Talk to the universe.
Listen for its reply.
Be on intimate terms with Nature.
See the life in everything.
Carry yourself like a child of the universe.
The first step, talking to the universe, is the most important. It doesn’t imply that you go around muttering to the stars or that you begin an imaginary cosmic conversation. The habit of looking at the world “out there” as disconnected from you is entrenched; we all share a cultural bias that reserves life only for plants and animals, and that places intelligence exclusively in the brain. You can begin to break down this belief by acknowledging any hint that the inner and outer worlds are connected. Both have the same source; both are organized by the same deep intelligence; both respond to each other.
When I say that you can talk to the universe, I mean you can connect to it. If you feel depressed by a gray and rainy day, for example, see the inner and outer grayness as the same phenomenon with objective and subjective sides. If you are driving home from work and your gaze is caught by a glowing sunset, consider that Nature wanted to catch your attention, not that you and the sunset are having just an accidental encounter. On some intimate level, your existence meshes with the universe, not by chance but by intention.
When you see the life that exists everywhere, acknowledge what you’re seeing. At first, it may seem peculiar to do this, but you are a co-creator, and you have the right to appreciate the patterns of connection that you’ve made. Carrying yourself like a child of the universe isn’t a game of cosmic pretend. At the level of the field, you exist everywhere in spacetime, a scientific fact that we are carrying a step further by saying that this moment in spacetime has a special purpose in your world. It is your world, and by responding to it that way, you will begin to notice that it responds back:
On some days everything goes right.
On some days everything goes wrong.
At certain moments you feel absorbed into the rhythm of Nature.
At some moments you feel as if you disappear into the sky or the ocean.
Sometimes you know that you have always been here.
These are general examples, but you can be alert to moments that seem meant just for you. Why do certain moments feel uniquely magical? Only you will know, but you won’t if you don’t first begin to attune yourself to the feeling. The closest parallel I can draw to this kind of privileged relationship is that between lovers, in which ordinary moments are suffused with a presence or specialness that wouldn’t be felt by an outsider. Something totally compelling draws your attention when you are in love; once experienced, it is not easily forgotten. You feel as if you are inside your beloved and your beloved is inside you. The merging of yourself with something vaster than yourself is a blending of two subjectivities. It’s been called the relationship of “I and thou,” or the sense of being as a wave on the infinite ocean of Being.
Don’t let names and concepts distract you. There’s no defined way for you to relate to the universe. Just relate in your own way. A little child like my granddaughter finds her way in talking to trees and invisible dragons. That’s her privileged relationship. What is yours going to be? Shiver with anticipation and find out.
Secret #12
THERE IS NO TIME BUT NOW
THERE HAVE BEEN MOMENTS when my whole life made sense. I knew exactly who I was. The people in my life were all there for a reason. Clearly, and without a shred of doubt, I knew that the reason was love, so for that moment I could laugh at the preposterous notion that I had enemies or that I was a stranger in this world.
Perfection has a mysterious way of slipping in and out of time. Few people, I imagine, haven’t felt the kind of moment I just described, but I’ve never met a single person who could hold on to it. But people desperately want to, and often this hunger motivates their spiritual life. In the Buddhist tradition, there are a wealth of exercises devoted to mindfulness, a state of awareness in which you can be conscious of perfect moments. Let’s hope they all become perfect. But to be aware, you must first catch yourself being unaware, which is difficult; after all, being unaware can be defined as not knowing that you aren’t aware.
I had a hard time with this slipperiness until someone told me, “It’s like being happy. When you’re happy, you’re just happy. You don’t have to think about it. But then a moment comes when you say out loud, ‘I really feel happy right now,’ and it starts to disappear. In fact, you can break the spell simply by thinking the words ‘I’m happy right now’ to yourself.”
That one example explained to me what it means to be mindful: You catch the present moment without words or thought. Few things are easier to describe and harder to do. The crux of the matter is time. Time is as slippery as that blessed moment before you say “I’m happy right now.” Was that moment really fleeting or is it eternal?
Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn’t really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety. The secret about time, then, is that it exists only as we usually think of it. Past, present, and future are only mental boxes for things we want to keep close or far from us, and by saying that “time flies,” we conspire to prevent reality from coming too close. Is time a myth we are using for our own convenience?
Books are written extolling the virtues of living in the present moment. There is good reason for this because the mind’s burdens come from the past. By itself, memory is weightless, and time should be, too. What people call “the now” is actually the disappearance of time as a psychological obstacle. When the obstacle is removed, you are no longer burdened by the past or the future—you’ve found the mindful state (and happiness, too—the kind that needs neither words nor thoughts). What makes time a psychological burden is ourselves—we have convinced ourselves that experiences are built up over time.
