Consciousness is not in time. The mind is. Time is synonymous with mind, which is thoughts. Consciousness is your Natural State – in India, they call it as Liberation, Moksha, which is the self-fulfilling and resplendent state of Consciousness. It is like when you look at the sky and see the Moon amid the clouds... It is still a sunrise and the Sun is beginning to appear, to shine on the horizon. The Moon is there, amid the clouds, and the Sun begins to shine, to spread through the earth. The Sun goes up and the moon, which earlier was so bright, is now going pale... You look and wonder: "Where is the Moon?" The brightness of the Sun is so great that the Moon disappears. The Moon is there, but it is not shining anymore.
The Natural State is something like this. The mind is present, with all its natural functions: to feel, to think, to move, to reason, to deduce, to conclude, to speak... In the Natural State, the mind is present with all these functions. But, as the "Sun" is shining, the mind no longer matters. The Sun is Consciousness and the mind is the Moon. Once this Consciousness is established, once the Sun is at noonday, the Moon keeps working but without covering the sunshine. So, the mind operates in its natural functions, but it does not take the place of Consciousness. The Natural State is like this!
In the unnatural state, which is the state of the common man, the Moon is trying to take the place of the Sun, trying to do its job. So, when the "Moon" tries to do so, it mixes up its natural function, which is to reason, to conclude, to deduce, to explain, to know, to experience... It takes this and creates the illusion of an experiencer controlling those functions. The mind starts to take control of what does not belong to it.
The mind tries to take the place of Consciousness, "the Moon tries to steal the sunshine." It is not enough to just reflect the brightness of the Sun, it wants to totally steal it. It wants to be a Sun apart, and that is the sense of separateness; that is what the Scriptures call as the fall of Satan. In the Bible, in the book of Isaiah, there are some words like this: "I will ascend above the highest clouds and become like the Most High!" It is all a figurative language of this sense of identity in control, being the lord of everything. This produces the illusion of space and time for this supposed present entity.
So, the mind, which has its natural functions (thinking, feeling, deducting, concluding), creates the sense of a "me" in the "body-mind-world" experience, as a consequence of this illusion of separateness. Therein lies the ego illusion. The mind itself is not evil. Thinking, feeling, concluding, deducting, learning, remembering, forgetting, this is all very natural. However, when it is at the service of a supposed present entity, at the service of a separate "me," it complicates everything! That is where Satan comes in – Satan in Hebrew and Diabolus in Greek!
The notion of time and space arises for this "identity," not for the mind. Putting it in didactic way, we name it as the "egoic mind," but the mind itself is only the Moon in a sky, where the king is the Sun. The Moon just reflects the brightness of the Sun, without problems. Is this clear? That is why you see me, sometimes using the expression "mind" referring to that egoic mind. However, at other times I am speaking only of the mind and its natural functions, not of the egoic mind. That is, you can observe, in the speeches, that I interchange words using mind and egoic mind. Just as the body has natural functions, so does the mind. What I call mind, in this "machine" [body-mind], is this inseparable operation of body itself (it is called "mind," but, in fact, body is mind and mind is body). Here, I am referring to the non-physical functions of the "machine", more subtle, such as "feeling," "perceiving," the movement of thoughts, the reason, and so on.
Now lies the space for the atemporal. This space for the timelessness is the "Sun" in its fullness, in its glory. Once this Consciousness is established in this mechanism, in that organism, the mind assumes its natural functions. The Now, which is not the "now-time" but the timeless Now, which is Consciousness, assumes Its place. So, the past or the future becomes irrelevant, since this supposed entity is no longer present. It is possible to remember the past, as you remember a movie, but without those old sensations of the moment when it was watched.
Notice, at the moment you are watching the movie, you go through various sensations and feelings. The images and sounds cause impressions. But then, when you remember the movie, you laugh because it does not cause impact anymore. It is no longer "the movie." It is only an unimportant memory. So, the past is this unimportant memory, which is actually happening now only as part, also, of an imagination, because there is nothing, in fact, happening. Not now!
When this is already solved out, it is seen this way. However, when it is not solved, the "movie" returns – which is the past – yet with all that load of imaginary impressions, which are felt now, here. So, traumas are like this. Not only them, but also every and any egoic memory operates in the same way: it is only an imagination appearing at this moment and taking an impression of reality, because it still finds room to reverberate in this illusion of a present "identity" still carrying the past, which is only memory, imagination.
The ego is this: the illusion of an identity present now, here, feeling a trauma, a guilt, a remorse, a regret (what some call depression). Or it plays with the imaginative memory of a future (what some call anxiety), but it is the same process. It is always the imagination of an "identity" now, here, feeling. There is nobody here to feel it. There is only the illusion you are real inside the body and this imagination is yours, of this "someone" you believe you are.
The Natural State is the awareness of this moment, but it is a Real Awareness. It is not the vision of the present moment. It is the Awareness of this moment. In the Awareness of this moment, a past memory may appear, the imagination of a future, but this is only an event happening at this moment, as a thought, without any validation, without any truth. It does not change at all What Is.
If a memory or an imagination appears, it does not matter. The thought in this Natural State is like hay in strong fire, which disappears in the flame by simply falling over on it. The mind of the Sage works like this: when thought appears, it is already demolished by this Consciousness. So, time, past or future does not last. Consciousness is this Presence now!
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