Chapter 3 Time and Oneness

A Parable

“Oh, no,” David thought to himself as he entered the coffee shop. He was experiencing one of his more recently frequent de je vu feelings. For him these events were not quaint and pleasant. These feelings were uneasy omens of ill fate for him. For some reason he had learned to associate his experiences of de je vu with things going wrong for him, or that the path he had somehow glimpsed before was all going awry. He did not really realize that his mind was often, or almost always convinced that he destined to an awful fate of some kind.

David made his way to the coffee bar. He asked for the coffee that he had each and every day. He had come there for years. The people that worked there all recognised him, some of them wondered why David had never been friendly or at least become a bit familiar with them. He was a distant guy. He seemed more caught in his thoughts and almost not at all involved with the world about him. Pre-occupied; he wasn’t overly rude. He just didn’t seem to notice people or at least they didn’t seem to matter to him. David was single, at least at the time. He was a good looking talented young man, perhaps twenty-seven. He had no problem getting girlfriends, it was another matter of being truly intimate with anyone.

David sat at the coffee bar, he sipped his coffee. The usually fleeting feeling of de je vu that had begun earlier would be gone in a few seconds; a passing annoyance. Today this one was hanging on strong and getting more uncomfortable for him. He tried to shake it. Picking up a news paper he attempted to distract himself. Reading did not work. He even checked the date o the paper to ensure himself that it wasn’t the edition from that day before that he had already read. It seemed as though he was actually living out a dream he may have had. It was becoming completely spooky to him. He grabbed up his coffee and walked out the door of the shop.

After walking a short distance in the brightly lit afternoon he came to a small city park. David walked to the middle of the greenery and plunked himself onto a bench. He was becoming obsessed with what terrible turn his life was taking in his “altered” state of mind. Soon, two or three minutes later a small East Indian man came and sat beside him. David was further annoyed. He felt he couldn’t escape anything. He was just about to leave when the little man said, “I am thinking that this a tremendously beautiful day. How about you?”

“Ya, I suppose it is nice out,” David mumbled as to not be completely rude.

“I don’t mean to look into your business, however you are looking troubled and that is not good,” the old Indian man smiled sweetly at him.

“I am fine,” David answered, somewhat puzzled by why he just didn’t get up and leave. Something just kept him there. Normally he would have just stood up and left.

“Ok, tell me are you believing in God? I think that you do. I am.”

“Well, I, ummm, well, I think that there is something more than what we see here, but what is really going on I don’t know,” David sputtered out and then fell silent. He realized that his de je vu had subsided. Internally he was a little relieved. He could not understand why he just remained there sitting beside this smiling little old man. They sat for several minutes, perhaps fifteen or so. “Have you ever had the feeling that you had been reliving an experience, like de je vu?” David could barely believe that he had blurted out that question.

“I have.” the old man replied and fell back into silence. After a few more minutes passed he started to speak again, “You see, God, he knows no time. God is infinite and eternal. I am an old man. The Earth has passed around the Sun almost seventy-nine times since I was being born. God does not age…so to him there is no consequence of time. He is not being able to conceive it. For God there just one forever moment and he is in the experience of it all, all the time. My body will stop, one day, being able to breathe and grow and beat my heart. But I am not just that collection of bones and skin. There is eternity in me as well. God is in me, and you. Your human thinking has clouded your real knowing of who and what you are being. This I know. Sometimes as though from out of a sleep, your real self, groggily sees things as they really are. Through the eyes of God. You get time confused with how your sleeping self has made it. There is no time, really. Only it is something we have made up to finding our way through the misconceived partial truth that we try to understand. Time is like a spot on a map. Only those who are lost need maps. Never is God lost. One day you will see… never have you been either.”

