“When you consciously use time to do something divine, you are entering into divine Time which means timeless Time. When you are consciously thinking of something divine, immediately eternal Life comes and shakes hands with you. Each moment you want to go upward through aspiration, the eternal Time also becomes your friend.”

—Sri Chinmoy, from Transformation-Night, Immortality-Dawn

I got into my car in Rhode Island at 6:50 pm, showered and dressed in a sari for a meditation function starting around one hour later in Queens, New York, 180 miles away. I prayed that if it was God’s Will that I might experience my own taste of timeless time in order to arrive in New York more quickly than usual. If thus blessed, it would be as if I entered into a time warp or that time itself slowed down while I drove. It had actually happened enough times previously that I knew it was entirely plausible. Therefore, I put it out to the universe, meditated for a minute before leaving, put my key in the ignition and got on the highway heading south to New York City.

While driving, I purposely didn’t look at the illuminated clock face inside the car and just concentrated on feeling eager, willing and inspired to share a meditation function with my spiritual brothers and sisters in Queens inside the soul-elevating surroundings of a place we call “Aspiration-Ground”.

Ordering up a time warp? Timeless time? Time is a subject pondered by philosophers, scientists and theologians alike. The question of time begs some of the greatest issues people ever confront. When was the beginning of creation? Can it be measured in years? Does God exist above and outside time? What is Eternity? What is time itself?

Before I became a spiritual seeker, I viewed these notions as the realm of physicists or famous philosophers and my own conception of time was much more pedestrian. I viewed time as a captive of the clock and never imagined a world outside the regular sequence of time as measured by that self-same clock.

As I practised meditation with my spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy, I began to experience time in a way that seemingly defied the clock. Time started to seem more fluid than linear. Time was something that could be stopped, bent or warped. This phenomenon manifested in my life primarily in the time it took to travel between locations.

I often go by car between my home in Rhode Island and Jamaica, Queens, New York - a hub of community for the Sri Chinmoy Centre meditation group to which I belong. Because this distance is only several hours away by car and it always renews my inner life with inspiration and sincerity, I average a trip to New York about once a month. I even have a regular place to stay once I arrive and I enjoy attending meditation meetings and other Sri Chinmoy Centre activities there in Queens.

The average shortest time for the 180 mile trip by car is usually 3 hours. Many times it takes longer than 3 hours depending on the volume of traffic, accident delays or the need to make short stops along the way. And then there are those times when it takes less time than ought to be imaginable, let alone possible. Sometimes this familiar trek to New York and back seems to expand and contract time in a manner that facilitates an easy commute convenient for the itinerary and obligations waiting on either end.

As recently as a month ago, I decided to make the trip to New York even though I was traveling alone and not leaving Rhode Island until shortly before the Saturday evening Queens  meditation was scheduled to begin. I rarely go to New York on weekends when I work 9-5 on a Saturday such as this one but it included a Monday holiday. The trip would still last a couple of days even without a full Saturday included.

Circumstance favored me and while I did not drive like a speedster, I was able to make the entire trip without any stops, major interruptions or traffic slowdowns. I sailed through the Throgs Neck Bridge toll, exited off the Grand Central Parkway and successfully found a place to park around the corner from Annam Brahma, a vegetarian restaurant run by Sri Chinmoy’s students. I stopped the car and meditated for a minute, offering silent gratitude for the ease of the journey.

As I walked into Aspiration-Ground, I looked at my wristwatch—it was exactly 9:30 pm. I had arrived at a meditation function in progress and as it turned out still far from finished for the night.

I purposely chose not to do the math right there and then but I knew without a doubt that I had been blessed with an answer to my prayer. I had entered “timeless time” and made it to New York in an amount of time that should have been impossible unless I had been speeding the whole way at a breakneck pace. I knew that rather than speeding hurriedly down the road I had just merged into a flow where it is possible to step outside normal clock time.

My heart was awash with gratitude as I stood outside a glass door to a tent through which I could see an audience of seekers sitting in the dark while a meditation video played on a large portable screen. Out of deference to this meditation segment in progress, I waited until it finished to enter the tent. Once inside, my inner being danced in a current of spiritual intensity inextricably connected to this place where I have attended countless meditations in the last 25 years.

