How to Turn Time into Your Friend

Time can be your friend or your greatest nemesis; a means for great experiences or deep suffering. Indeed does suffering require time. I can´t suffer without experiencing time as a reality and myself as a being subjected to time.

If you really understand that what you are is beyond time, you access the key to find inner peace out of every form of suffering.

Whatever it is that seems to disconnect you from fulfillment: You can leave illusion behind you at any moment and get back to the reality of your true Self.

When do I experience any situation as unpleasant or painful? When it causes unpleasant or painful feelings within me. Only then, without exceptions. And every painful feeling has to do in some way or another with the energy of fear. Basically, there are only two emotional states: that of fear and that of love. And what is fear? Fear is an instinctive mechanism whose task is to protect the body from damage and death . Nothing more and nothing less…

Thus is fear directly related to time: We feel fear as soon as our brain has analysed a given situation or experience with respect to its potential dangers and confronts us with the possibility of threat. In a flash it processes calculations about our future and for doing so, relies on data of past memories and conclusions. In a moment in which our thoughts are not preoccupied, with past and future events, we cannot feel fear.

All of our bodily concerns are time-related, as the body is a product of time. It constantly changes and transforms itself and at some moment, when our journey is over, it will leave us and die. This is part of the human experience and there is nothing frightening about it. However, by confusing ourselves with our physical vehicle, we opt for a physical experience that will unavoidably be dominated by fear, because we identifiy with the perishable, time-constricted part of ourselves.

Fear has its purpose and it fulfills this purpose perfectly when we allow it to do so. Fear´s function is to protect our physical bodies and when we understand its signals, it simply calls us out of slumber and inadvertence back into presence. If we don´t try to fight it back, but welcome it openly, fear also is a magnificent reminder or our true Self each time we get lost into confusing who we are with what we think and experience. However, fear you try to fight back does just the opposite: It controls and dominates your experiences and holds you locked into a limited, constricted version of yourself that has nothing to do with who you truly are.

The great majority of our fears are not related to immediate survival threats, but are based on projections. Even if there is nothing threatening our well-being right now, we fear the hardships our future might bring. We fear our peers as potential threats, we fear to fall victim to disease or poverty, we fear to lose our freedom (whatever that means to us), to be doomed to suffering, we fear betrayal or humiliation and much much more. The more we identify with the part of us bound to time, the more we are torn into the downward spiral of these fears.

And love? Love is the reflections of our innermost nature. To be in love means to be in harmony with what is; what is within me, within each human and each part of the world that I come to live and experience. Love is unconditional, as it is completely beyond any sequence of cause and effect and can neither be generated nor destroyed. It simply is. And in truth, nothing else can be but love. When I´m fully one with love, I´m one with my Source, detached from time and thus from the foundation of suffering.

Nothing existing in time is able to truly fulfill you as well as nothing in time can take away from you what is truly yours as all that is completely beyond time. Always be aware, at each difficult moment: What you´re now perceiving as the source of your pain, your dissatisfaction, your disappointment or any form of discontentment is not its true source. Suffering is only possible when you forget who you truly are and allow yourself to be defined by time.

Remind yourself of that time and again in dealing with other people, especially when you are close to them. All conflicts are based on some form of judgment. We judge ourselves for not being as we should be and how others expect us to be. Or we judge others for being the way they should be and we would like them to be. Both reactions cause each other and do only slightly differ in expression, not in source and effect. In both cases, we reduce ourselves and others to something that is of time. Behind every compulsion to judge and to condemn there is always fear. Fear to lose what we need in order to survive. This fear needs nothing else than to be reminded of who you truly are. You are not the slave of your fear. Nor is your fear anything you have to fight back and defeat. It is fully sufficient to welcome it in your love in order to be reminded that nothing in the realms of time can define or limit you in any way whatsoever.

Our attachment to time keeps us from being at peace with our emotions. For emotions we experience as pleasant we are afraid to lose them, for emotions we experience as unpleasant we are afraid of them sticking with us forever. However, the basic nature of our emotions is to flow and to continuously change and transform. It´s only through our judging and labeling into categories of good or bad, wanted or unwanted that we disrupt their flow and start identifying with their contents.

Without being attached to time, you will never try to hold on to emotions nor suppress or deny them. You will simply welcome them and feel the bliss that lies in experiencing them shfiting and flowing. When it´s time for a moment of sadness, it´s time for a moment of sadness. This doesn´t condemn you to permanent sadness and doesn´t categorize you as unworthy or underdevelopped either for still feeling sadness. Your true being is never concerned by thoughts or feelings you are experiencing at any given moment. It rejoices in each experience, whether our mind categorizes it as good or bad, because every experience means aliveness and expansion.

All the pain we carry within us is nothing but unfelt, accumulated emotions. We have made them part of us by trying to protect ourselves and disconnect from them. But that will never work. I can only be free of anything when I allow it fully to be there and to receive it with love. All resistance and defense ist illusion born of my attachment to time and to everything that is fading and fleeting.

Two realizations with respect to time have become milestones on my way and help me at every moment of darkness to find back into the light:

First, nothing that I truly desire and truly need is in any way related to time.

Second, being infused that nothing in time is of value, the experience of time suddenly becomes miraculous. Every fleeting experience, every instant of depression or sadness, of pain, short-lived happiness , every success and every failure.

If I stop looking for fulfillment in time, nothing in time can rob me of fulfillment in any way whatsoever. Time becomes my friend as soon as I understand that it doesn´t exist.