All Time Is Now

      All time is now:  that is an expression we, in the community of independent spiritual seekers, have all become familiar with, either through our own meditations or reports from lucid dreamers and obe travelers living through complex experiences and returning 15 minutes later.  Certainly, merging with the ‘god’ consciousness beyond the heaven worlds can illustrate the continuously unfolding eternity that seems to parallel the endless expansion of stars and galaxies without interfering.

     Asking where these expansions might end seems pointless.  Whether examining the territories of subatomic physics, the dimensional nature of distant galaxies, the infinite varieties of insect or plant life or how the brain filters consciousness to give us the parameters each individual projects for their specific needs, those involved in the investigations will report ‘no end in sight’.  Especially after that late 19^th century attitude that all the major issues had been resolved or were about to be.  Even those that cling to the Big Bang metaphor, the assumption from which many of their calculations proceed, will admit, when you get them in dark corner with the cameras turned off, that yes, it really is just a hypothesis that a bunch of them have agreed to so that their grant funded investigations may continue.

     And as such these investigators fall short of anything other than the physical plane realities.  As their instrumentation cannot detect the astral, mental or causal planes, of this or any other planet, including the radically uninhabitable sun, they cannot conceive the reality of other dimensions.  They can posit the possibility of eleven further dimensions and ponder why most of the universe is composed of ‘dark matter’ but they cannot say what goes on or who lives there.  Only those who cleave to the mystic path can return with reports of endless life everywhere.  Even the most courageous of the dead testify that there seems no end to the spheres of spirit or the varieties of beings who inhabit them.  Just as undersea explorers will tell of no end to the aquatic life they uncover there.

      Our species-centric desire for beginnings and ends seems propelled by our continued illusions of birth and death, which millions of souls still subscribe to.   They cannot or will not extend their perceptions to the world before and after physical incarnation, and if they dare to do so it is usually a matter of faith than knowledge, faith that gives them hope not understanding.  Faith, when disappointed, leads to despair, whereas knowledge when challenged and confronted, only leads to more knowledge.

          And what does all this have to do with ‘all time is now’?  Well, in order to arrive at that stage, that unfolding of perception, one has to pass through the illusions of beginnings moving step by step to endings.  One has to surrender that path from A to B, and ride above it like a passenger in a balloon who can observe the landscape on which such journeys are taken, revealing the appearances and disappearances for what they are: magical acts orchestrated from afar by magicians temporarily sacrificing their status.  And as magicians recalling some if not all of their mystical abilities we can grasp that  for every experience and action we undergo as events in linear time, first this and now that, we know we are never unconnected to the eternal moment of ‘now’.  That ‘now’, where we can stand and observe activities in many lives and see the manner in which they are all connected, as all the doctrines of karma would have it.  It is only our inability to remain focused that disrupts the continuity of that eternal now.  When we were being sacrificed as heretics, killed off by war or plagues, in the centuries that now seem so distant, our terror took precedence, while the relief of afterlife reinstated some level of relief and serenity, but not the unwavering knowing that nothing really ever happens to dislodge the spirit from that all-knowing now.

     That knowing, calm without any pinches of doubt, seems to arrive unannounced, settling on a shoulder at some point in the unfolding of our day, opening a space that expands as we sit within it, showing us the serenity of emptiness without action or reaction, those events the seem to mark out the life of linear time, much like the expansion and contraction of those life sustaining lungs.

    In that space, should we decide to direct the spotlight of our attention towards the unchanging and eternal, we can see the thoughts, emotions, actions and relationships of many lives making up a tapestry of our explorations of ourselves, our families and societies.  And if we push the envelope on our self-imposed limitations, we can catch glimpses of the bigger picture outside of our strivings and sufferings, that evolution of consciousness within the many forms, animal, vegetable and mineral, that make up our planetary life, and how it can bring greater and greater understanding of ourselves as tiny cogs in a huge creative enterprise.

     A project when it comes to fruition, graduates its willing participants into a cosmic brotherhood of sentient beings, aiming their gaze out to the radiant playground of the galaxies rather than in to the neuroses of the personal and the squabbles of societies.   It can be a stirring vision, an unparalleled descent of grace, into the basket of our breathing being.  One of its attributes is the knowing that when we arrive there it will be like we have always been there, celebrating our ascension and somehow knowing that we never left, that our departure and return were no more than educative illusions, set up by time and space to demonstrate the potentials of ignorance.

     Having time stop so that we may contemplate the profundity of its absence and our blessedness within it, is a gift that, as we say, keeps on giving, reminding us that there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.  At least within the paradigm of the eternal now.  “You are the crown of creation and you’ve got no place to go”… that was the Jefferson Airplane circa 1969.  Whether an insight from psychedelics or some other source, they were right.