While I will never be the one to easily explain lofty philosophical concepts about time or the layperson’s approach to the real meaning of E = mc2, I do know first-hand that time is not as straightforward as the clock makes it appear. In my own life, the transformation of time into something magical and flexible is linked to eagerness, willingness and aspiration. These qualities open a door to a manner of time that transcends ordinary perception.

Sri Chinmoy speaks of this different kind of time in the following selections from his writings:

“There are two kinds of time. One is earthbound time and the other is eternal Time. The earthbound time is what we have created, but eternal Time cannot be created. It is within us and without us. When we live in eternal Time, we cannot separate one second from another second. When we live in earthbound time, we know that it is one o’clock and then it is one minute past one. They are two separate minutes. But in eternal Time, we cannot separate the minutes or hours. In eternal Time one o’clock, two o’clock, three and four o’clock are all together. This is the difference between eternal Time and earthbound time. We can see the present, past and future perfectly housed in eternal Time, and this eternal Time we can easily possess when we are Self-realised.”

—Sri Chinmoy, from Transformation-Night, Immortality-Dawn

“Time is limited, energy is limited, opportunity is limited, capacity is limited—everything is limited. But the moment we go deep within, we feel that we are freed; we are enjoying Heaven-freedom. When we meditate we soulfully establish an access to something unlimited, ceaseless, eternal and immortal. It is only through proper meditation that we can free ourselves from the limited time that has been assigned to us. There is no other way. In sublime, deep, profound, high meditation we see that there is an eternal Time, which is without limits and without sections, and we can grow into the very current of that ever-flowing eternal Time.”

—Sri Chinmoy, from Canada Aspires, Canada Receives, Canada Achieves Part 2

Eternal Time without limits as a place where the present, past and future reside together feels quite out of my league at first glance. Then I stop and remember—2 hours and 40 minutes door to door from my house to a meditation function 180 miles away without any logical external explanation. 2 hours and 40 minutes. Yes I do believe in a kind of spiritual magic called timeless time.

Drawing from illustrated poems by Sharani

by Thomas Mcguire

I was born early, so why am I always late? Attempts to reconcile this paradox have so far failed. Perhaps, unconsciously, I have attempted to make up for my premature enthusiasm to crawl the earth with a never-quite-arriving-on-the-dot form of post-punctuality. It is often said that New Zealanders (or ‘Kiwis’ to those in the know) are habitually late to their appointments—“yeah, sure mate, I’ll see you at 7” actually means 7.30 bordering on 8 o’clock. You see, ‘lateness’, like time itself, is entirely relative—especially this far south of Greenwich.

To demonstrate my complete apathy towards clockishness (a made-up word meaning excessive adherence to the artificial, anthropogenic construct known as “time”) I threw away my watch during a recent holiday at the beach. Vowing never again to be restrained by the ruthless straitjacket of alarms, chimes, beeps, ticks and tocks, I spent countless summer days surfing, running and lounging in complete abandonment of all earthly responsibilities.

Here I found that nature has its own rhythm, quite oblivious to the metric measurement of the machine-mind. Surrounded by water and forest, one becomes acclimatised to the ceaseless dance of the sun, moon and stars—the drum-beat of the waves and the almost invisible, but perfectly timed growth of floral abundance. The sun sets, the moon shines, the tide dances back and forth. These are the moments, hours and days of nature’s clock. 

Do we waste too much time worrying about time? Is it possible to be too early, thus accruing large amounts of ‘dead’ time? What if I really am late to my own funeral?

“Watching the clock” is synonymous with boredom, while an atmosphere of fun and relaxation does away with the need for measurement, calculation and comparison.

Yet isn’t each second wonderfully important? One second can turn a billionaire into a pauper. One second can be a gold medal in the sprints. One second can embody a lifetime of enraptured bliss during a wonderful meditation. One second can be the difference between life and death. In one second, all can be revealed.

The scientists reckon that each creature experiences time in a radically different way. Philosophers claim that, when you get right down to it, the passage of time is only in our heads. My favourite spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy, spoke of dimensions beyond time that human beings could grow into—yet he, as a master of dynamic activity, knew the immense value of each moment. There is a phrase long hallowed in spiritual literature, and one which Sri Chinmoy often used, the “Eternal Now”. It evokes a sense that each tiny moment contains within itself all that is, was and will be. When I try to identify with this lofty realisation, I can feel myself becoming freed both of expectations from the future and regrets from the past. 