David was awestruck. Everything that the old man said seemed to make sense. He had paid attention to him like he had to no other. He smiled and watched some children run by chasing and playing with their dog. When he looked back to where the old man had been sitting to ask him another question, he was stunned to see him not there. He disappeared, at least the old man had seemed to, in David’s mind. He glanced at his watch, again he was baffled. He distinctly remembered leaving the house, a ten minute drive to the coffee shop, only a half hour previous to what his watch read then.


A Teaching

Everything changes. Everything dies. A man will return to the earth and stars from which he came. A tree may seem to live forever, perhaps five hundred years, however it will return to the soil and the atmosphere as well. Eventually a stone will erode away to become another form. It is through this relativity that we measure time. It is not the rising and the setting of the sun. The notion of day and night is only relative to the perspective of location. It is always day and always night somewhere in the world. If you were to be able to float in space half way between the sun and the earth you would perceive no time, unless you fabricated it by using a time piece. Your body would still age as it programmed by your DNA to change in that way.

The Oneness knows no time. It is eternal. It has always been and always will be. Time is only present in relativity to form. Humans live in a perception of linear time. We measure the passing of time by days, and years. Days and years are directly relative to the movement of the Earth in relation to the Sun. If you lived on a spaceship between the galaxies, with no sunrises, no orbits around a Sun, and no seasons would we see time the same way? Time is purely relative to form. The Oneness is beyond form. It cannot age. The One is not subject to time it is truly in an eternal moment. It is always in the Now. Humans experience their lives often in their minds disjointed from the One. The past is powerful in the minds of most and as is also concern of the future. These preoccupations hinder people from entirely being present in the now. Now is the only time that exists. The past is only around in records and memories. The past was Now but is no longer. The past does not exist now. The future will never be here. When you arrive at tomorrow it will be now. It is not important to understand that which will never arrive. You cannot affect the non-existent ever. You can only affect now. It is the only place you can act or be. The one is always in the present.
To live in Oneness is only possible when you are in sync completely. In the Now.

Some humans are caught in a “time warp” of past and future. Hooked helplessly into where they are going and what that might bring them. Many are haunted by the past. In a mode of regret or resentment. You may have sat in worry about what may or may not happen, creating a whole new “false reality”. The biggest difficulty of that imagined state is you will probably act as though your fiction is true, if you are in the grip of ego and rooted in the great delusion. Worry and regret cannot happen when you are truly in the present moment and consciously aware of your Truth. That you are complete in the whole; in the One.

Here is an example of that mind consuming a state of conscious presence and connection. At about the age of 23 I had a job in a lumber yard. At that point in my life I was very troubled and confused. I was unsure of who I was and almost always felt inferior. I had worked at this job for a few months and had received a promotion from yard hand to putting together pre-cut cedar shed packages. I would take raw lumber and build packages ready for customers to take home and assemble into garden sheds. I remember how I would spend hours alone and during that solitude in my work area and I would start to think about my boss and co-workers and what they might think of me. I would wonder how I measured in their eyes. Some times I would have imagined conversations and conflicts with them in my head. I would create a fiction that they were not even privy to, however I would pay the price. My self hatred would grow, my opinions of them would become skewed. My actions and interactions were affected and influenced by my busy imagination. I was trapped in illusion. I was so unhappy in my fictional reality that I always seemed to be driven to keep creating it in hopes of making sense of my world. Busily trying to determine what in my future would give me peace. In the mad world.

The noise and confusion of a busy mind constantly out of sync with the Now causes pain, suffering and sadness to the degree often that a person will seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, and all kinds of escapist behaviour. Some humans will be so desperate to quiet their mind that the will take extraordinary risk, ingesting toxins, engaging in dangerous activities and self inducing altered mental states (such as depression for example) in order to cope with the conflict in the clatter of a misaligned time frame in the mind. Some will even end their lives as a final escape from their self made erroneous reality. The presence in what is Now, real, and relevant instantly relieves you from that fiction and allows you to live in collaboration with the Oneness. Stepping out of suffering and into the One really takes no time, it only requires real surrender. The surrender of the false self is to abandon the delusion and join with Oneness.