Being Time
Anyone who adopts the path of challenging the status quo adopts the path of time. Only for a brief moment at the height of some revolution or other does it become possible to change the status quo in a fundamental way. And such rapid changes are always preceded by a long history of slow, incremental changes which prepare the ground for the revolutionary change. Those who would transform the world must learn to identify with time.
Time is typically portrayed as something external to human beings, but this is clearly an illusion. Our most profound and basic experience of time consists of the internal activity of our own body, especially the pulse and the breath. This internal activity is in turn linked to a gradual process of growth, maturation, aging and death which is the inescapable destiny of all human beings providing they live long enough to die of old age. Trying to escape from time is like trying to escape from your own body. Time is who we are, so we might as well be it.
Being time means being your whole self, the whole person whom you have always been and will always be. This person stretches from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death in one unbroken self that moves and acts in the present but exists in the past and future as well. The present does not cease to exist when it becomes the past, and the future already exists before it becomes the present. But awareness of the full extent of the real self is more or less banned in contemporary Western culture due to the influence of religious ideology.
Most religions, and Christianity in particular, teach that the human body is only the temporary abode of the immortal soul. In modern times, this doctrine has been secularized by some Western thinkers, who have substituted "universal mind" or "the Ego" for the soul as the entity which inhabits the human body and ought to rule over it. But regardless of precisely what it is called, the general tendency is to posit the existence of an invisible ruler self that is independent of the body and somehow superior to it. The refusal to recognize the entire body as the real self is then rationalized by the weird doctrine that the present is the only reality.
To understand just how absurd this doctrine really is, you have only to ask: what happens to the present when it becomes the past? Does it fall off the edge of the universe? Is it turned into nothingness, and if so, how? And why is it that there is no scientific literature devoted to explaining just how the present is annihilated when it becomes the past? Why is it that neuroscientists have spent over 100 years in a vain effort to discover just where memories are supposedly "stored in the brain" without even once asking whether memory couldn’t be more easily explained as simply the movement of the mind back into the past body? Common sense ought to indicate that the present body is not the whole body, but common sense in Western thought is stifled by the all pervasive influence of religious ideology and its pseudo-secular philosophic and psychological variants.
Once common sense is allowed to recognize the existence of the body in time, the true nature of the mind also becomes clear. It is not an independent entity but rather the ongoing awareness of the entire body, the body as it exists in time. This awareness includes but is not confined to the awareness of the present moment. Because the body exists in both the past and the future as well as the present, the mind also extends into both the past and the future. Its extension into the past body results in what is called memory, and its extension into the future body results in what is called precognition. Precognition occurs most often in dreams because our consciousness is generally dominated by awareness of the present during our waking hours.
I have written an entire book, entitled Being Time, setting forth in complete detail the view of time which I have briefly summarized here. For information on how to receive an advance copy of this book for purposes of publication and review, please proceed to Contacts.
Robert Wolfe