No Time

Most of us assume that time is something that rushes forward from past to future, a bit like wind blowing across a mountaintop, and that we're caught in that flow.

Our lives are a continual, frantic rush that starts out at the moment of our birth and ends when we die. We're always trying to catch up, but never can. Another way to express this perspective is to notice the assumption that time already existed before we're born. We enter into time, sort of like a boat entering a stream, and ride it, then step out at the end of our lives. It keeps going without us.

But another perspective is possible: one in which are are standing still, and time rushes through us. We are static and unchanging in a universe that changes all around us, and that changes through time, in relation to us.

Sit still, close your eyes, and try to imagine that you aren't the one that's moving. You're here, sitting still. Time is moving through you.

Now you can see that you life is a little like a stage play. You're born, and the universe is born with you, just like the curtain opening on the stage. You live your life, and when you die, your world and everything in it disappears as you go. There is no time and no world outside of you.

From this perspective there is nothing in the world that does not already exist. There is nothing more that you need that you don't already have, nothing that you are missing. You are complete and whole just as you are. There is nothing "outside".

Even your incompleteness and emptiness is part of that whole.

Nothing is left out.

The 10-hour day was invented in France during the French Revolution a way to sock it to royalty. 10 o'clock is midnight, and 5 o'clock is noon. Each "hour" is devided into 10 parts, and each part into 10 more parts. So a complete day has 1000 time units.