The time has come to have brave new ideas about time itself. If you want to make a breakthrough in human lifespan or prove the existence of higher consciousness or reach the mysterious region beyond the physical universe, all these possibilities require our concept of time to be reshaped in a new way.

Everyone knows the old ides, which have sufficed reasonably well until now. Time puts events in order by cause and effect. Time measures the distance from birth to death, for people and the universe as well. Time emerged at the Big Bang, and it has ticked away ever since, for 13.8 billion years.

What’s to like?

The Practice:
See what’s likable.

Why?

Liking feels good, plus it encourages us to approach and engage the world rather than withdraw from it.

Your brain continually tracks whether something is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In essence, is it a carrot, a stick, or safely ignored? Naturally, we like – we enjoy – what’s pleasant, dislike what’s unpleasant, and with what’s neutral would get pleasant pronto.

Most of us are familiar with the saying “Is the glass half full or half empty?”, which points out how perspective affects our experience of life. In other words, do you count your blessings or tally up your grievances? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you feel life is a gift or a burden, joy or tragedy? On any given day, you may feel one of these extremes and then extrapolate to a world view that sets you up for future experiences. You may keep an inner tally sheet of the “good” and “bad.” It seems to be a human tendency to divide up life events in this way. Yet life is made up of many emotions, many experiences. None of them permanent. What if the greater wisdom is to be inclusive of it all?

What I like about my life is that I get to utilize my time in the most productive way. Once you figure out the purpose of an instrument or a tool that you own, it makes it way more efficient to use that tool; to optimize the use of it. 

Life is simply meant to be experienced. The end. 

If life is just an experience we are having, then we, as human beings, are a part of that experience. The question is who is having it? What is it that is in me, observing through my eyes, that is experiencing through my being and is here on this journey of experiencing? Not learning lessons or solving riddles, but what is it that is in me that is hearing, feeling, seeing? What part of me came back here to have this fully immersive experience? 

How do you describe emptiness? How do I wrap words around the peaceful space I have been opening to since being diagnosed with breast cancer last August? Language seems inadequate to translate something so vast and limitless. My experience has been one of emptying out, sometimes called “dying unto yourself” in spiritual traditions. The dissolving of past identities, opinions, questions, expectations, fears, hopes, disappointments. All the parts of our selves that we accumulate over a lifetime and don’t even realize we carry around with us. Gradually, day by day, week by week, pieces fell away. No grief was involved; it was a lifting off, a lightening. Space opened up within me. I felt increasingly empty, but with no sense of loss or regret. In many ways, it was like opening the door to my soul, which was a room without walls filled with nothing but light. I observed all this without any particular emotional response. It was just happening, peacefully.

“For my part, I am almost contented just now, and very thankful. Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever.”  
—Charlotte Brontë

I've Been Thinking...

Watching the flooding in Kentucky and in other parts of our country made me reflect on climate change, but it also made me reflect on how, at the end of the day, people just want to help others. In times of crisis, we rush to step up. We rush to donate. We put aside differences and just help one another. That’s fundamentally who we are as Americans, at our core. The news may tell us that we are hopelessly divided, but we aren’t.

When are you?

The Practice:
Enjoy now.

Why?

There’s a profound and miraculous mystery right under our noses: this instant of now has no duration at all, yet somehow it contains all the causes from the past that are creating the future. Everything arising to become this moment vanishes beneath our feet as the next moment wells up. Since it’s always now, now is eternal.

Because humanity is in the process of letting go of how we’ve actioned in the world to feel safe, now is the perfect time to lean in and collaborate..

We’ve used the mind and its idea of how things “need to be” to control things. We’ve been conditioned to perceive the ways others need to behave, how we need to behave, or how things need to go. This has developed a rigidity in our lives.

A byproduct of forcing that sort of structure is that a lot of energy has been suppressed. Especially, energies of emotions, authenticity, mattering, and of a sense of clarity about who we are and what this world is really all about. 

The chaos and uncertainty we are experiencing in the world is in divine order. It is a friction and a polarization that allows for what has been suppressed to come up and be expressed. If life feels like a challenge in this moment, lean in because even though it looks crazy, it’s actually a great healing for people.

One day, a Buddhist teacher from the forest monasteries of Thailand—was teaching, one of his students asked him, “How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness, and death?”