by Taylor Ellwood
I’ve always had a strange relationship with time. For most of my life I’ve rebelled against linear time, especially in the form of clocks, watches, and other ticking items that deterministically try to inform me of what time it is.
We are surrounded by linear time. The calendar, the digital clock on your computer or phone, and if you still wear a watch the ticking hand of time marches on. That’s the time I’ve rebelled against because it just doesn’t feel right.
The time I want is non-linear, cyclical and rhythmic like the ocean waves pounding the shores, in tune with the call of the lunar moon pulling and pushing the waves.
The time I want is magical, found in the liminal between moments where all possibilities and none exist, waiting to be turned into embodied reality by the magician.
The time I want is woven into existence, a loom that displays the secrets of reality.
The time I want is sensual, felt and experienced. It’s raw and primal and it calls for you to live in it instead of being measured by it.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram shares that we can experience sensual time by truly opening ourselves to the space we are in.
I open myself to the space I am in by embracing stillness, emptying myself of the monkey mind of thought and the frantic flood of emotions and allowing myself to just be, without and need to do anything.
When I embrace stillness, I use the Dzogchen practice of Zhine. I sit still, comfortable, with my eyes fixed on something before me and all I am aware of is myself and that thing.
I don’t think about myself or that I think. I’m just aware.
When you think you slip back into linear time.
When I am still, just experiencing the world around me without doing anything, I nonetheless find that the mysteries of non-linear time reveal themselves.
As my eyes dilate, my sense of time dilates. A moment stretches and stretches and stretches.
There’s no ticking clock or calendar or phone. There’s just me, in non-linear time, stretching my sense of self across the moments to uncover the hidden paradise of infinite possibilities.
Sometimes the possibilities are like diamonds, multi-faceted, a feeling of liquid perfection that is seemingly solid.
Other times the possibilities are like an endless stream of bubbles, just waiting to be popped.
When you are still you experience the full range of possibilities. They are promises unrealized that can be experienced and embodied if you choose.
The moment you take a possibility into yourself is the moment you bring it into linear time and turn it into embodied reality.
Stillness isn’t always easy to cultivate.
It’s a daily, dedicated practice and the goal of the stillness isn’t to experience the possibilities. It is just to still yourself. Anything else is just to be experienced and appreciated without expectation.
What stillness brings us is the path of liberation from linear time, attachments to thought and emotion, and the need to do something.
You just are, and in that moment of just being you give yourself the freedom to step away from all your obligations, all your calendared events, to do lists, and everything else that is keeping you on the clock.
You provide yourself liberty and the opportunity to discover what else you can embody and manifest in the world.
When I still myself I step out of linear time.
I’m no longer a part of it. I’m in non-linear time, part of the endless cycle of moments spiraling into the infinity of forever. And I only step back into linear time, when I choose to grab onto a possibility and bring it with me back into the everyday word of ticking time.
But what I’m also bringing is my liberation, because I am resequencing linear time, integrating the possibility into the ticking time and changing my reality as a result, manifesting my life on my schedule as a result.
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Merken