It seems that “the known world is experienced by the self, which owns its experience. For this basic structure to work, the self must adopt a specific position that puts it outside experience… As an ‘outsider’, the self occupies the specific role of ‘bystander’, unaffected by the ‘passing’ of time… time as an active, dynamic medium cannot be grasped directly, and so is largely overlooked.†KTS 24-25
Is there another possibility, more inclusive, connecting the self to the time´s momentum, allowing the self to grasp its dynamic medium?
What can link the self to the flow of time? A time of memories, experiences, plans and dreams. Which invisible line can fill the stories of the self with meaning, weaving a delicate tessiture of our relationship with the entire world around?
With the silk thread of awareness, it is possible to connect delicately with my memories, my experiences, my feelings and my dreams. With awareness I can feel the emotions driving me towards action, and feel the energy of my body, rigid or flowing into relaxation, and also feel the connections that link me to something or someone with the charged power of a magnetic field.
However, the awareness is not always available. It is my resistance and lack of interest that tear its delicate silk thread. It is up to me to let go resentments, prejudices and positions. Every time I am lost in my repetitive thoughts, I lose touch with whatever is happening, and that will become a dead memory, a memory that I am not able to recall.
I can lock myself in my repetitive thoughts or pay attention to the world around me. I can let the momentum of time saturates the self and the experience, bringing my emotions, my body, my feelings alive. It is like the inside world and outside world were one.
The connection with the aliveness of time demands nothing less than our full participation.
We can rediscover the momentum of time accessible within the static structures of the experience. Though the temporal order steadily invites us to put time in the background, it is an invitation we can readily decline. KTS 26
Hi Eliana,
I like your post very much. You helped resolve for me an issue that I have been feeling: how to bring the dynamic energy of time into life as it is actually being lived? Since the self seems so central to everything I experience in life, how can I soften the influence of constructs, labels; how contest the past as it projects forward–into a living present– the repetition of frozen patterns? Your response makes clear that it is within our emotions, our memories, and our experiences that we have an opportunity to welcome the dynamic energy of time.
I also like your image of a silken thread of awareness weaving together all the elements that make up our lives. It reminds me of the Kogi tribe of Columbia who asked a BBC documentary maker–who decades ago made a film of their world–to bring 500 miles of gold thread. I think the Kogi intend to weave together the land and water of their realm, and thereby help to heal a planet that has become fractured and frozen into repetitious mechanisms from which living awareness has been banished.