How do you make time stop? Scale. Look at the second hand of a clock. Watch it go round and round. Now take a deep breath in and then out. Breathe with a depth that extends the reach of your body, one that sinks down deep into your bowels. And allow the breath to leave the body - do not force it. As the breath falls out of your lungs they will almost as naturally begin to fill back up. And as you watch the second hand glide around the clock over and over again you may be compelled to command it to stop, thinking yourself God. And therein lies the double-bind.
Forcing the breath does not drive its fluidity any more than commanding the second-hand stops it from moving. But if you were to continue to breathe and not force the breath and perhaps picture yourself sitting atop the second hand like construction workers on a beam, at once you and the second hand become ONE. That is to say, you are time. And if you look out you will notice yourself spinning from a center point, both outward but also around. And as your breath cycles in and out its fluidity mimic the fluidity of the second hand. And if you scale the experiment further and picture the second hand not as a spinning beam, but as a wooden beam, or perhaps a tree, grounded to the Earth, spinning from a center point, both outward but also around. However now we no longer feel the spin nor see its cyclical nature from our narrow aperture. From our position on the second hand, taken to scale, we can only see down its narrow line, straight ahead, into the future.
Now as humans with written languages, mathematics, science, and the curious minds Brahman articulates in us, we can create names for things such as seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, and so on and so forth. But those names are things we made up, just like right and wrong, just like good and evil, just like us and them. And we don’t live by those articulations, do we? At least not here in the West, we do not. Intellectually we understand the world and everything around it to be spinning in a cyclical nature, moreover, through precision instruments and highly specialized fields we can predict the cyclical nature of “natural events.” Yet because we see the world as something separate from ourselves, we see the passing of time as this thing barrelling forward with our future self at the terminal end of it. In that way, we can stop time through the command of our breath. I have seen enough people draw their last and it’s curious that, though the first thing new life does is to breathe in or inspire (and the medical technicians will stimulate this in the OB ward if need be) the last thing it does is breathe out. It expires. And for that person, that one person, there was no time before the breath, and there will be no time after it.
But that wasn’t who that person really was all along. And we know this to be true in the examples of Alzheimer’s patients and those with traumatic brain injuries and other insults to the memory center. It is almost like the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” In the movie, the character is born an old man with no memory of the before time. As time moves along, Benjamin gets “younger” while chronologically getting older. Paradoxically he reverts from an old man to a baby, wherein his experiences - usually reserved for the naivety of youth - carry the hindsight and nuance of having come into the world old.
This is symbolic of our innate desire to return to the joys of our childhood, to a time when things weren’t so serious. But in the case of Benjamin Button, as he reverts to a baby he begins to behave like one, and before long what is left is driven purely by instinct. Everything people thought they knew about Benjamin: his wittiness and charm, his intelligence and his profound wisdom, his use of spoken language were all availed from the body that lay before his witnesses; and in that way, he was completely unrecognizable to them. And if we take the fantastical charm of Hollywood that animates this story we can see that Benjamin’s fate is what awaits all of us: the dissolution of the ego - its death - and the separation of consciousness from the body. The Atman as the Hindus call it, manifest in pure consciousness: Brahman. Zen Buddhists would place this supposition rather in a Koan: The original self before your mother and father were born.
Same story, new people. We get to see our kids into this crazy world, and they’ll see us out of it. Just like those before us. And you and I get the superpower of animating that story however we want to. We get to pick the boat and adorn it with whatever we want so long as it keeps down the river. And the more beautiful our boat - the more we work on it as we go, picking up parts along the way - the more attention it will bring because of its beauty and its strange and inarticulable efficiency. When it goes over the waterfall - and it will - there will be a beautiful pile of supplies we leave behind to wash ashore and provide the materials necessary for new faces to build with.
Just like all the patterns in Thailand, they all just fall back in on themselves. Just like us. If our eyes could see cyclical time beyond the scope of our own personal lives, I think it might look something like that.
This is where I think I’m coming from when I say I loved you before I knew you. Maybe it was good enough without all those extra words when I said it the first time. I don’t know. What I do know is that my fidelity is tied to that supposition because it’s as close in words as how my eyes animate this life before me.
What is divinity? The space between the notes. What is the space between the notes? Everything that was there when the music wasn’t playing. The constancy of the tempo holds in between the notes what was already there but was invisible to the eye that was unable to look upon itself.
The game is how long we can carry on convincing ourselves otherwise.