The Nature of Time

yes, existance as a whole is completly pointless on the grandscale of eternity but what things do you like? what do you derive pleasure from? those are the things that make existance good.

 

I feel you brother. Nothing you can really do to erase those thoughts.. We all battle with thought process very much the same to that one.

Just take life for what it is... don't think so deeply into it. Life is but a game.

 

For most people, that how it can end...forgotten. So why don't you leave something behind so you will leave a mark in history? Strive to be your best at something and leave your impression. You know what I mean? Find YOUR purpose, what ever it may be! be a SOMEONE.
One day the physical You will pass away, but there will always be Your spirit to live on through whatever you instilled on the people around you while you were alive.

 

Independent from your ability to ask this question your body is doing everything it can to keep you alive. Life strives to grow, adapt, and propagate because life strives for the moment, its goal isn't to forecast the inevitable fate of all things, its goal is right this very second and nothing more. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from our survival instincts and demand a lot fewer answers out of a future we can't touch. People should try to be more connected with what's happening around them at this very moment, and by doing so simply live.

 

I think Alan Watts once said that "Anxiety is our imagination running wild about the future" it may have been Terrence Mckenna who said that but I smoke ALOT of weed and my brain is preety dead, but some how I make it outa bed, Just ta get up, Light up, and take another rip, munch out quick cuzz the buzz is fadin, so what was I doin, thats right, nothin, just foolin, around and around the house I pace, cuz im brain dead, in my head there are empty space,es, cuz all my life saw nothin but sad sad face,es, Daddy couldn't pay the bills so he sat around, and drowned, Mommy couldn't pay the bills so she never even frowned, as she burned, the wedding gown. Finally at the age of 15 I found sweet sweet bliss that came from a gentle kiss, from my first homegirl, Mary, No bitch could ever rise to that number one spot in my mind, Cuz every other hoe could be rat ready to snitch, cuz theyll be that way, when loves a game you got everything to loose and nothing to gain, so live it straight and stick to your self, fuck a chick love a girl, but always put it back on the shelf. Its that attachment to the future thats got young couples tangled in failing marriages, and as a side note, I say 80 percent of all people are drunken accidents.

 

The intellectual conclusion of someone who lives a "regular" life of ups and downs, mostly downs, that life has no purpose, that existence is fleeting, that the body, identity, and experiences are fleeting and ultimately impersonal, leads to the nihilistic conclusion that it is all worthless and not worth living.

The same conclusion, not concluded, not intellectually, but experienced, experientially, is the greatest of liberations and inner revelations about the nature of existence.

Yes, your life is fleeting. Your body is the same as any matter around you - the fallen flower, the dead branches. Your relationships and sense of "this is who I am", everything that you stake so much of yourself in, is all fleeting, all pointless, all ultimately irrelevant on your deathbed as the real question hits you for all other questions are then irrelevant.

The truth is an experience, that you are NOT your body, you are NOT your identity, you are NOT your relationships, and that YOU, cannot die. You have always been, and always will be, despite what your intellect might argue. You are THAT. THAT is you. You are the unseen, forgotten seer. The constant behind all the changes - the constant that under layers and layers of accumulation, has been long forgotten. Find it again, and you will find yourself in every stroke of the divine art that is existence. You will experience the great freedom - the one that was always there, but in favor of false security in identity, you traded it away. You can trade it back.

How do you find out who you really are? How do you find the thread of existence that is really you, that destroys all questions of "Why? Who? What is the point", destroys all depression, all fear, all anxiety, all the experiences of the being that believes himself to be separate, separate from IT, and reveal the great freedom? The unspeakable, unutterable, inexplicable existential thread that is everything and that is you, and that is beyond the impermanent, and will always be?

