Talk: Timelessness & Experiments With Truth

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Katherine Ingram.

The following is excerpted from a session of Dharma Dialogues called Timelessness.

It was recorded in Los Angeles in 2016.

You might have some time or other or many times had the experience where you answer the phone and at the end of the line,

At the other end of the line is an old friend that you haven't spoken with in a very long time.

You might say,

I was just thinking of you.

And you find yourself perhaps schmoozing as though you just picked up where you last left off,

Isn't it?

And we sometimes say of that kind of experience that the connection felt timeless.

We use the word timeless.

Now,

Why do we use the word timeless?

Because we're so drenched in presence with that person,

Right?

We're so present.

We're not in time.

We're so happy to be in present awareness and presence in a shared experience that everything about everything else falls away.

The future,

The past are just ideas that might pop up in conversation,

But the experience you're having is so strong that we say it's timeless.

Now,

Is it possible to pretty much live that way in a sense of timelessness?

We use the concept of time,

Of course.

We came here at 730.

We use the concept of time,

But really,

Truthfully,

We are living in timelessness.

Time is a construct.

We made it up.

And when you understand that really you're just flowing in a very big now,

That's all that's ever happening,

Then there's a richness to the experience.

One of my favorite quotes,

Many of you who've been with me a long time have heard this many times,

From Nisargadatta,

It is reality that makes this present moment so vital,

So different from past and future,

Which are merely mental.

All of the mental stories,

Past and future,

Don't have quite the vitality of this moment,

Do they?

Of this now,

Of this presence that you're experiencing.

And so we have this option to just adjust our attention just ever so slightly,

Really.

You can just use your facility of moving your attention around and let yourself notice.

And that's really all that it is.

You don't have to create it or do anything to get there.

Just let yourself notice that you are experiencing,

You're flowing in this now,

In this timelessness.

I like to say it's a taste of eternity,

But actually for a short time because we have these little blink of life.

So it's like you're tasting eternity for a little while.

And as the attention begins to enjoy that experience,

Which it does,

It calls it back.

It's a haunting.

It keeps calling it back to that experience,

To that taste that just flows along.

You know,

You come to a certain age in life,

As I have and as some people in the room have,

Where there's presumably quite a lot more behind than there is ahead.

So there's a different relationship to these thoughts of past and future,

Inevitably.

But one can come to know and come to really appreciate is that you can experience this sense of a kind of elongation of time,

If you will,

When you're very,

Very much with your actual direct experience.

So you can feel it in this room right now,

Even if you're not following all the words,

You can feel it in this room.

There's a vitality,

There's a wakefulness,

Different from past and future,

Which are merely mental.

Okay,

That's all that's coming to me to say.

If anyone has any questions,

Anything you'd like to discuss on such matters,

Please feel free.

You quoted Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Yes.

And knowing that he comes from a Hindu tradition,

I was wondering how you see that as relating to this being a Buddhist school and kind of the connection there between what he says and Buddhism.

Well,

First of all,

Even though he was in a kind of Hindu setting,

Let's say,

I don't find his teachings,

Especially Hindu,

I find them quite universal.

And what I love about the Buddhist teachings,

Especially the most simple of the Buddhist teachings,

Is that they are also universal.

So truth,

Which is a tricky subject,

By the way,

But it is something that one can make an experiment with no matter what the label,

And eventually in a way the labels fall away,

Right,

And you're having a very direct experience of the so-called truth.

And what's great about,

Say,

The scientific method is that you make that experiment in different contexts and it remains consistently so,

Right?

So what Nisargadatta pointed to over and over again in his teachings and what many of the great teachers point to in every tradition is this very simple truth that you can experience this very moment,

Right?

That there's an awareness that's radiant in you and as you,

That you can tune your awareness to that channel,

In a sense,

You can dial in that frequency.

It's different than most of the rest of what people are dialing in,

Right?

Really different.

Look at the world.

I mean,

It's mad,

Madness,

Raining.

So this is a different specific channel that you can tune into.

It happens to be the channel that a lot of the most,

You know,

Extraordinary awakened minds that have ever walked this earth tuned into and spoke about either in their own tradition,

Their own culture,

Their own time,

Right?

Jesus saying the kingdom of heaven is within you.

Ramakrishna saying we search,

The musk deer searches the world over for the source of its own scent.

In Zen Buddhism they say the earth where you stand is the pure lotus land and this very body,

The body of Buddha.

They're all pointing as you can hear and there's many,

Many,

Many others.

They all point to an essential truth that it can only actually be true for you if you taste it,

Not if you think,

Oh,

That sounds right.

Yeah,

That sort of sounds right.

I like that.

But taste it.

And then it's really true.

It really pops.

And then you realize you start to develop an ear for truth when you hear it.

It starts to resonate with your own direct experience.

It serves as a tuning fork.

You know,

You start just pinging together.

Yeah,

I couldn't agree more.

Would you,

I mean,

Are you familiar with theosophy?

Yes.

Would you consider that then to be theosophy in a sense?

Well,

Of course,

The best of it.

You know,

The parts that are direct pointers,

Right?

But as Krishnamurti famously said,

When he left theosophy,

Truth is a pathless land,

Right?

He left,

He was their big master and walked away from it.

You know that.

And when he walked away from it,

What he said was truth is a pathless land.

So to be,

Let all of these wonderful traditions be fingers pointing to the moon,

Right?

But really the point is to experience the moon.

Tonight the moon is quite lovely here in the Los Angeles sky,

Right?

You taste it.

And then you can let anything be the reminder.

There's reminders scattered all through great literature,

For instance,

Right?

And great drama,

Great movies,

Great conversations you might have with just any friend.

You know,

You begin to be very susceptible,

Very,

I like to say grace prone to hearing that which resonates in the deep places,

In the places that remind you,

Right?

I was talking to one of my girlfriends today on the phone and she was telling me about a friend of hers who I had known from my friend,

Had been dealing with cancer for five years.

But she's at the end of this journey with cancer.

She's going to be leaving this world soon.

And,

But she was telling my friend,

Our mutual friend,

That she'd gone to Target the other day.

She had found this really great coat.

She's in New England.

She found this really,

Really perfect coat.

And she was telling our friend how delighted she was just shopping at Target and finding this coat.

And she said that she got home and she thought,

How ironic that,

You know,

That something so simple in a way was so much fun for her that she was really letting herself have the fun of this little mini shopping excursion and how poignant it was that for most of her life,

That wouldn't have been the case.

That wouldn't have been much of a big fun thing.

She would have been thinking there was way bigger fun things to be had.

And that this one really was,

You know,

Kind of had a great flair for her.

And I,

And as I'm listening to this story,

You know,

I was letting that into my heart today.

I was actually drinking a cup of coffee as I was hearing this talking to my friend.

And I was gazing out this window at this spectacular view where I'm staying at Rick's house.

And in that moment,

I was having one of those flares of like one of those timeless flares,

Right,

Where you just realize,

You know,

Show up for this.

It's,

You know,

A short run.

Might as well show up and not be battered about by stories of what happened,

What might happen,

What are they thinking of me,

How am I doing?

Am I fulfilling my potential?

You know,

All these tormenting things we go through and then boom,

It's over.

Right?

Thank you.

This has been In the Deep.

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Till next time.