Real Time

 

Due to the influences of our social environment people have forgotten the true essence of time. As far back as I can remember the concept of time was directly related to clock time or dates on a piece of paper called a calendar. In this human made understanding we make it appear that time is separated into units next each other. This way of dividing time is helpful in many ways as we plan our daily activities, strategize our future involvements, and synchronize international efforts. But, this is not real time, this is imaginary time.

The ways of the world tell us that there is always something that we are missing, something that we need, and there is never enough time. In this way time becomes our elusive enemy, something that we continue to reach for that is always beyond our grasp. People talk about, “beating the clock” and “running out of time”. There is an ancient Greek mythological tale involving Tantalos, King of Phrygia, who in the afterlife was condemned to suffer for an eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Each time he would reach for the fruit the branches would rise; each time he bent down to drink the water the water would recede, the necessities of human existence always beyond his grasp.

Is this the life that we, as a human race of people have accepted to define us? Do we really believe that there is never enough money, never enough possessions, never enough food, never enough body numbing chemicals, never enough time to consume the things the world tells us are important? Is this who we are? Have we forgotten that we get to choose what we consider precious? This continual wanting that is the way of the world can only lead to dissatisfaction because the resources of the planet, like the years of our lives, are always limited.

I have studied the lives of those who people hold up as icons of fortune, humans who are masters of the economic paradigm of Capitalism. When I look in their eyes as I view them on news reels and documentary presentations, they look so hungry, so lost. They look as though they have become infected with a disease that causes them to create and live in a hell that is similar to the story of Tantalus. Through their eyes I see their hearts and their hearts are filled with anxiety, their minds filled with stress, their bodies riddled from the weight of wanting. They live in an illusion that has been fed to them by an unsatisfied world, a world that tells them massive amounts money, possessions, and political influence, will allow them control over something in their outer environment. Are they in control of themselves? People spend years of their lives on this illusion only to become exhausted, depressed, and in physical shambles. “Where has the time gone?” I hear people say.

To live in this sense of time with no understanding of real time you can find yourself making an enemy of time and an enemy of life. You become like a rigid rock that is continually being grounded into dust by life. The sacred writings within the Abrahamic traditions read, “For you are dust and to dust you shall return.”¹ These are powerful words from the wise ones of antiquity that help us understand the nature of our impermanence. However, people seem to have misinterpreted the words. Life is not supposed to grind you into dust. It will if you allow it, if you have accepted life as your enemy.

During the meditative process clock time disappears and the human bodymind becomes reacquainted with real time. In meditation each second becomes “pregnant with infinity” and time becomes always now, no past or future, but the infinite and eternal now. I usually set a timer at 15 or 30 minutes when I meditate. I am often impressed when the timer goes off that it seems as though I have been away from the mental “rat race” for hours or in some cases seconds.

During this practice, thoughts about what needs to be done in the hustle and bustle of your day are no longer necessary and no longer present, freeing your whole being to be truly current in the Spirit of real time. In this place of peace that is in you, you exercise the vessel that you are as a temple of this Spirit. You have allotted real time for a divine reunion with the Spirit of life. In these moments your mind is free to explore the depths of your being unhindered by clock time.

 

 

 

 

1. Gen. 3:19 NAB

 

 

 

Guy Schell © 2018

 

 

 

Identity

 

Children are conceived world open. As their interpretation of how to perceive reality is being formed an identity is created. Artist who push positive human evolution forward, personally and communally, become aware early that some or most of their identity was adopted from their outer social environment and involvements, e.g. parents, mentors, neighbors, social events, natural habitat, etc. Artist are prone to step outside the preconceived identity box made for them by society once they realize that the identity labels that were placed on them were not chosen by them and do not define who they really are. In this rejection/resurrection experience unique creativity expands.

 

 

©Copyright 2018 Guy Schell

Real Time

 

 

Due to the influences of our social environment people have forgotten the true essence of time. As far back as I can remember the concept of time was directly related to clock time or dates on a piece of paper called a calendar. In this human made understanding  it appears that time is separated into units next each other. This way of dividing time is helpful in many ways as we plan our daily activities, strategize our future involvements, and synchronize international efforts. But, this is not real time, this is imaginary time.

The ways of the world tell us that there is always something that we are missing, something that we need, and there is never enough time. In this way time becomes our elusive enemy, something that we continue to reach for that is always beyond our grasp. People talk about, “beating the clock” and “running out of time”. There is an ancient Greek mythological tale involving Tantalos, King of Phrygia, who in the afterlife was condemned to suffer for an eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Each time he would reach for the fruit the branches would rise; each time he bent down to drink the water the water would recede, the necessities of human existence always beyond his grasp.

Is this the life that we, as a human race of people have accepted to define us? Do we really believe that there is never enough money, never enough possessions, never enough food, never enough body numbing chemicals, never enough time to consume the things the world tells us are important? Is this who we are? Have we forgotten that we get to choose what we consider precious? This continual wanting that is the way of the world can only lead to dissatisfaction because the resources of the planet, like the years of our lives, are always limited.

