The Flying Times of Our Lives
WHILE IT CERTAINLY FEELS as if time has sped up on us in recent decades and is continuing to speed up on us, in reality it is not time that is accelerating, but the number of events a contemporary lifestyle forces us to pack into every minute of every day.
In the pre-industrial era, time moved at a glacial pace. There was little to do except find sustenance and, beyond that, loll in the grass or sit by a stream or river and watch the clouds go by. There wasn’t much to think about either, mainly because people had but a basic vocabulary with which to do their thinking and talking in the first place. Taken as a whole, so long as a neighboring tribe wasn’t on the attack, life was a quiet, unexciting affair and the days stretched languorously long and were probably quite boring.
In my youth, I did quite a lot of cloud watching myself. I roamed about the open countryside without an electronic device in hand and I amused myself in a totally unhurried, leisurely way. It made the hours seem beautifully surreal and the days go on forever. A summer day, in particular, could feel like an eternity, as if time wasn’t passing at all. It was nothing short of wondrous.
For those among us who yearn for eternity, then, maybe this is the way to glean what such a state might feel like.
Quite interestingly, very few of us would trade our busy lives for one which moves at a glacial pace, despite the complaints so many people sighingly offer. What wealthy person chooses, for example, to sit around and do nothing for the rest of his or her days even though he or she knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that they will never spend all of their amassed money?
Basically, no one. Even with knowing that adopting such a lifestyle could make his or her life seem significantly longer than a life in the so-called fast lane, virtually no one gleefully seizes upon this option. It seems that what we think enriches a life is going hell for leather and seeking all of the adventure we can possibly achieve.
That is because the contemporary human being has become a pack animal. By that I mean we pack in as much experience, food, drink, romance, fun and adventure into every moment as we possibly can. We busy ourselves with scouting out new merchandise, products and services at every opportunity, then set off to obtain those things at a breakneck pace. We spend our days devouring information on the internet, in magazines and books, watching TV, videos and movies, not to mention consuming food as if we are starving to death when most of us clearly are not. We drink liters of water, too, as if we are on fire and imbibe fizzy drinks and alcohol as if twenty minutes of boredom is absolutely unbearable.
We are literally on fire in a sense, of course. Our contemporary eating habits have most of us boiling over with inflammation. Inflammation, as most now know, or should know, leads to countless physical diseases.
Do we change our eating habits, though?
We do once we are forced to do so by a severe bout of ill-health.
Not to make light of humanity’s current plight, but if there is one way to slow time significantly — to make time drag, in fact — it is by becoming bedridden with an illness.
Nobody wants that.
What, then, do we want?
We want to feel as if we have all of the time in eternity while spending our time racing from one event to the next. It is men and women of action whom we emulate and hold up as heroic, not those who sit about doing little or next to nothing.
Yet, our great desire as human entities is to be eternal beings, rather than mere mortals with a finite lifespan.
The good news is that, according to the wisdom masters of history, we already are eternal beings.
If one does not believe that, there is a way to prove it to oneself.
Meditate. Daily.
By taking the time to sit and “do nothing” for a relatively brief period every day, one may automatically gain a small measure of freedom in that timeframe. By ignoring our thoughts while meditating, we jettison some of our pack animal load in the interim and, if we go deeply enough into our core essence, we can even glean the presence of a Higher Mind there.
That Higher Mind is one we may call by a name of choice, be it God, Mind-at-Large, Nonlocal Mind, the Akasha, Buddha Mind, the Matrix, the Tao and so on.
By reaching ever deeper levels inside within ourselves, we may also eventually glean a great surprise: the discovery of a sense of timelessness.
Timelessness is a transcendent state and can be viewed as simply another name for eternity, for eternity is beyond time.
To partake of a little timelessness from time to time, so to speak, we get to live in two worlds at once: the mortal realm and the immortal realm.
For those who wish to make their lives twice as amazing, here then is a proven way to do it!