By de-conditioning, by taking steps back, not steps forward. By slowly unravelling your identity, slowly gaining understanding and insight into the nature of existence by meditatively contemplating impermanence, death, the nature of yourself, the nature of the unfilling chasing of fulfilment day after day, week after week, year after year, life after life. By awakening the unconditioned pure consciousness behind thought, behind your mechanical mind, which once awakened, cultivated, and stabilized, becomes the center of your identity, and you experience yourself in this bodily existence as the pure subjectivity of pristine, uninvolved consciousness, and realize all of existence as pure non-conceptual subjectivity too. By surrendering to the pure subjectivity once it is established, by surrendering everything, every doubt, every conditioning, everything you think or thought about existence or about yourself. By surrendering into the bottomless now, the secret gateway into the unmanifested, into the absolute, to experience the great rest - death while still alive. By awakening your heart, the portal to manifested divinity, even if you don't believe in it, to realize that it is not a matter of belief, that it is there. To realize who you really, truly are - the soul, the individual spark, separate but still in union with its mother, the beloved divinity. To realize that "you" are simply one of existences many manifestations, that it manifested to experience itself from countless different angles of perception, the marvel and brilliance of this. To awaken to yourself, your purpose of incarnation, the source of everything - the unmanifested, and to awaken to your pure consciousness that transcends the mind.

This is where the truth reveals itself experientially, and the inner answer that puts to rest all other questions and answers, reveals itself to have never been hidden, but that you had just been searching outside, while it allthewhile, was sitting inside. The awakening and stabilizing of pure consciousness creates the resting ground from which you can truly start going deeper and deeper into existence. It allows you to be present without getting lost in the subconscious flux of chaotic thought, emotion, and insanity. The awakening and deepening of your being allows you to be here, fully, now, more than all pseudo-new-age ideas of "being in the now". It allows you to experience great rest and stillness, the same stillness of the trees, of the mountains, of the rock. The awakening and expanding of your heart allows you to experientially realize the truth of Grace, of manifested divinity, the willful intelligence that unfolds creation. Allows you to realize your unity with it, to receive guidance from it, to see it in every fragment of every cell of the manifested - that fills your being with deep tenderness and bliss and love towards all of creation, all the time. That demolishes your physical boundaries, and makes you feel like a flower falling from a tree is falling within You. The awakening of the soul to itself allows you to realize who you really are in your timeless purity, your purpose, brings the great clarity to you. It allows you to surrender yourself, your true self, back to the divine source, and experience the great unity.

This is what the East has called "sat-chit-ananda", existence-consciousness-bliss. All three must be awakened and cultivated to truly experience Yourself, to truly experience It, and to truly realize that You are It.

 

You're welcome brother, I've just found life to be less complicated than many think, and the most important moments aren't to be achieved because they are right now.

 

Dude if I it makes u feel any better, just look into the block universe theory. that same shit got me down a few months ago, but I got into quantum physics and stuff like that. Basically it states that the moment we call the present is all relative. It’s only the present to you because you have no memory "stored" in your brain of the future events you will experience, but all of your past is there. So every moment that you experience is going to feel like the present, it’s the only way we could evolve and survive. Life forms weren’t designed to understand the inner workings of time and reality, only to eat sleep and fuck, to put it crudely. Just remember that Einstein and modern physicists believe time to be a 4th dimension, just like the three spatial ones. So really all that will ever happen and all that ever has happened is occurring simultaneously in this 4th dimension that we as people are too stupid to perceive. So like I said, look up block universe, read slaughterhouse 5 and educate yourself on all sorts of sciences on this subject. Eventually you realize that we have little to no understanding of how reality actually works. if I had to sum up this philosophy in one sentence it would be that time is eternal, so are all the moments and emotions you experience in your life, just because one day you die doesn’t mean your time in this universe is erased. So smoke up and enjoy life, don’t take yourself and ego too seriously, as the late great Bill Hicks put it “don’t be sad or scared…ever! It’s just a ride!”

 

Yeah bro, when you get down to it, this "reality" we have in our mind is just the electric impulses of our brains, based off of some pretty weak and feeble senses. To have it in your head that human consciousness is the be-all-end-all of the universe is pretty fucking silly. There’s some crazy shit happening in this universe that we could never dream of understanding. Using psychedelics and meditation you can kill this "self" that we as people cling too and realize that the nothingness we fear so much is actually pretty fuckin cool. Like I said don’t take this existence to seriously, it’s just a natural process of chemical reactions, no different from the forming of planets and stars. There are some deeper truths to this universe that we have no idea of and probably never will; just that knowledge is enough to keep me happy.

