What Time Is It NOW
What Time Is It NOW
What time is it NOW? If you are looking at your watch to find out, you are a victim of
one of the greatest mass hypnosis on earth! And you are not alone. Each one of us is
imprisoned in the net of time.
Your watch might say it is 7:15 am. But look around at the other clocks in your house.
Are they exactly showing the same time to the second? Probably not! They might be
running a few minutes apart. For our normal consciousness, this is not a problem. We
assume that there must be an exact time RIGHT NOW, which someone (probably the
government or GOD) must obviously be maintaining.
It is not even surprising to us that in Singapore, it might be 9:45 am on April 10 th right
now or in the United States, 7:45 pm on April 9 th. This is because it is a commonly
accepted notion that there are different time zones. But note that the earth is not
physically but only conceptually divided into longitudes. We are taught so many things in
history and geography early in childhood that we fail to question anything and get so
busy with our life that we never get around to examining the nature of reality.
If on the earth, there are different times at different places, what time is it now?
We are so hooked to the watch and the time it shows, that our whole life revolves
around it. We wake up at a certain time, have to catch a bus or train at a certain time,
reach office at a certain time, meet a friend at a certain time, cook pizza in the
microwave for a certain time, grow from a baby to an adult in a certain number of years
and so on. It is so so obvious that there IS time that no one questions whether time
exists in reality. I know that no one is going to believe this, but if you are one of those
inquisitive types and want to know the behind the scenes story then please pay
attention.
You will at least accept that the clock is just an instrument. If the clock stops, the time
does not stop. This is our conventional understanding. So if time never stops for anyone,
can we see it moving?
Look at any object around you say a door. Observe very keenly. Do you see it moving
from the past minute to the present minute into the next minute? Or do you see it
coming from the future into the present and fading away into the past? If you do not
claim to possess divine vision, you will just see the door. You will not see it going
anywhere or coming from anywhere.
And thats a fact. The door is there right now. The wood, out of which the door gets its
shape and name, is decaying in the context of its surrounding environment due to heat
and moisture and maybe termites. This process cannot be seen with the naked eye on a
second to second basis, but is happening and cannot be denied. You can look at the door
after 10 years and you will surely see the change.
So if you tell yourself that the door that you see is actually changing right now due to
the moisture and heat, it will actually be the truth compared to believing our normal
consciousness that provides a false picture of a permanent and unchanging door.
So it is with everything around us, including ourselves. Everything is continuously
changing. Now look at the clock and watch the second hand. It is moving and changing
its orientation continuously. One of the first things that was taught to us as a child (who
is changing into becoming a grownup), is to read the time from the clock. So we see
which hand is pointing to which number and speak out the time. But if you drop the
interpretation and just see the hands, they are only changing their position continuously.
This change of position is interpreted as different times.