Most of us conceive of eternity as unlimited time. But it’s really the absence of time. It’s time’s suspension. Think about it: the eternal means timeless, not timeful.

Because of this elemental but misunderstood fact, we all have access to eternity at every moment of time, in the instant of time occurring now. In fact, the eternal can only be accessed now, never from the past or from the future.

Time is a measure of change. It registers decay, and inevitably, death. In time, death is found. Because we experience time, we experience death. The repeal of time means the abolition of death.

So why aren’t we experiencing this deathless state? If eternity is available to each of in the present moment, why don’t we open the door to it?

Death is our greatest fear. Yet we also seek it. This, our greatest secret, our ultimate denial. We seek out death.

We seek death because to live in eternity requires that we sacrifice our own creation: time. It calls on us to relinquish our investment in the past, which means we must give up our memories. Eternity calls us to relinquish our resentments, and these we hold on to fixedly. They are part of our story, and as such, an elemental facet of our identity. What you did to me. What life did to me.

And in order to experience the deathless, it’s just as necessary that we let go of all possibility, of all hope for a better future. We must sacrifice our own ideas of happiness, which almost always consist of being happy at some point in the future, when a future condition will be satisfied: I’ll be happy when… I’ll be happy when I’m in a relationship. I’ll be happy when I’m married. I’ll be happy when I’m divorced. I’ll be happy when I’m free. The fact that none of these conditions are universal should be proof that seeking happiness in any one of them will not satisfy the conditions for happiness, at least not permanent happiness. For true joy is a universal state which doesn’t require the satisfaction of any condition.

To be unhappy is easy. It seems more common than happiness. And that’s because we tend to look for happiness in the past or in the future. We seek for happiness through time, and through the humanmade device of time, we seek control.

Through time, we seek control. By moving back into the past and attempting retrieve the past through our recollections, we attempt to project them – to project the past – onto the future. We try to make the future like the past. We can then predict – rather than our own happiness – our very misery. For though we have little idea of what can make us happy, we’re pretty sure what won’t. And by remaining in misery, we remain in control.

Through time, we deceive ourselves, for the past is gone and the future – being always in the future – never comes. It is illusory. With our belief in time, we deceive ourselves. By extending time indefinitely into the future, we don’t achieve the eternal. We attain more suffering, which leads to more unhappiness, and which all ends in death. There is no paradise in time, and no time in paradise.

To live outside of time is to live finally outside an illusion. It is to come to know that what we see as real in time are just shadows on a wall, shadows of a past that’s as irretrievable as the faces of the dead in my memory. As unreal as the clouded future that never comes in just the way we think it will. What casts shadows isn’t the light. Shadows are made by what obstructs the light. And they’re only shadows. What stands behind them is always the same light, uniform throughout. For light has no kinds.

Light can’t shine itself on the past or the future since these ‘times’ don’t exist. Light shines only now. An inexplicable grace, a joy enters with this knowing. It’s outside time. It’s beyond memory.  And it comes only if we relinquish all our projections into the past and future.

Heaven, then, is the absence of time, not its extension forever. Time is created by our minds. And the strange idea that we live in time can only be surrendered by the mind. We see ourselves as victims of time. We call what the lapse of years does to us the ravages of time. What we hide from our own awareness is the primal fact that we’ve invented time and revel in our embrace of the past and the future. and this means we revel in death, for death only comes in time, with time.

The way of escape, the way into paradise, is only through the present moment.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just