I have studied the lives of those who people hold up as icons of fortune, humans who are masters of the economic paradigm of Capitalism. When I look in their eyes as I view them on news reels and documentary presentations, they look so hungry, so lost. They look as though they have become infected with a disease that causes them to create and live in a hell that is similar to the story of Tantalus. Through their eyes I see their hearts and their hearts are filled with anxiety, their minds filled with stress, their bodies riddled from the weight of wanting. They live in an illusion that has been fed to them by an unsatisfied world, a world that tells them massive amounts money, possessions, and political influence, will allow them control over something in their outer environment. Are they in control of themselves? People spend years of their lives on this illusion only to become exhausted, depressed, and in physical shambles. “Where has the time gone?” I hear people say.

To live in this sense of time with no understanding of real time you can find yourself making an enemy of time and an enemy of life. You become like a rigid rock that is continually being grounded into dust by life. The sacred writings within the Abrahamic traditions read, “For you are dust and to dust you shall return.”¹ These are powerful words from the wise ones of antiquity that help us understand the nature of our impermanence. However, people seem to have misinterpreted the words. Life is not supposed to grind you into dust. It will if you allow it, if you have accepted life as your enemy.

During the meditative process clock time disappears and the human bodymind becomes reacquainted with real time. In meditation each second becomes “pregnant with infinity” and time becomes always now, no past or future, but the infinite and eternal now. I usually set a timer at 15 or 30 minutes when I meditate. I am often impressed when the timer goes off that it seems as though I have been away from the mental “rat race” for hours or in some cases seconds.

During this practice, thoughts about what needs to be done in the hustle and bustle of your day are no longer necessary and no longer present, freeing your whole being to be truly current in the Spirit of real time. In this place of peace that is in you, you exercise the vessel that you are as a temple of this Spirit. You have allotted real time for a divine reunion with the Spirit of life. In these moments your mind is free to explore the depths of your being unhindered by clock time.

 

 

1. Gen. 3:19 NAB

Guy Schell © 2018

The Necessary

 

What is more important, exercising love

or claiming the certainty of its source?

What is more necessary, drinking clean water from a stream

or labeling the origin of its flow?

What is more essential, eating the tree’s fruit

or naming its root?

What bears more meaning, working with the visible

or claiming to know the unseen?

What makes more sense, addressing the obvious

or guessing at the obscure?

 What has higher value, being right

or experiencing peace?

What is more imperative, knowing yourself

or reliving your ancestry?

What comes first, sharing the present

or your name displayed for future generations?

What is more urgent, preserving life on the earth

or expanding ones country?

Without the former how can you know the latter?

 

Guy Schell © 2018

 

Shaping The Present Moment

It’s like the experience of an adult child who has just blown a soap bubble. As the bubble floats in front of you, you know that if you touch it, it may burst. Yet, you can gently moving the air in the space around it, and while still intact its shape and direction change. Neither you nor the bubble dominates the experience. Both are allowing each other to be. The bubble shapes your perception as you shape the bubble. In this, you and the bubble co-create together. Your energies have melded to conceive something that neither of you imagined was possible.

 

“True perfection seems imperfect,
yet it is perfectly itself.
True fullness seems empty,
yet it is fully present.

True straightness seems crooked.
True wisdom seems foolish.
True art seems artless.

The Master allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the Tao speak for itself.”

(Tao Te Ching V. 45)

 

© Guy Schell 2018

1. Photograph: Michelle Lynn Fritz,  Frozen Bubble

You are not your Thoughts

A Faithless Understanding

I remember sitting on the floor in my 8×13 storage room that I had rented and  converted into a bedroom/ office in 2013. It had been 13 years since I had attempted to meditate. By meditation I mean sitting still and thinking about nothing. The main motivation for the attempt had nothing to do with believing any particular religious doctrine or having faith in something that could not be proven by science. I had meditated 13 years previous and had experienced definitive positive results. I was counting on a tried and true method of relieving the stress that had completely engulfed my life. It was the want to free myself from this stress that was the chief motivator. I meditated for about an hour and I remember calling my sister after I had finished and told her that I didn’t want to leave the place that I had traveled to in my mind. It was so beautiful and life fulfilling that I had no desire to be anywhere else.

I have continued this practice daily now for more than four years and have come to understand that faith is quite unnecessary. I read somewhere once that Carl Jung the noted doctor who founded analytical psychology when asked if he believed in God answered “No. I don’t believe, I know.” I have come to the same place as he.

In the consistent practice of silent thought clearing meditation no faith is required because during the meditation, once the mind and the body becomes stilled, you become a witness to the beauty of the eternal pulsating love-energy that is God’s creation unfolding right in front of you. Any questions as to- how do I know this is true?- disappears when you are immersed in and become a part of the creative act itself. For one to “need” faith they first have to experience doubt. Doubt is the product of statements such as: all my bodily perceptions are telling me that this can’t be true. There is no urge to doubt when God’s love-energy is pulsating in every fiber of your being. Without doubt, faith has no purpose!

