How is it possible to experience both time and timelessness?

How is it possible to experience both time and timelessness?

Dear Rupert, 

There is this knowing that (A) consciousness is all there is, from moment to moment (or even not that, because consciousness is beyond time and space, which I know to be the true from experience); and (B) mind, body and world dance within consciousness and are consciousness. Waking state, dream state and deep sleep are time-bound and showing up in consciousness, just like everything else. 

But when I, as a separate entity, go there (by being conscious of consciousness): 

(1) Time seems to play a role in retrospect: there is a seeming growing of time spent ‘in this’ and less time spent as a separate entity. How can that be? It is like hip-hopping between knowing and not knowing, a rather impossible situation! 

(2) Being conscious of consciousness seems to be accompanied by, or even the same as, peace-happiness-love. How can that be? Those words are used in relation to mind and body and they seem to indicate a state. Consciousness is not a state! I cannot solve this on my own. 

(3) Reasoning from the point of view, so to speak, of consciousness, there is no forever, no time, only timeless presence. The mind comes in through a little hole and says, ‘There is timeless peace and happiness, but you, still being a person, must know that these are qualities of the mind and body. Consciousness can only be a void, and dull for that matter!’ Consciousnessanswers, ‘That is not my experience. I am very peaceful.’ The mind answers, ‘That is a feeling. It does not count.’ Is it all a matter of time – time that does not exist? 

With love,
Just

 

Dear Just, 

Just:When I, as a separate entity, go there (by being conscious of consciousness): 

(1) Time seems to play a role in retrospect: there is a seeming growing of time spent ‘in this’ and less time spent as a separate entity. How can that be? It is like hip-hopping between knowing and not knowing, a rather impossible situation! 

Rupert:There is no entity that ‘goes there’. Rather consciousness is always in its own placeless place, knowing and being only itself, eternally. 

Within consciousness, and made only out of it, the dualising mind rises up, seeming thereby to obscure consciousness’s knowing of its own being and creating, as a result, an apparently separate entity and an apparently separate world. 

A second thought then arises which believes that this apparent entity is both ‘knowing’ and ‘present’ (being) in its own right, and further thoughts subsequently rise up which credit this apparent entity with the ability to choose, decide, act, love, and so on, including the ability to go in and out of consciousness. 

But this apparent entity has no existence of its own. It is just a thought, and a thought cannot know or do anything, let alone go anywhere. So the apparent separate entity does not know anything, let alone hop between knowing and not knowing. Rather, we could say that there is consciousness, which is knowingness itself, and that this knowingness is sometimes seemingly obscured by the arising of the dualising mind. 

However, that is the answer to a question that provisionally assumes that the dualising mind obscures consciousness. In reality, consciousness never knows anything other than itself, even when the dualising mind appears. 

 

*     *     * 

 

(2) Being conscious of consciousness seems to be accompanied by, or even the same as, peace-happiness-love. How can that be? Those words are used in relation to mind and body and they seem to indicate a state. Consciousness is not a state! I cannot solve this on my own.

You are right, peace-happiness-love is just another name for the knowing of our own being, which in turn is just another name for consciousness. 

When the mind rises up out of this timeless, non-objective experience of peace-happiness-love in which it was not present, it creates the apparent separate entity and then believes that the experience of peace-happiness-love was experienced bythis entity that the mind believes itself to be. 

In other words, the dualising mind makes an imagined state out of peace-happiness-love and attributes it to a separate entity. But peace-happiness-love is not a state of the mind or the body. It is that in which all states of the mind and body appear and out of which they are made. 

(3) Reasoning from the point of view, so to speak, of consciousness, there is no forever, no time, only timeless presence. The mind comes in through a little hole and says, ‘There is timeless peace and happiness, but you, still being a person, must know that these are qualities of the mind and body. Consciousness can only be a void, and dull for that matter!’ Consciousnessanswers, ‘That is not my experience. I am very peaceful.’ The mind answers, ‘That is a feeling. It does not count.’ Is it all a matter of time – time that does not exist? 

It is not the mind that knows the peace and happiness. Peace and happiness are the names we give to consciousness’s knowing of its own being. 

However, the mind appropriates this non-objective experience of peace and happiness and attributes it to the apparent entity who, it alleges, is the knower of the peace and happiness. But the mind knows nothing of peace and happiness. It is not present ‘during’ the non-objective experience of peace and happiness. That is why we like peace and happiness so much! 

Consciousness’s answer above is correct! The mind’s answer is a misrepresentation of peace and happiness. Peace and happiness are not states of the body and mind; that is, they are not feelings. 

Consciousness is only void and dull from the mind’s point of view. Because consciousness has no objective qualities, the mind labels it empty and boring. But from its own point of view, so to speak, consciousness is not empty and boring. It is fullness itself. It is peace, happiness, love and beauty. It is freedom itself.

With love,
Rupert 

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