Click for Audio: Time and the Eternal Now
Part 6 of 6: Navigating from the Complete Soul
Throughout our spiritual literature, the now moment has been touted as the only time we have, and eternally so. We have been trained to think of eternity as an indefinite span of time stretching into the past and future. When we’re told that now is eternity and we can truly only live in the now, we like the sound of it but it is a challenge to make practical sense of this idea. We nearly all wear watches and keep some type of calendar. We constantly anticipate the future and mull over the past. Though we cannot enter the future or revisit the past from where we are right now, we can certainly think about them. And our thinking about them usually crowds out our ability to fully appreciate our present moment.
If you think of a wheel turning on an axle, the wheel of a lawn cart for example, you know the wheel can roll all over your yard while the axle remains still. If you think of your soul as the axle and your senses-based self-image and its outer life as the wheel you can get a sense of how two realities can be bundled into a single experience. Regardless of how fast or how long the wheel turns, the axle rests motionless. From the point of view of the axle/soul, there is only a single position. Time and space have no relevance. From the point of view of the wheel/self-image, meaning is found in time and space. There are things to do and places to go. If the wheel adopted the attitude of the axle, it would sit motionless and be of little service to the lawn cart. Having a body that expresses and interacts with this lawn of time and space, we obviously did not come here to do nothing.
Our challenge is that the bulk of our identity is attached to the wheel. The axle remains a vague concept. Without the axle, of course, the wheel and cart assembly breaks down. The problem is that the wheel can turn just fine completely unaware of the axle. We can live an interesting life under the jurisdiction of time and space, running lo here and lo there seeking the prize of absolute inner peace by arranging every aspect of our lawn just so. The time comes, however, when we realize that regardless of where in our lawn we roll, we feel the same absence of inner peace. We make more money but then it’s not quite enough money. We buy a bigger home only to discover a neighbor who is deaf to their basset hound’s incessant foghorn of a bark. We find the soulmate of our dreams and discover that not even they can lift us above our gnawing sense of incompleteness.
The axle that is our soul does not revolve in an evolutionary progression. It has no need to progress into anything more than it is already. The wheel will turn and the cart will move along its linear timeline, all while the axle remains still. When we understand this, we solve the mystery of the now moment and bring it into a more practical focus.