Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

The series on time and its paradox continues. Let’s put the spiritual aspect of time aside for a moment. Even when dealing with common calendars, we see that time isn’t always what it seems. Most of you reading this celebrate New Year’s on December 31st. Yet in India the Vedic New Year is marked when the Sun transitions into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. In 2010 this going to happen on April 14th. Aren’t you relieved? Now you can really get to work on your resolutions, you just bought time!

Time seems to be malleable, even when it seems to exist. The ancient Greeks had a special way of looking at this; they had two words for time, kronos and kairos. Kronos or Father Time refers to chronological or sequential time. Kairos signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined length in which something special happens. Kronos measures, it goes tick tock and is quantitative. Kairos is qualitative in nature, it flows.

Kairos brings meaning because it’s accessed in those moments we transcend the finiteness of time.

When we participate in time and therefore lose our sense of time passing we are in kairos; here we are totally absorbed in the present moment, which may actually stretch out over hours. –Jean Shinoda Bolen

It’s unlikely that Dali was in kronos time when painting his famous canvas.

The ‘now’ moment is creative and fathomless. It’s where we live out our passion and purpose. We get to express our true self and touch a depth that exists perennially. Now is like a great river. It flows with the totality of cosmic and human experience. When it’s tapped, that totality is available to the individual, who brings another stream to it, and so it goes on.

How can you deepen your presence in now? Journal using the following prompts. Remember to let your thoughts, feelings and intuitions surface on the page without being censored.

• What makes me regularly feel I’ve stepped outside of time?
• What does it feel like when I’m engaged in this?
• How do I lose my sense of flow?
• How can I bring flow even to routine activities?
• Who’s with me when I step out of time?
• Who pulls me back into time?
• How does now enhance my contribution to the world?
• What would I be living if I didn’t have responsibilities in time?
• How can I live my essence while in time?

I am letting go of my idea of time. I see that eternal life is not a question of “I will be forever,” but of “Now I am.” Eternity is time dying in me. –Jean Lanier

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The first post in this series generated quite some interest, and as promised the series continues.

I wear a watch only occasionally. I still have to get my son from school at a specific time. And the basketball game or nature show we want to watch starts at a specific time. Payments on credit cards are due very precisely too. Car loans are typically for 60 months and mortgages for 30 years. Time rules life on earth.

Yes, it does. Life on earth. We are more than earth, more than physical bodies obeying mechanical strictures. Dealing with time is a dichotomy, because clearly the body ages, and clearly everytime you meditate, you enter a timeless dimension.

Then there are meditation timers and the recommendation that you meditate for 20 minutes. Wait a second! These come from the recognition that we are here and have responsibilities, and our hereness and all it entails is profoundly enhanced by meditation or any other concept-busting practice.

And in these practices we are timeless. We become one with our true nature which is timeless.

When you know that you are eternal you can play your true role in time. When you know you are divine you can become completely human. –Mother Meera

How do we walk this; this being timeless and having to live in what seems like time? Recently it was Valentine’s Day, a day that if you’re a man in a relationship, you’d better remember! No matter what the commercial calendar says, I like to turn my thoughts to underlying truths. So in February I was thinking of love quite a bit, not that it’s relegated only to that month.

As a meditator, healer and citizen with a spiritual worldview, I dwell on, practice and embody love as much as I’m able. Love is a perfect buster of concepts for it can’t be contained and it doesn’t conform. Borrowing from and simplifying quantum physics, it became apparent to me that love is both wave and particle.

Love simply exists. It seems to have no origination. It needs no place and time. It’s pure potential and possibility. It’s in wave form.

When you kiss your child goodnight, love becomes a particle.

I believe what Mother Meera is hinting is that while time doesn’t exist as ultimate truth, it structures our temporary sojourn here, and we need that structure because we’re in form. Further, as we navigate time and form we need a purpose. This purpose isn’t merely to fill time and form, but to better and perhaps transform it. Usually this is impossible if your purpose is driven from inside time/space perceptions. From inside the ‘game,’ your purpose may only serve your ego, or keep you in servitude to a paycheck, or limit your potential because others on the inside have negated you.

We must take love from a wave possibility and make it a particle of value in the world. Just like love, we are a continuum that has frozen into a biological form for a certain duration, on a physical planet. And equally like love, we were before and will be after this.

Love is there naturally, but it’s deepening is moment to moment cultivation. If you’re anxious, depressed, fearful or ill, step outside of time and observe what happens. Observe how much power becomes available to you, how resourceful you become. Watch the peace descend and the joy rise.

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. –Herman Hesse

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Please donate what feels right. Each post is a considerable investment of thought, heart, energy and time.

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Has it ever occurred to you that our modern annual calendar has been manipulated purely for commerce? Think about it, every few months there’s some event on the calendar which involves buying something. Apart from the major holidays, some of which aren’t modern at all, there are all these “days”: Administrative Professionals’ Day, Boss’s Day, Drinking Straw Day, Barbie’s Birthday, Watermelon Day, Homemade Bread Day…you get the point.

There are worthy commemorations like Mother’s Day, and historic holidays have their place, but again with language like “Black Friday” it seems these have become focused on the exterior of life.

There’s quite some disagreement that the Gregorian calendar is even valid and authentic to natural and cosmic cycles, and plenty of other calendars available, some still in use. But, essentially the whole world has adopted a premise of 24 hours in one day, 7 days in one week, 52 weeks in one year.

It’s stifling! And not true. Time is a human construct. It actually works pretty well for living in a physical body, driving on asphalt and going to work in steel structures. It organizes life. And it runs out. That’s why it’s called a “deadline.”

The truth about time is that is doesn’t exist. Well, it does exist in the gears of your watch and for your kid’s soccer practice and a host of other events that make a life. So we’re dealing with shades of reality conjoined. We have to operate in time, but we come from outside of time.

Actually it’s not even “outside of time,” but timelessness. We originate in and return to timelessness and in between a large part of us hangs out there. Where? Um…”there.” If time doesn’t exist, there must not be space either, you may be thinking. Bingo! There isn’t.

Well, there’s the space you’re sitting in and the cosmos out “there,” and walls will stop you painfully. So again, we’re dealing with gradations of reality.

Let’s focus on the interior of life. It’s a common misconception to think of eternity as an endless span of time, whereas in fact it is timelessness; the nonexistence of time.

…time and space are in you; you are not in time and space. –Swami Vivekananda

This is very liberating! For instance, when we look at the potential of healing through this lens we understand that symptoms are data in time. Healing takes place at a meta level. Healing isn’t a cure as a cure is in time/space, whereas healing is abiding.

Spiritual healing is to erase the ignorance of what we are as metaphysical entities. When we take form, some limitations are imposed because that’s the nature of physicality, but we arrive and are unlimited.

Once this is remembered, life is lived with an expanded perspective, an and/also not an either/or. Breath is freer, creativity flows and the mind is sprung from its trap.

to be continued…
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Having provided free content for over two years, the Reiki Help Blog is now asking for your support. Actually, the content remains free, but your support is needed. The button or link below will take you to a secure PayPal page where you can give any amount of your choosing.

Please donate what feels right. Each post is a considerable investment of thought, heart, energy and time.

Donate to this blog. Thank you!