Guided Meditation: The Collapse of Time into Eternity

I want to explore time and eternity with you. And to do so, I'd like to explore two experiences, thinking and being. If we can call being an experience. So first of all thinking think now of the past a series of events in your past. Just start with breakfast this morning and just go back as far as you like thinking of various events in your past. And now think of the future. Start with dinner this evening and then think of something tomorrow, next week, next year or in a few years time. And now just go freely back and forth with your attention from the past to the future and and back again. Just keep going back and forth from a past event to a future event. And now ask yourself the question, what is the medium in which all these events occur? Time. Time is the The container, the medium, the field in which all past events and future events exist. The the time time itself the container in which all these events exist is empty of events. It is the container that enables all these events to take place. It is itself inherently empty of events. So just imagine the empty container of time populated by numerous events. And this container of time seems to have a a single linear dimension flowing from from left to right, so to speak, from the past to the future. A horizontal axis of time. And now stop thinking or at least stop referring to your thoughts and come to the experience of being Now ask yourself the question based only on my current direct experience of being without reference to thought. Is the experience of being moving? Is it traveling along a line of time or is it stationary? Now without referring to thoughts, ask yourself how long does the experience of Being lost. How much time does the experience of being take up? Don't think about this. Put your thoughts, suspend your thoughts. Just go to the direct experience of being. Is it extended in time? The mind would like to say being lasts forever. But forever or everlasting means extended indefinitely in time. But without reference to thought, there is no experience of time. But there is the experience of being. So see that if you refer just to the experience of being, it is not everlasting, it is ever present. Time is everlasting but being is ever present. And the horizontal dimension of time intersects with the vertical dimension of being had the experience called now. From the point of view of the mind, now is a moment in time. From the point of view of being, now is eternity. So now is the portal through which the mind passes out of time into eternity. And the same portal through which being passes out of eternity and expands into time. I want to explore this more experientially, more clearly. Go back to the the medium of time in which all the remembered events in the past and the imagined events in the future exist. And in other words, go back to the medium of time that is populated with all your past memories and future imaginings. And now ask yourself, if I remove all my memories of the past and all my imagination about the future, what remains of the medium of time. Another way of saying this is if I stop thinking because our memories and imaginings are just thoughts. So if I stop thinking, what happens to this medium of time in which all the remembered and imagined events take face. Does time exist between each strike of the bell or is it just consciousness? Go back to the question. What remains of time when all the events that populated are removed? In other words, when all my thoughts are removed, what remains of my experience of time See that as soon as we stop remembering and imagining events that is as soon as we stop thinking time collapses. It collapses into now. Not now a moment in time. For there is no longer any time present once it has collapsed into the now. It collapses into the everpresent now. That is into eternity. And by eternity, I don't mean some extraordinary realm outside of our experience. I just mean this everpresent now. See in this way that it is thought alone that expands the now pure being into time. Soon as thought ceases, time collapses. As soon as thought begins, time expands. Just experiment with this. Experiment thinking about the past and the future and see see that each of the events you imagine or remember take place in the medium of time. And that as soon as you stop thinking, not only do the events that you remember and imagine disappear, but the medium of time in which they seemed to take place also collapses or just experiment with this expansion and collapsing of time with the advent and the sessation of thought. See in this way that time is not the medium in which thought takes place but rather thought creates or more accurately imagines Time. By thought in this context of course I mean memory and imagination. See in this way that we do not remember things because they exist in the past. The past seems to exist because we remember them. In other words, it is thought that creates the illusion of the past and future, the illusion of time. But an illusion is not something that is not real. It is something that is real but is not what it appears to be. In other words, all illusions have a reality to them. What is the reality relatively speaking of the three-dimensional landscape in the movie? The two-dimensional screen. What is the reality of the illusion of time? Eternity. Ever present being when you go to a a 3D IMAX cinema, you see a fuzzy screen in front of you, a fuzzy two-dimensional screen. But when you put on your glasses, that two-dimension fuzzy two-dimensional screen expands into a three-dimensional space, an ocean or a landscape in which you are immersed as an observer. It is the glasses that you put on that expand the two-dimension two-dimensional screen into the appearance of a three-dimensional world. It is the same when you put on the glasses of thinking. Being which has no dimension. Being which lives in eternity, which is eternity, expands into one dimension of time. But that single dimension of time is an illusion. Just as the the ocean in which you seem to be immersed in the cinema is an illusion. And just as the three-dimensional ocean in which you are immersed that you experience in the cinema is contained within in potential in the fuzzy image on the two-dimensional screen but is only realized when you put on your glasses. So everything that takes place in time or has ever taken place or could ever take place or will ever take place in time is folded up as it were in eternity. It is only realized in time when thought begins. In other words, thought is the medium through which time emerges from eternity. So it is the finite mind that is thought that brings brings time out of eternity into apparent existence. Now what is the name that the finite mind gives to itself? I So I is in this context a a symbol for the mind. And it is in this context that in the literature of the tantric tradition of Kashmir shism they say that the world is an expansion of I. In the vdantic tradition, Ramman Mahaji expresses the same understanding. The I thought is the mother of the world. What they mean by the I thought or the expansion of I is that it is with the inception of the finite mind, the inception of thought. That being expands into existence and as such appears as the world. Hence the I thought is the mother of the world. And the corollery, the counterpart of this idea in contemporary physics, I would suggest is the big bang. The big bang is conceived by the mind to be an event in the past. At which point the universe expanded or began to expand out of a a dimensionless point, a timeless point because time was born at that moment apparently 13.8 billion years ago. It did not happen 13.8 billion years ago. It happens now. Not now a moment in time, but now eternity. Now the everpresent now. It is continually happening. It didn't happen once. The big bang is them. This dimensionless point through which dimensionless point called now through which being expands into existence through which eternity gives birth to time. And meditation or prayer is simply the reversal of this process through which we pass out of time into eternity through which the mind is divested of the limitations that it borrows from the content of experience and stands revealed as the infinite Now, forget everything I've said this morning. Just come back to being and let it do its work in your mind below the threshold of your conscious attention. Just come back to being Thank you.