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Inner
Frontier Fourth Way Spiritual Practice |
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Inner Work For the week of September 30, 2013
Time and the Timeless Introduction We live in time and, less obviously, we also live in the timeless. To the extent we are out of touch with the timeless, we are slaves of time. Our heart beats, the clock ticks and we feel our time, and with it our life, slipping past us. One response is the attempt to fill our time with experience and activity, to make the most of our time. We dread wasting time, because we know our time is limited. We suffer from the fact that only one event can pass through the gate of time in any given moment, that we cannot be in two places at the same time, and that, notwithstanding so-called multi-tasking, we cannot do two separate things at the same time. This continually forces us to choose what we will do in each moment, or to make the choice once and live by habit, or to react unconsciously to whatever time brings us. But we also can live a parallel life that is not in space and time, an inner life, a more or less conscious life. This is not a separate life from our life in time; we live one seamless life. But it has layers that intermingle. It has, for example, the layer of time as well as layers of the timeless. Our body and all other physical objects are trapped in time. Our consciousness and our will are not trapped in time, but belong to the timeless. Our mind and heart lie at the interface between time and the timeless. The Sacred resides in the timeless, but enters time. Our life in space and time distracts us from and masks our life in the timeless. We may notice our thoughts, but ignore the unchanging, cognizant stillness behind them. We may notice our body, but ignore the I that we are, the source of our attention and our decisions. In the coming weeks, we will explore in some depth the nature of our life in time, the nature of the timeless and our place in that, and how time and the timeless relate to our spiritual inner work. For this week, notice how your attitudes towards life and toward particular situations are shaped by your view of time. Would these attitudes be different if you had more contact with the timeless? |
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