How Can I Know That Time Passes? - 28th May 2021

Now yes, namaste my love. Thank you, so welcome. Um, I have written down my question because I, uh, my English is not so good and I try to read now. Yes, this question is about time and perceiving the time. So I am perceiving now. Everything I perceive is always in this moment and the concept of time is known like time, like past, present, and future. But the experience is always now, only this now. Okay, but then I look outside, for example, and see um, different old buildings or I read some ancient scripture or look at a past photograph and this sense of past arises, but it's not experienced or proven. So how can I know that time passes? Or how can we really rely on stories or books or sayings from the past if we haven't experienced it yet? So where does the so-called ancient buildings or scriptures then come from? Because I experience only always now. And if someone tells me something, it's from the past, or I see some old building or something like this and someone says, 'Yes, it's from the 14th century.' Or a very contemplation though, so if this image in front of you...

So yes, so what happens is that for a while, for a while in time, it can seem like we start to question: Is the image frozen? You see? So it can... what does it mean for the image to be frozen? It's like no time is passing, so it must be frozen, you see. So time is our idea of change, you see. Our idea of a previous state, a new state, and a conceptual future state, you see. Now, without these notions, you see, there is no time. Yes, actually there is no time. So very often I take this example that suppose you went to sleep tonight and in the sleep you had a dream that you were living in Haridwar or Rishikesh or something and you were an Indian man and somebody asked your name, you see. You say, 'My name is Ramesh.' You see, you will not say, 'No, no, sorry sir, my dream just started, I don't know what my name is.' So although it just started, we are able to still refer to that which our mind called memory from the apparent past and say, 'Okay, have you always lived in Rishikesh?' 'Yes, yes, I've always lived on the street,' you see.

So in consciousness, consciousness has the ability even at the start, very beginning of the dream, to have a full story about itself. And if it needs references in terms of what has actually happened, it has the ability to produce imagery which can convey that this is from the past, you see. What is memory? Memory never shows up from the past; it only appears in the future and yet we call it the past, you see. So really speaking, without these conceptual notions, the mental idea of time which is linear in the way of past, present, and future, it doesn't exist, you see. And the tool that we use to try and understand time, which is the mind, is totally incapable of understanding it. Just like it cannot understand truth and love and peace—anything that is worthwhile, it cannot understand.

So as you let go of your mind and learn to remain in your heart, then you will meet yourself in a broader way where you are not object—you don't have an objective relationship with time, you see. And therefore then time, where everything can all happen at the same time, but actually then there's nothing called a happening in the first place, you see. Then these kind of things don't confuse us; they can seem very, very obvious to us, you see. So this linear navigation of the narrative using our attention, just like reading a comic book, you see. Just reading frames of a comic book which give the apparent belief that the comic characters are going through this in time, you see. Actually, it is just a question of perception, you see, with attention, which gives this sort of feeling or not even a feeling but idea of time. But actually, like you said, it's only one frame. It's only one frame, but because our attention is limited, the ability of our attention to encapsulate all of perception seems to be limited and that's why we seem to live this comic book life where we're just consuming life frame by frame.

As we let go of our conceptual limitation, then the entirety of the comic is available, you see, and you can visit it this way, that way, jumping around—it doesn't really matter. I'm not saying it as some sort of a siddhi or superpower or something, I'm just saying that we no longer then are so attached to this linear narrative of time and then the experience of consciousness can seem broader and not so constricted by this linearity. But these are beautiful contemplations and they bring us to this point where we realize that the limited conceptual mind that we have is unable to fathom the broadness of our own being, you see, both in terms of the extent of it and the seeming play of our past and future.