Living To Be Four Hundred Years Old
Don’t Be a Slave to the Clock!
Here’s the problem with time — either we don’t have enough of it, or we have too much. When we are trying to do a lot, time goes by very quickly. When we’re bored and want to move on to something else, time can crawl by with infinite slowness. The lesson from this? Our perception of time can create the effect of there being more or less time. We do it quite easily, but the problem is that we usually alter our perception of time in the opposite manner that we’d like!
Time Is Too Fast
The oddest thing about time is that the more you manage it and pay attention to it, the faster it goes. This has spawned all sorts of books and methods of ‘managing’ time. You see, the basic human method of dealing with a problem is to put more and more energy into ‘solutions’ that don’t work. Obviously, it seems that the solution isn’t working because we’re not trying hard enough. It seldom occurs to us that the problem is that we’re trying so hard in the first place!
My time in the woods made it very clear that our perception of time can vary dramatically. Anyone can experience this if they spend enough time in a ‘wilderness living’ situation. How much time you need to spend there to experience this depends on the extent to which your mind is in the habit of constant thinking. If your mind is exceptionally quiet, it can be a matter of moments after stepping out into the woods. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of people who took four or five days of subsistence living before their minds finally quieted down.
As your mind quiets and outside concerns melt away, you find that time slows incredibly – it was not uncommon for a day to seem like four or five, and a week to seem like a month of ‘normal’ time.
Most of us, however, aren’t ready to run naked into the trees and subsist off berries and hazelnuts. Luckily, there are other ways to slow down time, which I’ll discuss soon.
Time Is Too Slow
We’ve all had moments when we wish the clock would move just a little faster. Talking to a family member who goes on and on, listening to someone give a boring speech, or waiting to get out of class or work. This cycle can actually get to the point where we wish most of our life away – moaning on Monday and wishing for Friday, when we get to have a little fun over the weekend. Sometimes, if we’re stuck in a job or an illness, we can wish away months or years, hoping to get to someplace better. Soon we’re wading through the muck of life, always looking forward to that glimmering light in the distance.
The Total Effect
The result of all this is that time becomes our enemy. And we naturally assume that we’ll have a better chance of ‘managing’ our enemy if we pay close attention to it. To this end we wear little time-keepers on our wrists, post clocks everywhere, and many of us soon have an addiction to time – I’ve been camping with people who bring their watches along! They just want to know what time it is . . . just because.
Like addicts, we look at our time-keepers over and over throughout the day, and live in a constant state of bemoaning time’s passage. It’s either too fast or too slow.
Our Own Creation
As usual, we’ve created our own problem, and then spend our lives trying to fix it. This is the human story. Ludicrous, but true.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what ‘time’ is. You can read definitions and philosopher’s and scientist’s writings, but as usual, their definitions won’t really be meaningful to your actual experience of time.
The only way that time truly affects you is in your perception of it. If you are in conflict with time, you’ll manifest constant stress in your life. If you master your perception of time, you’ll always feel like you’re moving in a quiet bubble, even when everyone around you is rushing about frantically.
My wife perhaps says it best – “Never rush that which must be done quickly.”
But how do we master our perception of time?
Three Mountains of Time
Time neatly follows the Three Mountain idea. In the first mountain, we believe time is real. An hour is an hour, and a second a second! We feel at the mercy of time, and watch as it makes us rush about. Then we get upset as ‘time’ ages us, and for most people, they find that time gets faster and faster as they age, so that soon the years are whizzing past. We dread the decades, when we turn 30 or 50 or 80, for these are the times when we suddenly realize how much of our life is behind us, and how precious little is left.
If we search carefully, we can come to the second mountain. Here we see time for what it is (this is a direct perception, and no words can describe it). The effect, if we attempt to explain it, is of a timelessness, when each moment is an infinity, and the future and past disappear.
This can happen quite automatically if you go off and live in the woods, or retreat to some tropical island with no money and no communications. At the very least, time will appear to slow to a crawl.
But we can also come to experience the ‘reality’ of time right here in our everyday lives. Our usual viewpoint of time is an ingrained habit, so if you want to undo it, it helps to make a few life changes.
Finally, we can come to understand the third mountain of time. We’ll talk about that more towards the end of this article.
Do You Need Time?
A surprising number of people, if they examine their lives, will find that they have little or no need for marking time. If you don’t have a fixed schedule or appointments you need to be at, you can dispense with all the time-keepers in your home, and after an adjustment period, you’ll discover some remarkable affects. Even if you have occasional appointments, you can dispense with all the time-keepers save one, and keep that one covered. This has the additional benefit of making time-checking into a deliberate exercise.
But what if you have constant appointments, and choose not to alter your lifestyle to be time-free?
You’ll have to change your basic relationship with time. This is best done by seeing what time actually is.
Experiencing the Reality of Time
Our goal is to figure out what the ‘now-moment’ is. Sit down in front of a clock or watch. This works best with time-keepers that have a moving second hand. You can start with trying to ‘catch’ the now-moment by marking it at a precise position of the second hand. Of course, as soon as you mark that moment, the second hand will move on, and the moment will be lost. In true human style, we can try to solve this problem by applying more effort to the problem. For instance, by getting ever-more sensitive time-keepers – say, one that marks tens of seconds. But all this will do is reduce our moments to tenths of seconds, for as soon as we mark a moment as occurring on .3, it will become .4 and that moment will be lost.
Now, since our Standard Dualistic Model teaches us that everything has opposites, let’s look at the interesting opposite of this situation. Stare at the second hand, and try to discover when the now-moment ends. Just how long is ‘now’?
Amazing! If we sit and wait for ‘now’ to end, we soon notice that the now-moment just follows us along! It never ends after all!
Of course, both of these extremes are ‘true’ in that they both make sense to our dualistic frame of mind. But neither of them describes the true nature of time. This is something that is not described by either extreme.
And what is this true nature? It’s what people are referring to when they talk about ‘being in the Now’, or being ‘present’. But in actuality, it can’t be described by words. It’s what happens when we cease to try to understand and define time, and simply see what is unfolding in the eternal ‘right now’. You’ll know that you’re experiencing it, because there will no longer be an anticipation of the next moment. ‘Each moment’ will in fact become endless, and all the time-based ideas we have about life, such as death, future and past, and aging, will suddenly be seen for what they are – ideas, just like our ideas when we were watching the second hand and trying to decide if a moment was short or eternally long. They are ideas, and they can sometimes be useful, but they have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
The rest of this site is your guide to experiencing this reality.
Coming Around to the Third Mountain
Clocks aren’t the embodiment of all evil. In fact, they can be useful tools, just like the host of other tools we’ve created for ourselves as human beings. But when we start being slaves to the clock, we have to ask ourselves – is this truly a useful tool any more?
Unless we go live in the forests, we’ll probably all have the need to utilize clocks, at least occasionally. Most of the rest of the people in the world are running around at the clock’s bidding, stressing themselves out to coordinate their physical actions with the movement of the clock’s hands. It can be exhausting. And if you’re going to function in this world, you’re going to have to understand that rhythm and learn to move within it. But if you can clearly see what the true nature of Now is, you won’t be able to take the clock so seriously, and you’ll find a new empathy for the situation when your boss or associate is angry with you for being ‘late’.
Like so many other tools, time is supposed to be there for our benefit. Let’s reclaim it! It’s not simply a matter of re-defining our relationship with time. It’s a matter of seeing time for what it really is. Then everything will be perfectly clear. And just like the title of this article, your life will become impossibly long once you cease to let the clock steal all of your time away.
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