldn't take my word, of course...this has to felt individually), such as meditation, yoga, tantra, shamanic journeying, etc...you will have found that Higher Power. You create your own realiy, as we hear so often these days. You realize you are THE consciousness sitting within your temporary body, and life.
Now, as witness to this, you understand the urgings of the ego mind and emotions: to label, judge, and be separate from all of existence. Also, to make up and cause problems, many of which have no solution...because they don't really exist except in your own mind. For it is this separation, intended and guaranteed by your own mind buzz, that causes you to need to access your high power in the first place. It causes you to forget you even have it.
I had a conversation about this concept with my wife the other night, and I came up with a little mental exercise that might be useful, as far as it goes. Imagine all your memories and knowledge were suddenly removed from your brain. All that was left was a totally functional body with all its senses and awareness intact. But no way of relating to or identifying with anything in your new experience. Western science would then classify you as a "vegetable". But I believe you would experience an awesome joy in beholding everything exactly as it is. No associations, no memories brought back up. It is THIS state that is the higher power we speak of.
This metaphor ends in that when you are in this state, you actually know EVERYTHING. :) Since you are basically pure consciousness, you have access to the entire universe, both physical and mental. But, locked in our temporary phsycal form in this version of a universe, we still need the human mind to be able to see into these realms. The trick is to not let the mind be the big blocking agent, but the portal. Shamanic journeying is but one way to use the mind is a positive manner to get beyond mind and body, and to access the Truth. The Higher Power, by another name.
ON BEING PRESENT
(BEHAVIOR OF THE WINKING UNIVERSE)
Physicists have suggested (and I have verified for myself) that the Universe, in its entirety, "winks" into its full form, in very quick flashes, over and over into what we call the present moment.
This winking is invisible to us, since our brains our wired to see only the "flash" (and not what happens in between them).
The flashes are strung together fluidly to produce what appears to us to be time (just as a movie is actually a series of still images that our brains convert to "timed" motion, even though they really are not). They are more correctly "expanding or contracting expressions of the beingness of all things" in the eternity of the Now. Einstein remarked that the purpose of time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
This sequence of flashes lends itself to the human mind being able to map these experiences and create the mental concept of clock time. One could say, however, that the universe is "frozen in place" during these intervals between flashes, and these are taking place in "no time"...that is, eternity. Then again, what we are really talking about here is the Spirit World, where there is no time.
I believe now that each flash (i.e., the latest version of the universe) can exist for as long as the Creator Consciousness (i.e., YOU, at your essence) needs in order to decide how everything in existence should appear in the next version. As "players" inside the game we created, we are also deciding what the next slice of the universe should look like, albeit only a teeny fraction thereof.
That is, you are also creating the life of the character you are playing within the hologram not only here in the game but as the Creator! Hence the truth of the phrase, "you create your own reality." Free will adds to the dynamic of the ever-changing universe as it responds to our decisions (or lack of) in life during the "pauses" between "flashes".
This all suggests why "sudden flashes of insight" are the best solutions we come up with in our minds. It is there that we "hear God thinking." I believe each potential timeline is run through to its ending as needed during these pauses, so that the "best fit" result is the one chosen...leading to incredible "synchronicities" and "right place, right time" situations in life. These solutions are thus aligned with the "master plan" of the Universe or they would not have arisen.
This all, of course, also suggests that each present moment is indeed perfect, since it comes about only after the Creator Consciousness, which is YOU, has decided how it should appear.
Some quantum physics experiments suggest this "pause between flashes" as well. In double-slit experiments, a single photon going through a single slit behaves as if it is passing through the other slit as well. It "somehow" KNOWS the other slit is there, and the suggestion is that it travelled through at least this portion of the universe "instantly" to discover the other slit BEFORE it passed through. To me, this would have to occur within the "no time" pause.
THE PAST
Even though each "slice" of the universe ceases to exist after the present moment ends, each is nonetheless eternal, because it is stored as a record in the present slice.
This allows for memory in humans and other animals, as well as for the ability of shamans to visit the past, investigate past lives, etc. It also explains why so many theorists now consider our reality a hologram (in a hologram, the blueprint of the entire hologram is contained in each point of it).
The lesson for us here is that not only does living in the present moment, and stopping the mind chatter about past and future, allow us to live in total synch with life as it is NOW...it suggests since there is a long "time" in the frozen version of each universe before the next arrives, we are actually already experiencing eternal life without knowing it. We are also choosing our next experience, move, etc., often without recognizing it in our minds.
And do we ever really experience the present moment physically? The farther away an event is from our eyes, the further back in the "past" it really is, because it took time for the light to reach our eyes and be processed by our brains. So everything we experience has already happened and gone by the time we realize it. This allows us to realize that those "just-Nows" were also perfect, since they were as they were...so there can be no mistakes in the past.
MIND USES
To me, the only way to actually experience the present moment is through the consciousness energy center of the body/spirit complex the Mongolian shamans call the Setgel...located centrally below the heart. When we connect our intuitive minds to the Setgel deliberately, we are truly in synch with life. We get "the big picture", not the filtered mind tidbit. This is what Eckhart Tolle calls living "above thinking".
It would appear, then, that the primary purpose of the rational mind in human beings is to be able to analyze the hologram sufficiently to discover that each of us is indeed the Creator (the Awakening, the Remembering, being born again, etc.)
After that, rational thought serves the purpose of translating spirit and consciousness messages into physical thought forms (this is the way of the shamanic journey...spirit information passes through the shaman's mind, where it is "translated" into physical thought. In non-journey events, such thoughts usually end up being described as masterpieces. In this way, we are agents of creation acting from within the creation itself.
Finally, and the way most people use their rational thought processes, is to use it to generate thoughts from within the mind and for ego strengthening. These usually generate conflicts, wars, greed, resentment, negative actions, etc., or conversely, they generate acceptable, temporary, "good enough for government work" creations. Of course, this mind also does our "day-planning", etc., and is vital for such activities here in the hologram.
A PEEK AT THE AFTERLIFE/REINCARNATION
Reincarnation: Shamans know that some souls in the afterlife do not continue to exist although most do. But this is no more tragic been pulling a chest piece that is no longer needed off the chessboard. It might even be that way for the soul that you have designed for yourself in this life, but again it won't matter because eternal-Creator-you will decide that this particular soul no longer fits in your own design.
FINALE
Underlying all this is the Consciousness, the One, the All, God, the Source...YOU...overseeing and directing it all from a place of unconditional love and infinite true wisdom, both as the Creator and the "created".
"The eternal Now is life itself" - Eckhart Tolle
"It is in the perfection of form that you are free" - Ram Dass (every moment is perfect, so accept it without judgment, which frees you from suffering)
"Take advantage of every opportunity..." - Lao Tsu (rational thought hides the actual moments of opportunity by trying to design its own, inferior version)
"The master accomplishes everything by doing nothing." - Lao Tsu ("nothing...TO INTERFERE with the Universe's wise intent" is what I add to that sentence...)
"You are not making mistakes (in life)...you are avoiding the wrong successes." - Shaman Four Hawks (humbly submitted).
