Meditation: Being-Time

Andrew Tootell's OzZen Podcast

This guided meditation take us on a journey exploring the two dimensions of time. The first quote refers to our normal experience of time as linear. The time that passes by in a flash. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds gone by in a flash. This is time seen from the relative or delusional perspective of the separate self that feels itself to stand-out, apart from reality as it is. It generates the emotion-thought of loss. The separate self is the wave that does not see itself as the ocean. However, even though it is delusional from the perspective of the Absolute (the ocean), it still feels real to us. When our beloved dies we suffer. This is what it means to be human, to be secular. However, there is another side to time, what we might call the religious dimension. This is the realisation of eternity. However, for zen, eternity is not endless duration that never ends. It is timeless in the sense that time as measurement of duration is not applicable. Eternity is not endless duration but nonseparation from just this moment. Wherever we may go, to the top of the highest mountain or to the depths of the deepest ocean, we are always here in this present moment, presencing. In fact, we are coming and going in and out of existence so rapidly we don’t see ourselves as change itself – we experience instead the illusion of continuity, rather like an an animated movie, where the film (motion picture) is a series of discontinuous still images. Photo by Matt Hardy from Pexels.