I’m older than you, I know what I’m talking about.
I’ve been around the block a few times.
Listen to the voice of experience.
Pay attention to your elders.
These formulas make a virtue out of experience accumulated not with insight or alertness but simply by hanging around. Mostly they are futile expressions, however. We all know at some level that carrying around a heavy suitcase of time is what makes people gray.
To live in the present moment means dropping the suitcase, not carrying it with you. But how is this done? In the one reality, the only time on the clock is now. The trick to dropping the past is to find out how to live now as if it were forever. Photons move at Planck time, which matches the speed of light, while galaxies evolve over billions of years. So if time is a river, it must be a very deep one and broad enough to contain the least speck of time and the infinity of timelessness.
This implies that “now” is more complex than it looks. Are you in the now when you are most active and energized, or when you are most still? Take a look at a river. On the surface, the current is fast and restless. At the middle depths, the flow slows down, until one reaches the bottom, where the silt is only slightly stirred before you touch bedrock, where the motion of water no longer has any effect. The mind is capable of participating at every level of the river. You can run with the fastest current, which most people try to do in their everyday lives. Their version of now is whatever has to be done right now. For them, the present moment contains constant drama. Time equals action, just as it does on the surface of the river.
When they become exhausted from the race (or feel that they are losing it) people in a hurry may finally slow down, only to be surprised at how hard it actually is to go from running to walking. But if you decide, “Okay, I’ll just keep going,” life brings new problems, such as obsessions, circular thinking, and so-called racing depression. In a sense, these are all disorders of time.
Tagore has a wonderful phrase for this: “We’re too poor to be late.” In ot
her words, we race through life as if we can’t afford to throw away a single minute. In the same poem, Tagore gives a perfect description of what you find after all the rushing around gets where it wants to go:
And when the frantic race was over
I could see the finish line
Bursting with fear lest I be too late
Only to find at the last minute
That yet there is time.
Tagore is reflecting on what it means to race through your life as if you haven’t time to spare, only to find at the end that you always had eternity. But our minds have a hard enough time adjusting to a slower pace when they are so conditioned to misusing time. An obsessive-compulsive person, for example, is typically panicked by the clock. There is barely enough time to clean the house twice before company comes, barely enough time to line up forty pairs of shoes in the closet and still make dinner. Where did time go wrong?
Without being able to locate the source of obsession, psychologists have discovered that low self-esteem is accompanied by negative words like lazy, dull, stupid, ugly, loser, worthless, and failure that get repeated several hundred times per hour. This rapid-fire repetition is both a symptom of mental suffering and a futile attempt to find a cure. The same word keeps coming back over and over because the person desperately wants it to go away and yet has not discovered how to expunge it.
Circular thinking is related to obsession, but with more steps involved. Instead of chewing over a single notion like “the house isn’t clean enough” or “I have to be perfect,” the person is imprisoned in false logic. An example would be someone who feels unlovable. No matter how much people express love for them, the circular thinkers do not feel lovable because inside their minds they are saying, “I want to get love, and this person is saying he loves me, but I can’t feel it, which must mean I am unlovable, and the only way I can fix that is to get love.” Circular logic afflicts those who never become successful enough, never feel safe enough, never feel wanted enough. The initial premise that drives them to act (“I’m a failure,” “I’m in danger,” “I’m in need”) doesn’t change because every result from the outside, whether good or bad, reinforces the original idea. These examples bring us to the “paradox of now”: The faster you run in place, the further you are from the present moment.
Racing depression gives us a very clear picture of the paradox because depressed people do feel inert, trapped in a frozen dead moment without any feeling except hopelessness. For them, time is standing still, and yet their minds race with shredded ideas and emotions. This flurry of mental activity doesn’t seem like what should be going on in the head of someone who can’t get out of bed in the morning. But in this case, the mental flurry is disconnected from action. A depressed person thinks of countless things but acts on none of them.
When these problems aren’t present, the mind slows down by diving deeper. People who take time out for themselves are seeking the calm of solitude, where external demands are fewer. In its natural state, the mind stops reacting once external stimulation goes away. This is like escaping the waves in the river’s shallows to find a depth where the current slows down. The present moment becomes a kind of lazy circular eddy. Your thoughts keep moving, but they aren’t so insistent that they push you forward.
Finally, there are a few people who enjoy stillness more than activity, and they dive as deep as they can to find where the water stops running, a point so still and deep that one isn’t touched by the surface waves at all. Having found this stable center, they experience themselves to the maximum and the outside world to the minimum.
