Step 8. Let the Timeless Be in Charge of Time
We’re told that time should be used wisely, but what does that mean in practice? For most people, it comes down to time management. There are only so many hours in the day, and if too much time is wasted, the day is gone before you’ve done half the things you set out to do. But your soul doesn’t see time that way. Its frame of reference is timeless. Therefore, using time wisely means using it timelessly. If you heard someone say, “My life is timeless,” you might have assumed that they were deeply religious, and being timeless means being close to God. Or that they lived in a place like the desert where time seems to stand still. There are other possibilities. The person could be devoted to meditation—a Buddhist, for example, trying to escape the prison of time to reach Nirvana. In other words, the word timeless has a mystical ring that may make it confusing and impractical: if you are realistic, your time is better spent trying to cram everything into your day that you want to get done.
It’s very important to make the timeless practical. If you turn your back and forget that the timeless exists, you are disconnecting from your soul, which cannot be crammed into a daily schedule. So, is it possible to do the opposite and expand your life into a timeless schedule? To approach this question, think about the various ways that time can go wrong. We can use one example that illustrates the hidden trap that time presents. You have decided to go on a dream vacation, a trip to the Bahamas that will be like a second honeymoon. You and your spouse agree that you both deserve a long break, and by leaving the rest of the family behind, you hope to rekindle your relationship. Unfortunately, things go unexpectedly awry. Planning the trip eats into the little spare time that you have, and you begin to resent your spouse for not doing his share. Your flight to the Caribbean is canceled, stranding you for a day at the airport. You arrive feeling frazzled, unable to relax until practically the day you have to return home. In addition, you spend more time worrying about the kids you left at home than reconnecting intimately with your spouse. It’s a relief when the vacation comes to an end, and a month later the whole notion of a second honeymoon feels like a distant memory.
The difference between having a good time and having a bad time actually depends on time itself. In this example, the following things went wrong:
Time became too tight and constricting.
Time created psychological distress.
Under time pressure, experiences felt shallow and unfulfilling.
Time didn’t accommodate what you really wanted to happen.
If timelessness can solve these problems, it will turn out to be eminently practical, because the same ills afflict each of us every day. To begin with, take the most basic complaint that all people share: time is too tight. Under the pressure of deadlines, with too many demands on our time, daily life becomes a race with too many finish lines that recede ever farther away the faster you run. Time management attempts to solve this problem, but at best ameliorates it. Work will fill up any time you give it. The solution is to live from a timeless place. Only when time disappears is there enough. That sounds like a paradox, but here’s the deeper reasoning:
Time isn’t separate from you; it’s part of your being. At your source, all events are laid out with perfect timing. The beginning knows the end. Enough time is allotted so that you can not only accomplish all that is needed, but the experience of moving from A to B will also be fulfilling. In other words, the unfolding of time is actually the unfolding of the self. Time cannot trap the self, meaning the real you.
Think of your body when you were in the womb. A normal pregnancy takes nine months for only one reason: the full complexity of a newborn child perfectly fits that span of time. If the embryo needs less or more time, birth adjusts accordingly. There is no pressure dictating that nine months is a fixed deadline. In the same flexible way, anything you want to accomplish is packaged with its own inner schedule. Time submits to your desire, not the other way around. If two people read the same book, the important thing is who got the most out of it, not who got finished first.
Once you see that time is completely subjective, geared to what you want out of life, the whole notion of time pressure vanishes. (The British writer Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, dropped out of school in Rhodesia at age fourteen and never returned. She once told an interviewer that this proved to be an enormous advantage, because instead of reading the books that were assigned on schedule in high school and college, she was free to pick up any book when and only when it interested her. In that way she got the most out of everything she read, and her life unfolded in sync with the books that absorbed her.) If you are tied to an external sense of time, you miss the whole point of existence, which is not to meet deadlines.
The timeless knows how to use time far more efficiently than the human mind could possibly calculate. We are not even capable of organizing the body’s basic biological rhythms, which are so complex and interwoven that they must be left entirely to Nature. But the mind is quite capable of messing up those rhythms. The same holds true for time in general. The mind may arbitrarily decide that there isn’t enough time, that time is running out, that things must be done on time, but in reality the timeless takes care of time. Imagine that you casually spend an hour preparing dinner, reading a magazine article, and doing some light housekeeping. Each thing is untimed. You have a vague sense that you want to get food on the table at a certain hour, but otherwise, fitting everything in its place is effortless. You even have space to think about what you’ve read and perhaps to entertain a daydream or a future project that is only beginning to gestate.
Now take the same situation but add a phone call saying that your spouse is bringing the boss home for dinner. Time hasn’t changed, but your psychological relationship to time has. Now you feel pressure, and what was easy to accomplish is overlaid with anxiety. There’s no time to read that magazine article, much less time for reflection, daydreaming, or planning a future project. You have lost the element of the timeless, whose first quality is that time is taken care of. When the task of time management is turned over to the mind, the order it tries to impose is crude and unsatisfying compared with the spontaneous organization of the timeless.
