Time

TIME

Replying in a letter to a friend, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote ‘My apologies that this reply is so long. It would have been shorter had I more time to compose it.’ More often than not, this is how I feel about my posts. Goethe also said ‘Continue because you must.’ So please bear with me as I tackle our latest subject.

At one time or another we’ve all probably had the experience of time seeming to slow down. This happens in unusual or extreme circumstances. A sudden death of a friend, a family member or colleague. Or a dangerous situation where life and limb are at immediate risk. Time, or our perception of time, stretches and our externals seem to move slower than normal. Even withstanding extreme circumstances, we’ve all experienced the drag of an hour’s tedious work, or the fleeting culmination of a successful effort.

Time seems coupled with speed. The instinctive center can tell the difference between wholesome food and rotten faster than the intellect. If left to the intellect to assess the quality of an edible, it would have to perform scientific analysis. How long would that take? The instinctive and moving centers are poor instruments at perceiving the emotional world. When a friend, relative or child is in emotional distress, our own emotional center picks this up almost immediately.

Different centers operate at different speeds and have their own experience of time. Even light, which is supposed to be the fastest object in the entire universe, has it’s own time reaching it’s destination, and even then, it’s only the limitations of the lower centers that ascribes a moving centered speed to it. Light appears as instantaneous to the four lower centers, but, as mentioned, that’s a limitation of the speed of lower centers. Time then, is a linear experience.

Due to the nature of light, it is obvious why consciousness is often compared to this phenomenon. Except that higher centers far exceeds the qualities and characteristics of light. Many individuals who must have achieved or have been graced with the permanent principle of higher centers described their experience. Walt Whitman, epically yet with a sublime tenderness describes higher states: “Light rare untellable lighting the very light, beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.” William Shakespeare, in one of his incomparable sonnets describes the speed at which higher centers operates as a mental experience. Yet isn’t it also somewhat a description of light? “For nimble thought can jump both sea and land, as soon as think the place where he would be.”

For a couple years, the Teacher published his thoughts and insights. Once time, while on the subway reading through the latest issue, one of his observations transported me into a higher state. At that moment my eye was caught by an advertisement with ‘Be.’ printed in large letters. The tunnel that the subway train was traveling in was a double tube, as it were, allowing trains to travel at opposite directions to each other. The dividers were heavy concrete supports about twenty feet long, so as trains passed each other there was a few moments interval where the other train was visible in a brief glimpse. In the same moment my attention centered on the advertisement on the carriage I was riding, it saw and followed with perfect clarity, the same exact advertisement with the same large lettered ‘Be.’in a train traveling in the opposite direction.

Our image is from the Dutch old master, Pieter Claesz. All the old master painters used skulls to represent the brevity of time. When we engage higher centers, we are unbound from the passage of time. Again from Walt Whitman; “The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?” This is what is taught in a fourth way school - how to escape and transcend time and space.

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