One way or another, we’ve all experienced these different versions of the present moment, from an exhausting race to motionless calm. But what about the now that is right before you, this now? In the one reality, this now has no duration—relative terms like fast and slow, past and future, don’t apply. The present moment includes faster than the fastest and slower than the slowest. Only when you include the whole river are you living in the one reality, and then you’re living in a state of awareness that is ever fresh and changeless.
So how do you get there?
To answer that, we have to look into relationships. When you meet someone you know well—let’s say your best friend—what happens? The two of you perhaps meet at a restaurant to catch up, and your talk is full of old, familiar things, which feels reassuring. But you also want to say something new, or the relationship would be static and boring. You know each other extremely well already, which is part of being best friends, yet at the same time you aren’t totally predictable to one another—the future will unfold new events, some happy, some sad. Ten years from now one of you could be dead or divorced or turned into a stranger.
This intersection of the new and the old, the known and the unknown, is the essence of all relationships, including the ones you have with time, the universe, and yourself. Ultimately, you are having only a single relationship. As you evolve, so does the universe, and the intersection of the two of you is time. There is only one relationship because there is only one reality. It’s been a while since I referred to the four paths of Yoga, but each one is actually a flavor of relationship:
• The path of knowledge (Gyana Yoga) has a flavor of mystery. You sense the inexplicability of life. You experience the wonder inside every experience.
• The path of devotion (Bhakti Yoga) has the flavor of love. You experience the sweetness inside every experience.
• The path of action (Karma Yoga) has the flavor of selflessness. You experience the connectedness of every experience.
• The path of meditation and inner silence (Raj Yoga) has the flavor of stillness. You experience the being inside every experience.
Time exists so that you can experience these flavors as deeply as possible. On the path of devotion, if you can experience even a glimmer of love, it’s possible to experience a little more love. When you experience that little more, then the next degree of intensity is possible. Thus, love engenders love until you reach the point of saturation, when you totally merge into divine love. This is what the mystics mean when they say that they plunge into the ocean of love to drown themselves.
Time unfolds the degrees of experience until you reach the ocean. Pick any quality that holds charm for you, and if you follow it far enough, with commitment and passion, you will merge with the absolute. For at the end of the path, each quality disappears, swallowed up by Being. Time isn’t an arrow or a clock or a river; it’s actually a fluctuation in the flavors of Being. Theoretically, nature could have been organized without a progression from less to more. You could experience love or mystery or selflessness at random. However, reality wasn’t set up that way, at least not as experienced through a human nervous system. We experience life as evolving. Relationships grow from the first hint of attraction to deep intimacy. (Love at first sight takes the same journey but in a matter of minutes instead of weeks and months.) Your relationship to the universe follows the same course—if you let it. Time is meant to be the vehicle for evolution, but if you misuse time, it becomes a source of fear and anxiety.
THE MISUSE OF TIME
Being anxious about the future
Reliving the past
Regretting old mistakes
Reliving yesterday
Anticipating tomorrow
Racing against the clock
Brooding over impermanence
Resisting change
When you misuse time, the problem isn’t at the level of time itself. Nothing has gone wrong with the clocks in the house of someone who loses five hours’ sleep worrying about the possibility of dying from cancer. The misuse of time is only a symptom for misplaced attention. You can’t have a relationship with someone you don’t pay attention to, and in your relationship to the universe, attention is paid here and now, or not at all. In fact, there is no universe except the one you perceive right now. So to relate to the universe, you must focus on what lies in front of you. As one spiritual teacher
said, “The wholeness of creation is needed to bring about the present moment.”
If you take this to heart, your attention will shift. Right now, every situation you are in is a mixture of past, present, and future. Imagine yourself applying for a job. As you offer yourself to the scrutiny of a stranger, trying to handle the stress and make a good impression, you aren’t actually in the now. “Will I get this job?” “How do I look?” “Were my recommendations good enough?” “What’s this guy thinking, anyway?” It seems as if you can’t help tumbling in the mix of past, present, and future. But the now can’t be a mixture of old and new. It must be clear and open; otherwise, there is no unfolding of yourself, which is the reason time exists.
The present moment is really an opening, so it has no duration—you are in the now when time ceases to exist. Perhaps the best way to gain such an experience is to realize that the word present is linked to the word presence. When the present moment becomes filled with a presence that is all-absorbing, completely at peace, and totally satisfying, you are in the now.
Presence isn’t an experience. Presence is felt whenever awareness is open enough. The situation at hand doesn’t have to bear any responsibility. Paradoxically, someone can be in intense pain, only to find that in the middle of his suffering, the mind—unable to tolerate the body’s torment—suddenly decides to abandon it. This is particularly true of psychological pain—soldiers caught in the terror of battle report a moment of liberation when intense stress is replaced by a rush of ecstatic release.