Consider all the years of religious indoctrination. All the religious services that I had attended with my parents as a child growing up in the Midwestern US, and continued to attend as an adult. All the efforts made to get me (and millions of others) to have faith and believe in something that was invisible when all I had to do was sit still and clear my mind in meditation and the invisible became immediately visible and known as a matter of course.

Millions and millions of words spoken, written, and sung, shoved in front of me for half a century, words assembled in reasonably fashioned sentences to create reasons to overcome doubt, and it was the words themselves that distracted me from the God that was right before me and can be known in the silence. The Sufi Poet Hakim Sanai discovered this in 900 years ago:

We tried reasoning

our way to him (God)

it did not work

the moment we gave up

no obstacle remained.

 

He introduced himself to us out of kindness:

how else could we have known him?

Reason (words) took us as far as the door

but it was his presence that let us in.                                                                                  (Hakim Sanai , Walled Garden of Truth, approx. 1100AD)

A Chinese emperor’s librarian, Lao Tzu wrote about this 2600 years ago:

Can you step back from you own mind
and thus understand all things?

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch 10/16, Mitchell, Harper Collins 1988)

I was never taught this when I was in school. Considering the positive healing effects for people of all ages, why was this not being taught in our schools? Is it possible that those who were deciding what should be taught to us were afraid of what would happen if we found out that we could experience worry free peace all by ourselves? Satisfaction, contentment, and calm, without running out to buy anything or consume anything, Hmmm….. – I bet that would put a serious damper on the corporations whose very existence depends on us being “needy (greedy) consumers”.

A few years ago, my youngest son said to me that he didn’t believe in god or religion anymore and apologized to me, “I don’t want to upset you.” I laughed for a moment and then responded, “I don’t give a tinkers damn if you believe in a god or ever step into a church again. My only concern is – do you know peace. I am glad that you have tossed aside the box that others were trying to put you in. Now you can get down to the business of discovering yourself!”

Copyright © Guy Schell

 

 

Spiritual Access

Mind Clearing Meditation: Letting Go of Clock Time

If you are able to sit still long enough in your meditative practice, clock time eventually dissolves. You smile as thoughts come to mind that try to drag your attention back to the clock. Their attempt to influence you to move from stillness has no effect. The real you has separated from your thought and now you can easily be an objective witness to them. The thought itself evaporates and another will step forward that will provide you with another notion that there is something else more interesting or urgent to do besides sitting still. You recognize this as the automated conditioning of your mind and not you. It is as if your ego or “I Maker” is pulling different task, that have been stored in your memory bank, out and bringing them to the center stage of your mind to remind you of possible actions. You have reached a state of “being” in that instant that is present where you know that is unnecessary to disrupt your stillness.

            In between each thought is an infinite space or “spacelessness”. When you focus on this space you float out into its unfathomable depth. Your perception is no longer only linear but now includes vertical depth.

          As the body remains at rest and free from thought the mind positively evolves. This not only includes your own mind but encourages the human evolution of all minds. In this linear space your perception leaves only a slight human imprint as the labels that were placed upon you during your aging process remain above on the linear plane in the form of thoughts. In this space you experience perception without human interpretation; a labeless present. In this space there is no clock time only real time. The time of the present instant. In this space past and future merge with the present moment to create real time. Once you become aware of this within yourself you can never lose it. It is imprinted in your memory. You can go back to living your life as if there is only linear perception but your bodymind will periodically step in to remind you that there is a whole other universe inside you.

            These reminders may come when you are overwhelmed by your linear thoughts. Since the vertical space carries no labels there is no anxiety or depression. In this space you are not required to do anything or believe anything. You are nestled in the peaceful knowing that you are an integral part of something far bigger than yourself. You are alive, safe, nourished, and eternally present.

            Mind scientist focus on linear thought when attempting to heal someone from conditioned dysfunctional thought processes that cause stress. Spiritual Counselors focus on the space between the thoughts as in the infinite depth of this space is the essence of our Divine source. Both are an important part of who we are.

“Time is seemingly tamed if we treat it spatially on a calendar or the face of a clock, where we can make it appear as divided into separate units next to each other. But this also falsifies time. Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control—but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time carries us to real death. (This is not to deny that spatial reductionism is immeasurably useful and technologically necessary, but only to say that its accomplishments are intellectually limited, and can be deceiving.)”

                                    Orality and Literacy; Walter Ong, 1982 Methuen & Co. Ltd, Pg. 74

Copyright © 2017 Guy Schell

Breathe Life

 

Take a moment. Close your eyes. Breathe deep. Hold it. Focus on your center. Hold it. Exhale. All of it. The last of it. Hold it. Focus on your center. Now breathe normally. Boom! You have just absorbed the gift of breath and it is pleased to propel you forward. You are no longer the same person you were before the breath. Life and you have merged and you are a new creation. Do this regularly through out your day and you will fall in love with that which sustains you.