The Nature of the Moment
Life takes place on a platform of time and space experientially perceived as a 'moment'. Each moment is a frame of film in a long filmstrip we perceive as a lifetime. Each moment embodies in itself the residue of all preceding moments indexed within your brain/mind into a structured reality suggesting the possibility of a past and future. But the moment itself is essentially 'timeless'. Reach out with your mind/awareness and try to capture a moment. Before you can grasp it it's gone, replaced by a new moment, which is gone...replaced.... The only thing you can grasp is the content of the previous moment, which resides in your mind. The moment you experience is also without content except for the content of your personal experience. For the moment is an artifact of awareness and as such the moment is a very personal thing. Without you, that moment, that is filled with your ‘reality stamp’ would not exist.
Thus, each moment has a dual nature, the first being of a linear nature, a platform of experience traveling from the distant past into the distant future via our awareness. This 'moment' is a conditioned, conditional moment, dependent for existence upon the brain/mind belief in past and future. The other side of this dual nature of the moment is of a timeless nature, a doorway into unbridled expansion, a state of total freedom. To catch the moment is to be timeless as the moment. To be timeless means to go beyond the place where time as future and past exist, to go beyond one’s own mind and the conditioning within that mind. When the belief structures created by your conditioning, i.e., those beliefs, fears, expectations and fantasies cease to hold your awareness, you then begin to experience timelessness and within that timelessness is unconditional expansion. One must remember at times of timelessness, that the only restraints upon consciousness is self-imposed.
Either of these two 'experiential modes' of the moment is available to all of us every instant, and every instant we make a conscious or unconscious decision on which way we want to travel. Do we want to continue traveling down the river of time, like huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer off on another adventure, filled with memories and expectations? Or do we choose to reside perfectly within this very moment through a strategy of being totally right here, right now.
This 'being right here, right now' is a state of meditation, a state which is the vehicle for infinite expansion in all directions, an expansion which takes us back to Who We Really Are, whatever that might happen to be. In this case the vehicle we are riding is not the river of time with its past and future and numerous memories and expectations, but the river of consciousness, whose only essential characteristic is unlimited, exponentially increasing expansion, a wild ride if there ever was one. For within unlimited expansion is found the truest ecstasy there is, and it's totally free, just waiting patiently inside you and me.
For further insights into the 'self', self-actualization and the nature of time,
For further insights into the 'self', self-actualization and the nature of time see:
Freedom: What it is and How to Achieve it, Volume 1: Freedom & the Self
Freedom: What it is and How to Achieve it, Volume 2: Freedom & the Ecology of Relationship
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© Copyright 2017 Richard E Bradshaw All rights reserved.