To be whole, you must let the timeless merge with time. That isn’t a matter of changing our attitudes alone. You need to cultivate deep awareness, because on the surface, awareness shifts constantly as one thing after another claims your attention. A river runs fastest on the surface, but is nearly motionless at the bottom. Approach your mind that way by finding the still, silent depths that open up through meditation. Like a river, your mind’s quiet depths aren’t detached from the activity on the surface. Every level of the river is made of the same water and moves toward the same goal. But the journey becomes much more comfortable when you aren’t tossed about like a drifting leaf.
It’s not at all mystical that a river can be still and moving at the same time. There’s no reason to find mysticism in the mind’s ability to be still and moving at the same time, either. The timeless merges into time as easily as water merges with water. You can experience this personally. When you discover that being still inside removes the pressure of time, it’s inevitable that you will reach the next step, seeing that when the timeless is allowed to handle time, you will never run out of time or be tied to any deadline. The timeless brings freedom, a quality that seeps into time and makes you free this very minute.
Step 9. Feel the World Instead of Trying to Understand It
You can’t think your way to wholeness, but you can feel your way there. Leonardo da Vinci spent hundreds of hours near the end of his life trying to figure out the swirling patterns in water as it wended its way downstream, but he never succeeded. Flow refuses to be analyzed, and the same holds true for the flow of life. Yet you were designed with awareness that goes far beyond thinking. You can walk into a room and sense if there’s tension in the air. You can sense if someone loves you or not. At a su
btler level, you can sense if you belong, or if it’s safe. These subtle aspects of awareness guide life far more than people realize. It is mainly in their absence that one sees how crippling it can be not to feel the world.
Here I’m thinking of a young man I know who fell in love with a woman and quickly moved in with her. She was also very much in love, but soon a strange vein of insecurity was exposed in her. Whenever the young man went into the other room, she followed. If he tried to read a book, it wouldn’t be long before she would ask, “What are you thinking about?” At first he took the question casually and would reply, “Nothing in particular. Why?” But soon the situation worsened. Every five minutes she would ask, “What are you thinking about?” and no answer would satisfy her. The young man had no idea where this obsession came from, but in the end it caused their relationship to fall apart. Only afterwards did he realize that the woman was unable to feel loved. Anytime the young man became quiet—while reading, working on the computer, or doing nothing at all—she had the panicky feeling that he didn’t love her. When she asked, “What are you thinking about?” the only answer that would satisfy her was “I’m thinking of you, darling,” and yet even if he gave that answer as affectionately as he could, she would still feel panicked five minutes later.
This is an example of someone who couldn’t sense that she was loved, which became a crippling disability. If you feel unlovable to begin with, you cannot sense that someone else loves you. A fixed thought blocks your awareness. In the same way, people who don’t feel safe cannot be made to feel safe by any kind of external protection. People who feel unworthy cannot gain self-esteem through any kind of achievement. If you look deep enough, all these cases illustrate a disconnect between the self and the world. We project how we feel onto the external world. If you feel unlovable, the world seems loveless. If you feel unsafe, the world feels dangerous. But isn’t the world a dangerous place? Aren’t we surrounded by unloving actions and widespread indifference? Yes, but these aren’t absolutes. Sometimes the world is dangerous, but most often it’s not. Love is absent in many situations, but at unexpected moments love shines through the darkest situation. Instead of trying to understand the endlessly changing world, you can feel your way and trust those feelings. Only then will you know what is unfolding around you.
To be whole requires a very specific feeling: I am enough. When you feel that, the world will be enough as well. However, if you feel “I am not enough,” the world always will fall short. You will harbor a vague sense that you somehow lack a critical ingredient for fulfillment, and no matter how hard you try to understand it, the missing piece will never be found. Many times in these pages I’ve said that your body is closer to your soul than you imagine, and this is no exception. Your body knows that it is enough. Cells aren’t insecure or worried. If they could speak, they would assert the following things with complete certainty:
I am self-sufficient.
I am safe.
I know exactly how to live.
Life fulfills my needs.
I belong.
Cells live the truth they cannot put into words by constantly being self-sufficient, fitting in perfectly with every other cell, fulfilling their role in the body impeccably. With the body as your foundation, you can feel your way to the certainty that you are enough. Perhaps you’ve seen widely circulated videos of a blind teenager, afflicted with cancer of the eye as an infant, who has invented his own kind of sonar. Like a dolphin, this boy emits a stream of clicks several times a second and listens to the echoes they make as the sound bounces off objects. In this way he moves with uncanny grace through a dark world. The boy rides a bicycle on his own, plays basketball, and performs household chores. If he is walking down the sidewalk and senses an object blocking his path, he can focus his clicking and “see” that the obstacle is a trashcan, which he then walks around. There are a handful of other sightless patients in the medical literature who have made this adaptation. Apparently their self-created sonar allows them to form mental pictures made of sound.
