There is something remarkably convincing about time. A difficult feeling appears now, but almost immediately the mind can stretch it backward and forward: I’ve been here before. How long will this last? What if I still feel this way next week?
Suddenly, what is actually being felt in this moment has become something much larger. The mind is no longer dealing only with what is here. It is trying to carry a past and manage a future at the same time.
This is one of the deepest implications of the power of now. It is not simply a suggestion to pay more attention to the present moment. There is something much more fundamental to notice about the relationship between thought, time, resistance, and our willingness to remain in direct contact with experience.
And when that relationship becomes obvious, some very familiar forms of suffering begin to look quite different.
Why The Power of Now Is So Accessible
Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is such a genius book. It is so well written.
I’ve talked about it before. If you haven’t read it, check it out. Probably most people who watch my channel have read it, but if you haven’t, it’s excellent.
There are a couple of reasons I think it is so well written and uses language in such a genius way. One of them is simply that it is so accessible. It is really disarming. It is simple.
I think a lot of people overlook it because they think, “Well, that’s not hardcore non-duality. That’s just entry-level mindfulness or something.”
I really don’t think that’s what it is.
I think Tolle masterfully uses very simple language to point toward a very deep and important insight. It is an insight I point to as well, in different ways, and one I find important to repeat.
The book does this in a particularly effective way because the same thing is being pointed to over and over throughout the entire book, from many different directions.
He uses the term now, or the power of now. But even more importantly, he points toward the illusion of past and future. The illusion of not now.
The Power of Now and the Illusion of Time
Time is incredibly binding.
I notice this often in people even in deeper realization. Occasionally, even beyond no-self realization, when someone gets really bound up, it is almost always connected with time.
There can be other components. But without time, without the mind imagining time, it is very difficult to enter a strong resistance pattern.
In fact, I would say it is essentially impossible.
You might feel very intense energies. You may feel intense sensations. There can be energies moving through the body, even involuntary movements and things like that.
But without the illusion of time, without believing in time or reifying time through thought, it is very difficult to resist anything.
If you notice what you are thinking about when you are caught in a resistance pattern, you will often find that the mind is trying to hold some span of time.
It may be the past. It may be the future. Often it is both.
How the Mind Tries to Hold the Future
One way we try to hold a span of future time sounds something like this:
“How long is this going to go on?”
“What if this is still happening tomorrow?”
“What if it is still happening next week?”
“God, what if this just keeps going?”
“I don’t think I can handle this pain that long.”
“I can handle it right now, but I’m not sure I can handle it if it keeps going for a week or two weeks.”
Those are only a few examples. The variations I hear from people are tremendous.
And it is heavy.
It is so heavy to try to hold time.
The beauty of recognizing this is that none of that future is actually happening.
There is no future you need to manage.
The moment that becomes clear, you are released. You are free. You are here again.
That is the power of now.
Tolle points toward this over and over, sometimes very cleverly, sometimes subtly, and sometimes very directly. But the language remains so digestible. That is one reason I think the book is so powerful.
It also frequently opens people to that dimension of timelessness while they are reading it. That increases the possibility of a shift, a true shift in identity, because you are being continually opened to that dimension of timelessness.
You are being reminded of something you have never actually been apart from.
How the Past Extends the Experience Into Time
The future is one part of the binding. The other part is the past.
Consider thoughts such as:
“Oh, I’m back here again.”
“I’ve been here so many times.”
Those thoughts reference multiple past moments as though those moments are actually being experienced now.
They aren’t.
But the thoughts seem to drag the current experience out into time, and suddenly it becomes very, very heavy.
If you notice that there really is no past or future, and the mind is not contemplating either one, then there is only what is actually being felt right now.
Without comparing it, how can there be a problem?
Without comparing now to anything, how can there be resistance?
Why would there be resistance unless there is an idea that what is happening could be different from how it is?
And the only place we can get the idea that it could be different from how it is comes from thoughts about the past and future.
Those thoughts are far more distorting than we realize.
Why Thought About Time Can Initially Feel Soothing
There is an important caveat here.
Before awakening, early in this process, or when someone is very mind-identified and lost in thoughts for much of the day, these kinds of thoughts may not actually feel so distressing.
In fact, they can feel soothing.
And in some sense they are soothing.
When identity is deeply tied up in thought, there are so many layers of thought happening almost constantly that it is possible to switch from one track of thought that feels uncomfortable to another track that feels a little more comfortable.
For example, there might be a thought saying:
“Oh, well, I can figure out what to do about this later.”
