Even if I completely accept that ultimately time is an illusion, what
difference is that going to make in my life? I still have to live in a
world that is completely dominated by time.
Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won’t make much
difference to your life. To realize this truth, you need to live it. When
every cell of your body is so present that it feels vibrant with life, and
when you can feel that life every moment as the joy of Being, then it
can be said that you are free of time.
But I still have to pay the bills tomorrow, and I am still going to grow
old and die just like everybody else. So how can I ever say that I am
free of time?
Tomorrow’s bills are not the problem. The dissolution of the physical
body is not a problem. Loss of Now is the problem, or rather: the core
delusion that turns a mere situation, event, or emotion into a personal
problem and into suffering. Loss of Now is loss of Being.
To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for
your identity and future for your fulfillment. It represents the most
profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine. In
some rare cases, this shift in consciousness happens dramatically and
radically, once and for all. When it does, it usually comes about
through total surrender in the midst of intense suffering. Most people,
however, have to work at it.
When you have had your first few glimpses of the timeless state of
consciousness, you begin to move back and forth between the
dimensions of time and presence. First you become aware of just how
rarely your attention is truly in the Now. But to know that you are not
present is a great success: That knowing is presence — even if
initially it only lasts for a couple of seconds of clock time before it is
lost again. Then, with increasing frequency, you choose to have the
focus of your consciousness in the present moment rather than in the
past or future, and whenever you realize that you had lost the Now,
you are able to stay in it not just for a couple of seconds, but for
longer periods as perceived from the external perspective of clock
time. So before you are firmly established in the state of presence,
which is to say before you are fully conscious, you shift back and forth
for a while between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the
state of presence and the state of mind identification. You lose the
Now, and you return to it, again and again. Eventually, presence
becomes your predominant state.
For most people, presence is experienced either never at all or only
accidentally and briefly on rare occasions without being recognized for
what it is. Most humans alternate not between consciousness and
unconsciousness but only between different levels of unconsciousness.