Time has its moments—and the most memorable of these moments have made history, the plethora of events and trends that have shaped the world over the millennia, seem far simpler than it really is. In the opening days of the new decade, Time magazine had a new, special edition on the shelves: “The Decade that Changed the World”. It reflected on the more memorable, vivid moments of the previous decade, that cluster of ten years between 2000 and 2009.

So that was the decade that changed the world? The decade, mind you. Not just one of the many. That was the decade that left the world a different place, which had apparently never happened before.

Of course, every decade of the past century has stood out, leaving the planet a different place (though hardly an unrecognisable one). While earlier centuries—the twelfth century, the seventeenth century—invoke certain moods and images, now it is each and every decade that has its own unique ambience. The twenties, the sixties, the eighties, all invoke a few notable images.

A year, however, is a slightly less eventful period. One-tenth as eventful, strictly speaking. Only a few embody a “world-changing” mythos, thanks partly to pop historians in the mass media, infatuated with anniversaries and nostalgia. In the past fifty years, perhaps only 1968 (“the year that everything happened”) and 1989 (“the year that,” as you can probably gather, “changed the world”) have reached that apex. A few others have achieved some heightened sense of prestige, perhaps within limited circles. Even I have added to this, writing a book called 1975: Australia’s Greatest Year. It was not a stand-out year in most places, but in my homeland, it was—politically, artistically, dramatically, culturally—so full of nation-changing events to be worthy of its own volume, three decades later.

But even in a “normal” year, certain events ring out. It is the Hollywood style of history. Like any great movie, history is now recalled by its most powerful scenes. The hero triumphs. (Washington becomes President. Macarthur leads the troops to victory. Ali defeats Frazier.)  The hero dies tragically. (The assassinations of Lincoln or JFK. The death of Diana. The murder of John Lennon.) Moments of terror. (The Titanic. Hiroshima. 9/11.) Moments of beauty. (Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel. Mozart composes his Clarinet Concerto in A K622.) Moments of excitement. (The Roaring Twenties. Beatlemania. The fall of the Berlin Wall.)

Of course, these were simply the turning points, the moments when various quieter or more humble moments come together, leading to a climax. While 1989 might have had more thrills, many smaller events in previous years had provided equally significant times. How could the Berlin Wall have fallen without the series of forgotten moments preceding it? Moments that, a few years earlier, placed Mikhail Gorbachev in charge of the Soviet Union. Moments that inspired the citizens of East Germany to demand their freedom. Moments that gradually caused the world order to change.

In our life stories, like world history, the most significant moments are not always the loudest ones. Consider all those times that we are overcome by emotion, leaving us forever affected. In hindsight, these moments… well, they usually make no difference. Consider the time spent with close friends, the ones you assumed would be your friends for life. In how many cases have those friendships ended—not usually in a stormy or tragic fashion, but almost unnoticed, fading away quietly as you grew apart. They have not been sad farewells, but logical, organic separations.

Look back on the decisions you have made, the ones that seemed most essential. Did they make a difference? In many cases, yes; in some cases, no—however momentous they seemed at the time.

Then look back at the moments in your life that, in hindsight, were truly significant. Did you even notice them at the time? Did they seem like they would change your life?

For this writer, one such moment was the day I walked nonchalantly into a meditation class, half a lifetime ago. I wanted a positive change, but had no way of knowing that it would be perhaps the most important day of my life. It would lead me to the spiritual life. Most previous ideas of life were soon replaced. I would never experience those moments that I had expected—but never really wanted—to witness in the future. Getting married, starting a family, starting a mortgage… That’s what everyone does, right? No, not everyone. Once I walked into that class, my life took another direction. I remember enjoying this class on the day, but it was some time before I even began to understand its significance.

Indeed, while I’d like to wax lyrical about what a magical day it was—how it lifted me to the heavens and made me feel a joy that nobody had ever felt before—I’m afraid that such a reminiscence wouldn’t be sincere. As I said, I enjoyed it. I even saw it as something very special. But it was hardly the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the time, it was simply a nice, quiet moment. One of many that changed my world.