 

Guy's, I have to say.
I love you.
All those responses to first question prior were "indescribably" insightfull.
I'v been suffereing from the same thing he was.
I was questioning everything, begginning to lose hope.

But..Wow..

Thank you.

 

Glad to help bro. the problem we as people have is we put distance between us and those around us; we keep these feelings bottled up and pretend we don't feel them, but WE ALL DOO. If we could all just openly communicate our fears and questions about existence, we would all be in a much better place spiritually. I don't mean spiritually in the traditional sense of a soul, but rather that deeper mystery of existence. If you ignore these feeling, or try to drown them out with the company of others, religion, drugs, etc you're not helping your situation. If you study things like quantum physics, consciousness, natural science, etc you get the same benefit as the more gullible among us get from attending church, you tap into that feeling of aw and mysteries we all need. ​

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Comedians like Bill Hicks and Joe Rogan (yes, the fear factor guy) know this. And if you want to hear some very interesting and compelling ideas in a comedic form, go to YouTube and check out their standup and interviews​

 

I’ve always looked at it like this. When people get themselves down saying things like "how their lives are so insignificant and pointless, there’s billions of galaxies and trillions of stars..." etc. well "significance" is a made up idea! Without consciousness what makes a single atom less significant than a solar system or galaxy? It’s kind of silly to say one is more important than the other just because it’s bigger. We made up this idea of purpose, there for there is nothing more "important" than us because we ascribe this idea to ourselves. I’m finding it hard to express this idea in writing, but it’s clear as glass in my head, haha.

 

Wow this very same idea has been really bothering me lately, thank you for posting this.

 

Let's pretend I'm a spiritual master (I'm not) and you're an incurably depressed person (you're not; you're curable).

Me: 'Suppose you're right. What would happen if everything you experience is someday forgotten?'

You: 'Well, then there'd be nothing.'

Me: 'If there was nothing, would that be a bad thing?'

You: 'Yes, obviously.'

Me: 'How can Nothing be a Bad Thing? How can anything be bad if you don't exist to experience it?'

You: '...OK, well I guess Nothing technically can't be bad. But still, the fact we die is an important fact of life."

Me: 'Yes, it is. In fact, it is the *second* most important fact of life.'

You: '...What's the most important fact of life, then?'

Me: 'The fact you are alive NOW.'

People suffering from depression and anxiety have an overwhelming tendency to give their negative thoughts a higher priority than the present moment. In other words, thinking comes before living, for them. And the worst part is, these thoughts are almost always untrue, exaggerated, or otherwise flawed. People with depression spend most of the time in an *imagined* past, often with a feeling of regret or loss. This creates their depression. On the other hand, people with anxiety spend most of their time in an *imaginary* future, fixating on frightening and unpleasant possibilities. This creates their anxiety, and it keeps them in that state.

Last year I was hospitalized for severe depression and anxiety. At the time, I felt I was ready to die. Luckily, I saw a number of good psychiatrists who helped me overcome my negative thoughts and see how nasty, counterproductive, and untrue they really were. I realized that my mind, something I value immensely, had become my own worst enemy.

Cognitive behavioral therapy helped me a lot. It is the only effective treatment for thought-based depression. A shitload of studies have shown it's more effective than any psychiatric drug. CBT works because it trains you to recognize, isolate and correct your negative thoughts, the same thoughts that create your depression. Only by changing your negative thought patterns can you permanently overcome depression.

Every qualified psychologist and psychiatrist in the United States is familiar with CBT. If you already have a therapist but remain depressed, ask them about it; they might be certified in CBT. If you don't have or can't afford therapy, I'll send you the most popular text on CBT. It's called Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. If you're interested, drop me a line and I'll email you the PDF (10MB). Don't forget to thank me, though, because in stores the book costs money.