Be still and you can perceive the infinite in a moment
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein.
Take a moment for a Thought Experiment: Imagine no Time
Take some time reading through this, and then use your imagination for an exercise.
Imagine that this moment is the only one that exists. After all the future is just an assumption isn’t? The past is nothing more now than assumptions in your mind about what happened. Someone else will have a different set of assumptions about the past according to their point of view. Let all those assumptions go.
Imagining that this is the only moment that exists requires us to remove from our imagination any concept that life is going anywhere. Or, that this moment actually was produced anywhere. To imagine this moment without time requires us to let go of any story of how we got to this point. It is willing ourselves to erase our own personal history, as well as, any that we have placed on the world.
You can imagine yourself being in an experience with no beginning and no end. Let go of any notion of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years or lifetimes past or future.
When you touch this moment without the overlay of future or past projected on it, you find a feeling of being in all eternity. You are in eternity because you are in all time. This is so because you have not spliced yourself into today, and alienated yourself from tomorrow, or your past. We allow them to merge when we remove the artificial dividers that we placed between them with our imagination. In actuality, they have always been merged, but we have not noticed as our attention has been focused on its division through our projection of the concepts of time.
The idea of eternity is a concept also. It doesn’t exist either except in our imagination. If we remove this artificial construct, then we move closer again to what is Real. Each time we remove these concepts of knowledge that trap our attention, we move closer to what is Real. What is real is what exists when we remove the projections of our imagination. What we might call our assumptions.
Time and the words of time, days, lifetimes, minutes are used to describe that which has no name. In a crude way, they are words that describe the flow of the planets through the solar system. The idea of being late, being ahead of our time, behind the times, on time, in a hurry: these are concepts we sometimes live by or have our lives ruled by, but they only exist in imagination. The judge and victim in our mind use these concepts to tell stories about what we should be and when we should be it. In this way “time” becomes a tyrant that rules our mind. But it is not “time” that rules our mind, it is our knowledge and agreements about time that our judge and victim use against our happiness. In this way, we become slaves to knowledge, knowledge of time.
The present moment has no knowledge. Nor does it need any to be experienced. Practice sitting in the stillness of the moment, letting all descriptions go, letting all knowledge go. Even letting go of the trapping idea that it is a silly way to spend your “limited amount of time”. Practice being in stillness, and perhaps, you will find there all the time in the world. If you don’t practice you won’t ever find it.
Finding the stillness in the mind, may take some practice. But practicing once in a while, will make it easier. If you find it difficult, it may be because you have certain limiting beliefs about time. Living in this timeless way, is actually a natural way of living. Watch any young child. You see that they behave quite differently before being domesticated with the beliefs and agreements about time.
Now Imagine being in this moment, focus your attention on what you are experiencing in this moment. Let go of any knowledge you have of the past, or thinking of the future. Be still, and in the stillness, experience that you are.