Time Waits for No One? Thoughts on Time and Mind

Part of my quest for truth began when I noticed the similarities running through all of the brilliant works I was reading. I had noticed that Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" had a lot of similarities to "A Course in Miracles." Time, in the course, as in Tolle, is merely an illusion. The course goes even further, and states that the ONLY purposeful use for time is for healing. In other words, time used for any other purpose (read: money, travel, work, play, NFL games, skateboarding, fill in the blank) is actually doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, and "chasing after wind."

The course goes on further than this, though. It posits that time is such an illusion that it is no more, and was actually over and done long ago. Everything we observe is merely the recollection of a tiny tick of time when the "original sin," the "fall of man," the banishment from Eden, or whatever you want to call it occurred and was immediately then corrected, never to be experienced again in reality but only in the mind dreaming of illusion (read: you and me.)

My mind has a hard time grasping this. I am sure yours does too. After all, everything you believed for all these years never really happened, if one is to believe the course. Luckily, the course does not ask us to believe this. It merely asks us to read about this and consider this. It knows how used to the world we are, and how much resistance our egos have to these "crazy thoughts."

The good thing I notice when I think about this is that when I do spend part of my day fully in the now and telling myself this whole place is an illusion, that part of the day goes very well indeed. Better than lots of other parts of the day, like when I am caught up unconscious in "work," thought, or anything of the world. So, my feeling about time is this: I will tell my mind that it is over and gone, I will feel peace while thinking this way, and at the other times I will be caught up in the "world" so I won't really be thinking at all in any important sense of the word "think," until the next time I can get myself to that quiet peaceful place outside of time and mind.