When we are dissociated from the body because of identification with thought, that actually works, sort of.
It works to some degree.
You might ask, “Well, why not just live like that?”
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but the problem is that as soon as there is a significant trigger or an activation of trauma, you go unconscious.
That activation might show itself as anger or rage. It might be all kinds of shame. And it can come out sideways onto people around you, people you don’t want to hurt, strangers, or yourself.
That is why it matters.
Identification With Thought and the Sense of Control
When identity is almost completely located inside thought, it can feel like there are multiple layers of thinking available, and you can simply switch from one layer to another when something becomes uncomfortable.
In a way, it seems to work.
It gives you a sense of control.
It gives you the sense that, “In the future I can do this, and this, and this, and then I can avoid something.”
But you are already dissociating from your body.
So it is just one more turn in the house of mirrors of dissociation.
The whole place is so confusing that you don’t realize how much it is actually costing you to remain in that world of dissociation.
Why the Cost of Dissociation Becomes More Obvious
At the other end of the spectrum, I see something very different in deeper realization.
Those old habits of dissociating through thought, especially through time, begin to have a much higher cost.
And I mean the immediate cost.
It feels horrible.
In a way, that is good.
If you were to ask the universe to really show you truth, to show you how to live in truth, how to live close to experience, how to live without dissociating, how to live without going unconscious, and how to live without losing direct contact with reality, then this is what it has to show you.
It has to show you the cost and the pain of dissociating in certain ways.
And one of the most significant ways we do that is through time.
Ultimately, it is always through thought. But time in particular is very distorting, and it can become very uncomfortable.
Time as the Vehicle of Resistance
If I can guide someone through this and show them what is happening, and help them recognize that those thoughts are reifying time, they almost always drop in very easily.
They feel the relief.
And it works.
With enough reminders, eventually you begin reminding yourself. At some point, you simply stop using time in that way.
But it can be incredibly distressing when you are trying to dissociate and you can no longer successfully dissociate, while at the same time the body is feeling something very intense.
The energetics are coming through, and yet the little remaining tendency toward identification feels profoundly uncomfortable.
Why?
Let’s say reality itself, or the truth of your infinite self, if you want to use the term self, doesn’t want to leave itself.
It can’t leave itself.
It doesn’t want to disappear from the experience. It wants to be in that experience because that is natural.
It is non-dualistic.
So trying to distort that into an experience of dissociation, using a very old coping mechanism that no longer works, becomes extremely uncomfortable.
I think it is uncomfortable energetically, psychologically, and emotionally.
But the mechanism, the vehicle, is time.
The illusion of time.
Returning to the Power of Now
So again, right here, here we are.
Read The Power of Now. It is great if you haven’t read it. If you haven’t read it in a long time, maybe read it again.
It is so good, and it is a very easy read.
But there are also questions you can ask yourself to directly remind yourself of what this is pointing toward.
Outside This Moment, What Can Actually Be Known?
Ask:
Outside of this moment, what can be known at all?
How can anything outside this moment be known?
Only through thought, right?
But don’t merely answer the question conceptually.
Ask the question and look.
Another question is:
Without imagining past or future in any way, can I find a problem?
Or:
Without imagining past or future, can anything here actually be resisted?
These are not just philosophical questions. Look directly at what happens.
Even Resisting Something Present Requires Time
You might say, “Well, I don’t know. There is something over there.”
Maybe there is a physical object across the room, and somehow that object is distressing to you.
You might say, “Well, I can resist that.”
But how can you resist it?
You actually have to imagine it not being there.
Even with something that is directly in your immediate experience, in your immediate vicinity, resistance requires imagining that it is not the way it currently is.
You have to use time.
That is why these questions can be so valuable.
You can use them at any moment as a reminder.
The Power of Now as an Experiential Experiment
Another thing you can do is use the kinds of thought experiments, or experiential experiments, that I often point toward.
If you believe the past is real, show it to me.
Show me the past right now.
Reach into it.
Touch it.
Pull an object out of it and show me.
Look around.
Do you see the past?
Or do you see right now?
I think Eckhart Tolle says something like this in his book. People will argue with it, but it is so ridiculously obvious that we overlook it.
There is no past.
The future is the same.
The future may actually be a little easier for people to see, because the mind says, “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s there somewhere.”
Really?
Look around at the future.
Do you see it?
What do you really see?
When you begin to see that thought and time are intertwined, it becomes clear that one really cannot exist without the other.
Resistance cannot exist without those.
And what are you really left with?