Excerpt from Spiritual Enlightenment
The mind will take you everywhere but here because it knows that once you are here it will cease. It explains away all the mystery. It says “the trees? Don’t worry about those, they are just plants. Pay no mind to that. However, you should look back to yesterday. Find what went wrong many years ago. Look ahead to the future and find what may go wrong”.
Time itself is the illusion of the mind, created by your flawed memories and dreams of the future. It traps you on a timeline where you are never facing front, but always forward or backward.
The illusion of time is solidified with the experience of what we call night and day. The concept of night and day is exclusive to earth and planets like ours that orbit around a life-giving ball of light. We wake up to the light, go about our day until it is time for us to rest. We go to sleep, and wake up into a new day. Each day is separated by the setting sun and restful sleep. We judge the difference between each sunrise and sunset with hours and minutes. We lump days together into weeks and months and years. We watch the image of ourselves in the mirror slowly shifting into a withered version of ourselves over the decades. Our minds capture and store these many markers and project the idea of time onto the world around us.
However, what would time be without these many markers? Without the illusion of a sunrise and a sunset? We would be much closer to an existence without time. We would experience each moment in the now, rather than living with the idea that there is always a tomorrow, separate from today.
The now can be seen as an empty stage that is everpresent. The stage is all of existence, a now that has never been anything other than right now. All that takes place in the universe, all that grows and the changes is simply a play on the stage of existence. This stage is what is eternal, not the props and characters in the play. Your memories are filled with the play, but never aware of the stage on which the play is performed. Becoming aware of the stage will keep you seated in the present moment. It will wake you away from the dream of passing time. Become aware that the mind is what is causing you to dream. You are accumulating dead and gone memories that are no longer within the stage. Keeping you from experience the play at hand.
It is a concept in yoga that you should die every moment so you can be reborn every moment. However, it is not meant for you to physically leave your body. It is meant for you to drop what the mind is holding. Erase all that has accumulated like dust in the mind. When all has been dropped, you can see the stage anew. You can become awake to the play that is unfolding here in the now. This is the only experience that truly exists. There is no use in dreaming about the past. It is not even certain that it was there. It is a subjective collection of your own sensory interpretations.
It is always the mind taking us away from what is true. Weighing down the mysteries of the universe with mundane labels. Keeping us lost in dreams so that we never experience the pulsating aliveness of this present moment.
