At any given moment, it is our free-will to either look back or look ahead. In looking back, there are memories, stories, narratives which are entirely our own. In looking ahead, there is imagination, possibility, anticipation, hope, fear, and the sort. At any given moment, we are given only this moment. Nowhere else is any time that we can really travel into and out of. Everything that is, and can possibly be, is all living in this individual experience of the life that is. But then there are thoughts, emotions, expressions of desire, guilt, regret, fantasy which make a world of time exist as though it is extending somewhere in a real sense beyond just this moment. Over time, there is a heaven waiting to receive us, and a retirement plan to have, and a childhood that has passed, or a dear one no more. All in time, making the mind the reality for this entity called life that we are. All over time, establishing meanings and moments to remember and learn from. And because of time, seeing the inevitability and transient nature of life itself, sometimes yielding in wisdom, or some flowers, or a fruit.

It is not that time does not exist. Time is the fact that proves the falsehood of it all. How death makes the point that however great may the ignorance be, it comes to an end. So, to stop and swing with time for a while is also what it should take to master our ignorance of time – to watch how time has never come, nor has it ever gone. To know that time is in the mind, and is the making of the mind. And to realise, that it lasts only if the mind wants it to. If the mind doesn’t want it, there is no such concept. Time after all is a concept. Just like money is a concept. Just like death is a concept. It is not that these concepts do not exist in a practical sense. They certainly do. And it is our mind that has been conceptualizing to experience them in a uniquely individual way. It is how conceptually one is supposed to understand the world through education, and as a result live in this world as an educated man or woman. The same applies to time. With more time, a mind in awareness will realise the concept of time. How time has never occurred, but only the mind keeps occurring in the present, against its templates of past and future. To further probe this, the whole of life is reflecting only in our mind. Nothing has ever occurred unless it’s registered in our mind. And to further infer, it is the mind alone that has caused its own fate. If time is a real experience in your mind, mind can make it its truth, just as it has truly made you and I come alive in every existential way. Such is the intelligence that’s holding it all together here and now.

Would that mean that you and I are not true if the mind has just made it up? If your mind is registering my mind, then we are only as true as time is. You and I are existing and are witnessing the existence. If we stop the witnessing, we don’t stop existing, but are the existence itself. Because witnessing prerequisites a mind to witness. If there isn’t any, then there is no time in effect, no person securing a body. There is life. Life is flamboyant, juicy, boundless, and unlike any more thoughts on this subject.

Yuvraj Goswami is the author of #NoPointTalking, available on Amazon in January 2019. Excerpts from the book can be found on www.elefemel.com