Only there’s a catch here. The sonar used by dolphins—technically known as “echolocation”—requires incredibly fast sound pulses, up to 1,750 clicks per second. A blind person could emit five clicks per second at best, not remotely enough to form a mental image of objects in the near vicinity. How, then, does a sightless person see? One answer is that the body has eyes that are not eyes, primitive areas of the brain just above the spinal column at the base of the skull. Without being connected to the visual cortex and to a pair of eyes, these cells “see” by sensing the outside world directly, the way primitive, single-celled animals steer toward the light. Little is known about “autoscopic vision,” as it has been labeled, but this may explain the popular notion of having eyes in the back of your head—you literally do. (Reliable experiments have shown that subjects can sense when someone is looking at them from behind, for example.) The most uncanny examples are people who see their own bodies standing in front of them. Neurologists have recorded a handful of subjects with this kind of vision. When someone has a near-death experience and reports rising up in the air and looking down on her dead body, some kind of autoscopic vision may also be responsible.
These examples don’t explain away near-death experiences, or blind people who can see; they show instead that awareness extends far beyond what we generally assume. The body is designed to be aware above and beyond the five senses. If you don’t believe that this is true, your mental attitude can block out the subtle awareness that is meant to guide you. On the other hand, you can accept that subtle awareness is real, and once you do, feeling your way through the world becomes a critical part of the spiritual journey. To go back to the woman who kept asking, “What are you thinking about?”—if she had possessed self-awareness, she would feel the panic underlying her obsessive question. Tuning in to this feeling of panic, she would become aware that she felt unloved, and then she would plumb that feeling and conclude that at bottom she feels unlovable. Now a turning point has been reached. She faces a choice. Either being unlovable is a fact that the world keeps cruelly reinforcing, or it’s something she can heal in herself. If she makes the choice to heal herself, the cure is to reconnect with her deepest awareness—her soul—which is the source of feeling lovable.
In place of “I am unlovable,” one can substitute “I am not safe,” “I am not fulfilled,” or “I have no purpose.” Any sense of lack can be traced back to disconnection from your source. Therefore you can feel your way back and heal the breach. The soul’s entire existence depends on the certainty that it is enough. Being whole, nothing can exist outside it. As you reconnect to your soul, feeling your way step by step, your awareness will shift. You are sensing who you really are. “I am enough” is the goal of all spiritual seeking. The good news is that because it is your natural state, your search for wholeness—if you stick with it—is destined to succeed.
Step 10. Seek After Your Own Mystery
Wholeness is yours if you want it. People want jobs, cars, houses, money, and families. They get those things because they go after them, and society is set up to make that possible. But society isn’t set up for getting wholeness. Everything spiritual has been put into a separate box from material life. It’s true that some people have such strong religious convictions that they want to live a Christian life or a Jewish life or a Muslim life in every respect. The advantage of devoting yourself to religion is that a ready-made path is provided, along with a strong support group. The problem with devoting yourself to religion is that it demands conformity, and if you conform so well that you become the perfect Christian, Muslim, or Jew, there’s still no guarantee that you will be whole.
There is no escaping two facts: you must want wholeness as fervently as you want a job, house, car, and family, and you must be willing to walk the path alone. I was deeply moved when the private letters of Mother Teresa were published, years after her death, and the “Mother of Calcutta” revealed that she had never experi
enced God. Despite her decades of devoted service to the poor, and going against her public image as the perfect saint, Mother Teresa didn’t achieve what she wanted—personal knowledge of the divine. For many, this was a depressing revelation. If a saint couldn’t reach her spiritual goals, how can we? I’d like to suggest that the answer lies in seeking your own mystery, not one that is handed to you by anyone else. The Buddhists express this by saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the path, kill him.” What this means is that if you find yourself trying to conform to a preset ideal, put that notion out of your head.
The mystery of life is your mystery to solve. Every step of the way, you must proceed without preconceptions. It’s quite a trick to maintain your passion without a fixed goal in sight. It’s so much easier to say to yourself, “One day I will be perfect,” or “One day I will meet God, and He will love me.” If you pursue a fixed goal, however, you will be like a railroad train whose wheels are held between two rails, unable to move right or left of its own volition. The ability to move in any direction at a moment’s notice is critical. Life doesn’t come at us along railroad tracks. It comes at us from all directions, and for that reason we need complete freedom of movement, which implies complete freedom of choice. If you have a passion for freedom, that will be good enough at every stage of the spiritual journey.
This was vividly illustrated by a recent experiment with mice that sought to discover how they experienced happiness. Animal researchers define happiness in mice as a brain response. When a mouse is eating, certain areas of its brain light up, indicating contentment and satisfaction. Later, if the mouse is merely reminded of food—through a smell, for example—that is enough to light up the same areas. The situation is similar for human beings. When we are given signals that remind us of being happy (not just the smell of food, but also pictures of loved ones or movies of a beautiful tropical beach), the happiness areas in our brains light up.