Timeless ‘now’

[1]

Amrit Sadhana [1]

You must have heard the sentence “your time starts, now” frequently on TV quiz programmes. Whenever the participants have to answer a difficult question the time appears to stand still, the timer starts ticking: tick-tock, tick-tock.

Their attention is focused, their intelligence sharpened like a razor and every moment becomes an eternity. The viewers hold their breaths, too.
This kind of intensity gives a heady feeling as all the senses are awakened. One feels so alive! It’s a pity this time-consciousness doesn’t spread over life. Actually, every moment in life is as important as the moments in a quiz show. For the whole of life is an immense quiz show, and unlike the one on the TV it doesn’t have any answers it only has questions. People try to find answer in many ways: in the scriptures, from astrology or some guru, but everything essentially is a guess work. Instead of wasting time in roaming around, the best would be to live every moment totally.
Enlightened men like Osho always talk about living in the moment, because for them the time always starts “now”. There is no other moment except this moment.
But the question for an average person is, how to catch this “now”? Where to find it? It is so subtle, so slippery, it cannot be gripped. By the time they become aware it has slipped out and become the next moment.
Only a meditator can find the “now”, because he lives in the depth. Those who live a superficial life cannot dive in the depth of each moment. They are thinking of the past or planning for the future. They are never present here and now. And because they are not present, there is a feeling of constantly missing the bus. They feel defeated by time. And they know that eventually time is going to grab them in the form of death. In Sanskrit there is one word for both time and death — it is kaal.
However, there is no need to feel sad, because at a deeper level time does not exist.
Osho says it clearly, “Ordinarily we think that time is divided into three categories: past, present and future. That is absolutely wrong. Time is divided only into two categories: past and future. The present is not part of time. Just watch, the moment you recognise that this is the present, it is already past.”
So live more and more in the present, in the moment. Meditate regularly, go on deepening it, slowly you will see that you are far away from the formidable thing called time. As you are distanced from your body, and also from the mind you arrive at an inner space which is timeless “now”.

Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune