Ernie Thayer

Most of our lives are lived on the time-line from past to future, cradle to grave. We are endlessly concerned about how things are going and how they’ll turn out. It seems the most natural thing. Then at moments, our breath is taken away by something beautiful, by a delightful fit of laughter, a wonderful outing with friends or by a sunset or the dance of light or the sea. In such moments, time stands still and we experience something else, outside of time. It is always lovely and feels ‘just right’. We’re free in such moments – free of being anyone, free of the worries of our ordinary life and completely at one with life in the moment. Usually, as soon as it’s over, we want more of it. Yet actually something unusual has occurred. We may see the open possibility of a life different from the ordinary one in time – one where what happened before and what may happen later are not so terribly important. We’ve lived a moment (however long) out of time. And we were free, relaxed, easy, happy beings there. Could we live life that way?

These moments let us glimpse the intersecting existence of the living moment where our experience of life is completely free of care. We actually feel in such moments what it’s like to live not enslaved by time. I think this is our native, natural state. When this way of being flowers and becomes fairly stable, something unnatural is shed and one falls easily into a way of living that is fully human, life as it is meant to be for us. For most of us it was like this as kids before we became so self-aware, but now can happen while fully conscious. The hijacking of a person’s life by time can be over.
Transformation isn’t the attainment of anything, only the realization that our natural state is like the one experienced in those lovely moments. This occurs of its own when the time-line life is seen for what it is and the intersecting present fullness is all that’s left. Blessedly, another order of intelligence than my clever self is free to move. Its first intelligent act is to depose the self as master of the life (because it is so clear that we don’t want to keep living like that) and make room for paradise – a human being free of the constraints of time.