TIMELESSNESS

The following is based entirely on my personal reflection on TIMELESSNESS. Please feel free to add to it, or question it, as you give your comments.

Timelessness is "living in the present". As we practice it more and more, it gets refined, and therefore, redefined to living in the "present moment", or better still, living in the moment, ... just moment. Period !

Now, who can define how long is a moment?

A second ? A nanosecond ? However, for now, let us say it is a second. For this split second, there is no thought in mind. If we live this one second without a thought of the past, and without a fear of the future, and just "be" in this second without any thought, we have then just lived one second of our life in "TIMELESSNESS".

And now add to it a moment, and then another moment, and keep adding, and soon you have a string of moments of TIMELESSNESS, as if you are laying bricks next to each other, and soon you have created a PATH for yourself.

As we practice this state longer, this path keeps getting longer and longer, and it becomes a ROAD, as it were. However, we do not measure it, i.e. we do not measure this length of TIMELESSNESS that we experienced, for that would mean that we have become conscious of time, and that means we are in TIMELESSNESS no more, or we lost what we just achieved.

Notice above that I have not used the word "span", and in stead I have coined the word "path" for this length of time, and this "path" brings us now to the goal of " living in TIMELESSNESS".

As we said, moments of TIMELESSNESS lived become this path, and this path as we practice it more and more, it becomes the state we are living in, i.e it becomes our state.

During each of these moments of TIMELESSNESS, we are not conscious of our body or of our mind, and in fact we are not aware of any thought in that nanosecond. Notice that I said we are not "aware" of any thought, and that I did not say "there is no thought" in that moment. This "no thought" is a potential topic for another discussion.

We observe and live our thoughts when these moments connected together become a span of time that we are conscious of, and "that" consciousness makes us conscious of our body and mind, and of pain and pleasure and myriad of other emotions i.e anger, love, hate, anguish, jealosy, reprimand, win, lose, and all the pairs of opposites we can think of. And when this happens, we are living in TIMELESSNESS no more. We are, in stead, living in time, "conditioned" by our past experiences, and by the fears of the future, i.e. fear of the "unknown".

Depending on the extent of our attachment to our mind, we "process" these past experiences, and in this process, we either resolve and make a kind of treaty with our past, and not let it affect us any longer(or, affect us less), or we can get even more entangled, called "going deeper". We get more entangled because in the process of so called discovery, we become even more subordinate to our mind, for the thoughts have no end, they only lead us from one to another, to another, and here we started with an attempt to free ouselves of our past, and we often only end up in a bigger forest, rather we create a forest for ourselves. And then, we attempt to resolve this bigger forest, by using the same mind creating more thoughts, and more, and we are then in a shape worse than ever before. Thus, "going deeper" is getting us more attached to our mind, and it is ironically taking us away, rather far, far away from living in TIMELESSNESS.

This discussion above brings us now to "why live in TIMELESSNESS ?

We may not achieve LIVING IN TIMELESSNESS, and yet any attempt towards it will help us disassociate with our past, and in this respect, as Lord Krishna said in beloved Bhagwad Gita, " in this no effort is ever 'lost' ". I want to clarify here that  to DISASSOCIATE does not mean that we do not remember or know our past any more, it only means that we are not affected by it as much as before.

I have digressed a lot on the "past", because so long as we are living in the past, we are 'not' living in the present. In 'processing' our past if we are not able to disassociate ourselves from it, during those times that past is strongly enveloping us, we cannot live the present moment `in the moment', and we can, therefore, not experience TIMELESSNESS, and reap the huge benefit of it, which will become more vivid as we read further.

Going back to the expression, "experience of TIMELESSNESS", I said that " in that single moment ", there is no thought, no cosciousness of the past or the future. There is just "is"ness of that moment. We have, thus, just experienced a moment of TIMELESSNESS, even if it is for a mere moment. Now, as we were laying 'bricks' and making a path earlier in this discussion, let us lay these moments of TIMELESSNESS next to each other, one moment at a time, and soon we will have a moment after moment after another moment of TIMELESSNESS, taking us thus through these moments of thoughtlessness, which then we call SAMADHI, or call it by any other name, it is the same, i.e. the STATE of just BEING, with no feeling of the past, or the fear of the future, feeling of neither pain nor pleasure, for then there is no body and mind consciousness, and that is what is called the BLISS.

BLISS, therefore, is not happiness, and it is not pleasure either. BLISS is just bliss, for happiness and pleasure are feelings, and the feelings are related to mind, and in those moments of TIMELESSNESS we were not conscious of our mind.

We call this BLISS as PEACE or SHANTI. Why? Because PEACE is when there is no conflict, no agitation, and in that moment of TIMELESSNESS, hopefully, that we just lived together a while ago, it was just a moment with no conflict and/or agitation, i.e we experienced PEACE, SHANTI, or BLISS in that moment, without even knowing at that time what is it that we were experiencing, i.e. there was no name or form or upadhi connected with it, which is what BLISS is.

As we go out of 'living in TIMELESSNESS', we will experience pain and pleasure, these being the functions connected with the body and mind.

TIMELESSNESS is not denying the existence of physical or emotional pain, it is disconnecting us from it in "that" moment, or moments. And as these moments connected together become SAMADHI, there is, therefore, no experience of pain and pleasure, whether physical or emotional, in SAMADHI.

TIMELESSNESS, therefore, is just "IS", just like BRAHMAN IS JUST "IS".

In SUMMARY, TIMELESSNESS, in practical terms, is living in the present, without being affected by the past or the future, and TIMELESSNESS, in आध्यातमिक terms, is the highest state of meditation, connecting us with our source, making us ONE with BRAHMAN, which is being BRAHMAN Himself.