Last month I went to New Mexico for my annual retreat, and while I was there I experienced some strange synchronicities having to do with time.
As soon as I got to my room and was unpacking, I noticed that the alarm clock on the nightstand wasn’t plugged in. I investigated and discovered that the cord was too short to reach the outlet behind the bed.
No worries. I had brought my wrist watch with me so that I wouldn’t have to use my cell phone to tell the time, and since the watch has a button that illuminates the face in the dark, I realized I could just put it on the nightstand when I went to bed. But then I noticed that the light was very dim, and later that day the battery went dead. Then, the next morning, I discovered that the clock on my rental car dashboard wasn’t keeping time.
“Hmm,” I thought. “This is interesting.”
I had brought along a book a friend had loaned to me, Edge of the Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, by Mabel Dodge Luhan. Dodge Luhan lived in the early 1900’s, and the book is her account of leaving her socialite life on the East Coast and moving to Taos, New Mexico, where she encountered the Indians of the Taos Pueblo. Her interactions with them showed her how neurotic the culture was that she had left behind. Her worldview began to shift; her consciousness began to expand.
One evening while sitting in my room reading, I came upon a passage where Dodge Luhan recounts a conversation in which Tony, one of the Indians from the Taos Pueblo whom she would eventually marry, is talking about the differences between the Indian and the white man.
“. . .after the animals, God put the Indians on the earth, and after that the white people. But they were separated by something. By time. Indians have no time. They have never had no time.”
“Holy crap,” I thought.
Tony went on to say, “The white people have to change, that is their way. So they have to try and change everything. They take God’s animals and change them from one thing to another. . . and now they come to want to change the Indians though God told them to stay Indian.” (p.199)
The passage struck me like a bolt of lighting.
I recalled my own mystical moments when the veil has dropped away and I have seen Reality clearly. In those moments it is obvious not only that separateness isn’t real, but neither is time. Everything exists as a vast interconnected whole within an ever-present, loving Now. I also remembered how, many years ago, out of the blue, I had received the opening line that would evolve into a whimsical story of awakening: “Once upon a No Time.” (From No One in I Land: A Parable of Awakening)
When I read Tony’s words, I suddenly realized something I had never recognized before: time is separateness!
We usually think of separateness as spatial—I look out my window and see a tree, which my brain registers as something separated from me by space—but separateness is also temporal. We perceive that time separates us from our wholeness, our happiness, our enlightenment, our full expression of Self. And then we believe we have to use time to change all of that.
Chances are if you take a look inside yourself, you will discover that the illusion of temporal separateness has been at the root of a lot of discontent in your life. And no wonder. It prevents us from experiencing the completeness we already are. We push it away, off into some mythical future and deny ourselves the opportunity to know ourselves, in the words of A Course of Love, as The Accomplished.
By saying that you are not only accomplished, but The Accomplished, it is being said that you are already what you have sought to be. Thus, in order to live by the truth, you must live in the world as The Accomplished and cease struggling to be other than who you are in truth. (A Course of Love T3:16.8)
Rather than slogging our way through the swamp of “time,” struggling to change our lot and striving to discover and bring forth our true Self, we have the option of dropping out of the time game altogether. How? By simply joining with the wholeness, the happiness, the enlightenment that already is, within us.
When we do this we don’t collapse the timeline, which was never actually real to begin with. Rather, we collapse time. We experience our perfect, luminous Self as a present reality, and know our oneness with the infinite, loving, ever-present Now.
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This is a beautiful post from you, Patricia. Thank you for sharing this, and all the “listenings” you have with Love filled sight.
Blessings as the Accomplished Self is revealed in “removing the blocks to Love’s presence”, the eternal NOW.
Most grateful 🙏🏻
Love this piece/peace Patricia. I also loved the Taos Pueblo when I was there back in 2012 and wish I had bought more tee-shirts for myself then, lol. I agree that time has been a big separator in 3D life, past -present- future, but then that has been it’s primary purpose, I would say, to allow us to process sequentially until that is no longer necessary or desired….until the the illusion is mastered, perhaps?
Blessings of this re-New-al season to you!
JAH
Thank you, Patricia, for sharing your experiences with time. I read your post with delight. I could not help thinking about the Western cultural notion that time is masculine as in, Father Time.
Patricia, thank you for sharing your wonderful insight into the reality of “time.” I have also been contemplating the difference between “linear” and “present” time.
I love the image and meaning of “collapsing time,” and I will be reading and re-reading this article to sit with this image and what it means for me and my spiritual seeking. It could be profound…
Thank you, again, and Namaste,
Judith Dutton
Yes! Life “out of time” is how I live my life these days & have for about a year. Separateness is disappearing. Yay!!!!!! Thanks Patricia for sharing the Taos Pueblo wisdom. The wisdom of our Native American teachers is powerful & deep. I am so grateful for all of it! Thanks for bringing more of it to Light!
I’ll check on the books too. They’re calling 😊❣️
I love this, Patricia, thank you.
I’ve always been fascinated by time and how it isn’t a fixed thing… E.g. the experience we all have of time going so fast sometimes…and soooo slow at others.
And how liberating (and exasperating!) It can feel to spend time in cultures where time is much more fluid.
But I’ve never actually understood that it can be time itself which acts as a ‘separator’jJ
I would really appreciate any simple exercises/meditations that you could point me to that would specifically help me to ‘join with the wholeness…….that already is, within us..’
Love
Cathy