Timeless

From Menletter January 2009

By Tim Baehr

The little boy lies on his back at the foot of a tree not far from his house. He is ten years old. His head cradled in his arms, he looks up at coruscations of yellow sunlight dazzling his eyes at one moment and glowing through green leaves at another moment.

The afternoon passes, and the boy daydreams of space ships, sea voyages, heroic deeds, buried treasure. He plays with ants and grasshoppers that come his way. He draws pictures in the dirt with a twig. And at times, he just drifts, mind blank, the soft summer breeze combing through his hair and cooling his face.

We might think that this little boy is subject to the same passage of time as all of us - as all of the universe. Hours pass, but only for those that count the hours. For him, time has stood still. Or better yet, time simply doesn't exist.

A call to dinner sounds like a message from another galaxy. Our little friend ignores it. The call becomes more insistent. Still, the boy is in his timeless place. Finally a body blocks the waning sunlight. A hand, attached to a chuckle, reaches down to help him up. "Let's go eat."

Dreamwalking, the boy follows his father to the house. Time begins to creep back into his consciousness, but it never gets a good purchase on him. He goes to bed in his favorite pajamas, deliciously cool against his skin. He closes his eyes with a sigh of contentment.

And over the next few years his school and the rest of his society will capture his imagination and make time one of the strongest and most bedeviling influences in his life. The summer days under the tree will be forgotten, or pressed like a flower into the deepest pages of his book of life.

Slavery

We've become slaves, often willing ones, to time. When we are way too young, we have tardy bells, special times for specific classes, deadlines for papers and homework. (Deadline: During the Civil War it was a line in a prisoner of war camp. If you crossed the line, you were dead. Nice metaphor for how we view much of our lives!)

Even pleasure is on a schedule: vacations, TV shows, sports events. In the age of TiVo and DVR, we think we can postpone our fun - but then we have to schedule a time to watch the recording.

We've been affected so deeply that we treat time as if it were some kind of tangible object. We save it, give it, take it, or waste it as if it were currency. Time passes as if it were a moving object. It can feel like an enemy if we're in a hurry or a friend if we're in need of healing. Whatever time may really be to physicists or philosophers, in our ordinary lives it is a human construct, a metaphorical understanding of something we don't experience in a direct way. The metaphors - time as currency, time as a moving object, and so on - are illusions. Useful, but still illusions.

Not that the physicists or philosophers can tell us anything we can really understand or use. Einstein said that time is what we measure with a clock. An appropriate response might be "Duh" or "So what?" followed by a shrug. A little more usefully, a philosopher might say that time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

Our little boy, not yet a slave to time, spent a timeless afternoon. As an adult, he may remember fondly this particular afternoon, and others like it, but they will be part of a sweet nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent period in his life. He may ponder, sadly, that the innocence, simplicity and timelessness of his youth are long gone and probably out of his reach.

Killing Time

Or maybe one day he'll go in search of simplicity and innocence. He will find, in midlife or beyond, that he is racing pell-mell toward death. We know the cliché - that as we age, time goes by more quickly, too quickly. The endless summer afternoons of our childhood give way to entire years that pass in the blink of an eye. Some of us don't relish how soon the dark shroud of oblivion will overtake us; the rest of us wonder about immortality and find that we much prefer what we know now to what an uncertain afterlife might bring. We all want to cling to something, anything, that will slow down the very thing that has so usefully kept everything from happening at once.

We grab onto psychic handles and straps as we try to stay put while time whizzes by. Booze, drugs, and frenetic busyness are temporary palliatives that many people might consider pathological. More acceptable mooring points might be total engagement in a profession or hobby, extreme sports, exotic travel, or anything that keeps endorphins pumping and gives us what psychologists call the "flow."

But it's good to remember that our young lad didn't do any of these things. He sat. And sat. And sat. Nothing much beyond his fantasies engaged his mind. He made no plans. He remembered no appointments. He had no regrets. And when his dad, with wise gentleness, brought him home for dinner, the lad took the timelessness with him, all the way to a contented sigh before sleep.

We might say that the boy was killing time, and that this metaphor may be the key to fending off the sour wrenching in our gut as we contemplate our mortality. We can kill time in a more literal sense - kill the invention and illusions that, so far, have served us so well. We can do what our little ten-year-old friend did. We can sit. And sit. And sit. In silence. In solitude. In stillness. We can do this under a favorite tree, or we may need the discipline offered by a meditation practice.

Whatever we do, it won't be easy. Thoughts, worries, plans, memories, regrets will intrude in a way that the boy, in his innocence, wasn't subject to. That's all right. If we sit long enough and often enough, the thoughts, worries, plans, memories, and regrets will pass by us harmlessly as we watch.

Eliminating expectations is even trickier. The little boy was not trying to achieve innocence and contentment and timelessness. He was sitting just to sit. We can do that too, but it's not easy. We've led a results-oriented life. With repetition, however, we come to sit only for the sake of sitting.

Eventually, time begins to fall in on itself. We may experience an instant in which the collapse is total. We could say that time has ceased to exist. Or we could say that time, as a concept, has just lost its meaning and relevance. We sit, if only for a moment, in a state of timelessness. There is only now. No past, no future, no sequence, no order. Just now. This is what it's like to touch timelessness. To me, this is what it's like to cast off for just an instant the ropes of whatever ties us to our mortal existence, to be in touch with the divine.

We are serene: no worries, no plans, no memories, no regrets. Into this profound serenity creeps a sense of contentment. As we become aware of contentment, we begin to move back into the world in which time is measured, but with a new feeling. Like the boy in his pajamas at the end of his perfect, timeless afternoon, we sigh. And because we now have an adult's understanding, we know that we can carry a tiny piece of timelessness around with us through the temporal world. We may still mark and measure time for practical purposes, but each moment of our lives is also a timeless moment, each experience is more alive.

We go back to the sitting in solitude every once in a while to refresh the feeling. And when the final moment arrives in our temporal life, we will have participated already in the timeless "now," in the divine.

Kabir, a fifteenth-century Muslim mystic, advises us to look for the divine while we're still alive (version by Robert Bly):

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,

do you think

ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten --

that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you

will have the face of satisfied desire.