Ia man slave or master of time?-7

We say ordinarily that eternity is felt in an instant. What do we mean by that?

When all possibility of measuring a pleasure or an experience by a criterion is gone, when all feeling of necessity and compulsion is gone, when even the duality of the 'now' moment and the one who experiences the 'now' is gone, that is the instant into which eternity empties itself and by which it justifies itself. The' now ' is not a moving phenomenon. It is the look of the subject by which it entices the object and annexes it into it bosom. And when the object is annexed then the attention remains without object. The thought is at its meridian, it measures its own limits, enjoys its own plenitude. It is the all inclusive unifying experience of the witness.

In the Hindu tradition, in addition to the doctrine of Jivanmukti (liberation in the body) there is the notion of immediate release or Sadyomukti, on which Sri Ramakrishna lay much emphasis. The Bhagavadgita says that the moment knowledge comes, one is released.

The Bhagavata puts it beautifully:

'When men realize Me (The Lord)' as present in all beings, as the latent fire is in wood that moment they are liberated of confusion.' So then it is knowledge of this already accomplished identity that releases us immediately. We are in everything. Only this has to be realized and confirmed.

All philosophy and philosophers were attracted by the experience of the eternity in the now-moment. But the first in the Western tradition to give it spirituality was Meister Eckhart :  To say that God created the world yesterday or tomorrow would be foolishness, for God created the world and everything in it in the one present Now. Indeed, time that has been past for a thousand years is a present and near to God as the time that now is. The soul that lives in the present Now-moment is the soul in which the Father begets his only begotten Son and in that birth the soul is born again.'

....These were from the article by Swami Nityabodhananda in Vedant Kesari

 

 

Is man slave or master of time? -6

We live in time and die in time. Mystics realized the intemporal in time. The radiance of eternity shines through its stain, namely time. Eternity is affirmed in time and not in eternity and this is possible because of life's time transcending quality.

Do we see eternity? We see it, feel it when Beethoven's symphony makes us participate in the peace in movement or the motionless in the moving. We see it in the painting when we see behind the painting not the brush but the painter's heart that moves and moves not…. Life is not content until eternity is condensed and enjoyed. And that is what we do in every moment of desire and aspiration.

 Is not desire eternal? We feel it is and that is why we run after desire. It survives any number of lives. Desire, as it were, takes us in its hand and enjoys us and when it had enough of us it drops us. But then we, by our spirituality, can reverse the process. We can take desire by the hand and suck it dry as an orange and when it is finished, we can drop it.

That is what spiritual men do. Then the eternity of desire is transferred on to us. It is the same with aspiration. Instead of thinking that aspiration takes us by the hand and pushes us, we can take aspiration and use it and drop it when we have had enough of it. When it is said that the liberated men are swayed neither by desire, nor by passion, nor by thought, it means that the eternity of these is no longer felt by the liberated, for in their own eternity is consumed the eternity of desire. Because we unconsciously feel the eternity of desire and not our eternity, we are after them, we thirst after their eternity.

Is man master or slave of time?-6

Apparently it is a moment of isolation as we feel cut off from all things. We feel lonely because then every thing is within us, because attention, which ordinarily feels its presence by projecting itself and perceiving things, slides into its own source. This isolation makes us afraid. But the liberated man, who had lived all his life liberated of all choice and necessity, who had experienced attention without object, is not afraid of the moment of death. He knows what it means and he fades into it with joy. For us too it can be a moment of attention without object. We can integrate with it in joy instead of fighting against it with fear and finally succumbing to it. The liberated man conquers death as he had before death mastered time, by liberating himself of choice and necessity. We too can do so.

When this identity is felt by and through love, then loving is spontaneous. It becomes the natural law of life and not the result of a necessity or the result of thinking that I should love. The planes of necessity though so real in life, where are they by the side of the intensity of experience that identity with the All can give? Those planes pale into insignificance. When we have realized this identity and this realization is as simple as existence, we exist and we naturally know that we exist, and so to exist is to love then we have no need to think that we should love or we should grow. It is when we lack this realization that we think so. Do we grow because we think we should grow? If so, it is not a spontaneous growth, it is the result of thought. Do we think because we should think? Before we think, we should think we are already thinking. Before we think we should be awake, we are awake. This is the grandeur and glory of life. We cannot catch up with life's moving intensity. Life is spontaneous, we need not have to push it. And we can never cope with this moving spontaneity, this moving Self, this moving eternity that decide to be time and give us perception but at the same, time moves on to avoid our grasp. This quality of life it gets by its very position of being at the threshold of time and eternity.

Activity : Before we think we should be awake. Did it happen to me today?

Is man master or slave of time?-5

In waking-time we choose, we become, we are held under necessity. That is the time in which we grow and decay. In sleeping-time we do not choose, we do not become what we are not. Becoming is suffering, for in becoming we choose and we die. We die only in waking-time. Waking-time is symbolic of choice and conflict. We never die in sleep and by sleep I mean not the usual sleep, but the epoch of peace and the absence of conflict. Choice means death, for choice brings in time-consciousness and with time-consciousness comes in the notion of the end of time, namely death. We think, death cuts us off from time, from life, from everything.

Suppose we do not choose, because we do not feel the urge to choose; suppose we realize what we are and hence feel no more tempted to become something other than what we are. Suppose we are liberated of that 'necessity to become', liberated of the thralldom of the necessity to become  and necessity brings in time - then what happens? Time which was pushing us on and on to fresh and fresh necessities, to new and newer choices rolls back into us. Time which was liquid becomes solid. When we feel there is nothing to achieve, time not only stops, but rolls into us and becomes an inner dimension and certitude. For the man who has no rendezvous(appointment) to keep hut looks out of his window on a busy street, time is not a master but a nucleus that relaxes him.

It is just the feeling of the traveller in the couchette(seat convertible to bed) of night trains, when he hears the people outside struggling for seats and he himself is quiet and sheltered. Not that life loses all meaning and charm when time stops; becoming loses its charm. Attention, life's attention becomes interiorized. Lucidity increases, so too love. Love and lucidity which were before focussed on things roll back to their source. When attention finds itself without object, then it is eternity. When all criterion to measure disappear, then it is eternity. That is what happens at the time of death. At death our attention transforms into attention without object. We think it is the annihilation of time, the losing of life. In reality it is the moment when we have dispensed with all choice and becoming, with all necessity and time. This moment is a moment of spiritual plenitude.