Relationship with time
“Letting go of TIME”
We live world driven by a certain notion of time. If we lived under the stars, our sense of time would respond to the rotation of the earth, the cycle of day and night. If we were sensitive to the cycles of menstruation and the tides, we would respond to the cycles of the moon. If we were farmers, we would respond to the cycles of the seasons. For any of you who have lived a portion of your life, either out in the woods, at the farm, on the seashore, you may have had the experience of letting go of artificial time and being in real time.
For those of you who haven’t done so, it’s extremely healing to take yourself out of the timeline. Whether that be a weekend mountain climbing, camping off grid, volunteering at a local farm, fishing at sunrise, there are hundreds of opportunities to experience the simple pleasures of stepping out of your world.
For some of you in your teens, 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, you may feel that you are an anomaly. You probably will find yourself in a peer group where no one leaves their phone behind. (Yes, I’m glad you are the one person reading this who does that.) No, you won’t need your phone to take pictures, no you won’t need to call anyone in an emergency, no you won’t need to receive those important txt and post on social media.
The whole point, is that there is no possible way to feel the conditioning field of artificial time, unless you actually escape from it. Our lives are timestamped, calendared, calculated, scheduled, indelibly marked by something that is absolutely unreal. Unreal in the sense that it’s an invention of the human mind. Everyone knows there are 365 days in a year, 30 days in a month, 30 days in the banking calendar, and bills are due on the 1st. Who says?
It’s a fascinating rabbithole to investigate the origins of the Babylonian calendar, the shift from 13 astrological signs, 13 moons, to a 12 month, 7 day a week calendar. Our job here is not to elucidate calendar conspiracies, but rather to say, what is your relationship with time, really?
As one spiritual teacher has put it, letting go of time is the final frontier, the last identification. Interesting. We are taught that the final thing to surrender, is our ego. Everyone says that, must be true, right? Perhaps not.
Try letting go of time, and you will discover that’s a lot harder than letting go of ego. Yes, they are intricately connected. To let go of ego, you can try relaxing any particular agenda; to let go of time, you will have to let go of your whole world.
In fact, much of what we consider to be ‘ego’ in the modern world, is actually a belief in the necessity of adhering to someone else’s time schedule. This whole momentum of “happenings”, “schedules”, “calendars” was not created by you. It is something outside yourself, that you fit yourself into.
Yes, you say, it’s so convenient! How would you know what to do without a timeline, a timepiece? Toilets are convenient as well, although they pollute the world’s water supply unnecessarily. It’s convenient that bills are due once a month....especially if you own a bank.
What is convenient is that everyone is stressed, impatient to get somewhere, socially anxious, in a rush, trying to work on time, arriving at church on time for your wedding....it’s all very convenient for those who have an interest in draining your lifeforce. By psyphoning your energy for their own uses, these parasitic forces keep themselves alive. Without your participation, they would shrivel away and die, or have to find their own resources.