The View from the Centre

Have you ever noticed there are no straight lines in the universe?  Everything has a curve somewhere.  Even that old ruler at school had a curve at the end, although you may need a bed bug sized perspective to see it!  What we tend to do however, is try to straighten out the world.  It comes from the impulse to control.  We think we can straighten out other people, gardeners think they can straighten out their garden, countries think they can straighten out other countries, and sometimes our arrogance stretches as far as the weather, as we attempt to manipulate its mysterious patterns.  But the world just doesn’t work like that.  It works in curves, or to be more precise, cycles.  The carbon cycle, the water cycle, the economic cycle, the cyclical movements of orbiting planets are all testimony to the idea that the world, at almost every level, doesn’t go along, it goes around! 

When we are conditioned by linear thinking we can only see and think in straight lines, and if we can’t, we become frustrated.  Yet even the world in our heads moves in cycles – thought, feeling, action, result, thought, feeling action, result.  And most mystically of all, time itself – straight lines or cycles?  The day, the year, the seasons are all cycles that define the rhythm of our lives.  In these cycles there is both a sense of completion and completeness that sits alongside an awareness of continuous change.  What is momentary sits comfortably within the eternity of what is! 

The Hub of the Wheel
There is a symmetrical beauty in the turning of a wheel, perfection and harmony in a rhythm that turns back on itself to begin again.  The world around us is always moving and changing and our awareness of the passing of time is based on our perception of change.  In more ancient cultures including the Greeks and the Mayans they developed a deeper intuition about the true nature of time/change and its tendency to move in cycles.  They extracted the ideas of past, present and future from a linear context (way of thinking) and overlaid a cyclical context.  And then, in there mystical practices of meditation and contemplation, they assumed to role of the ‘centre’ of the wheel of time.  They created a state of awareness within their consciousness where they were the ‘hub’ of the changing world ‘out there’.  The hub of any wheel is still, it’s the one aspect of a wheel that doesn’t move and therefore change.  It has long been recognised that the true and most powerful state of our consciousness, which is our ‘self’, is stillness; a silent and still state from which all that is real is seen and known and all that is illusory falls away.  It’s as if it’s only in a state of silence and stillness, free of the narrowing effect of thinking on our awareness, that it’s possible to go beyond our awareness of the passing of time and the changing nature of space.  Only then are we able to hold within our awareness a complete ‘sense of all’ of time and space.  The big picture or the whole wheel is then seen and known in its completeness.

As the wheel of earthly time and change is viewed from this still point at the centre, from the inner hub, there is, for a few moments, an awareness that the past is the future, the future is the past, and the present is simply a meeting of the two.  But eventually even the past, present and future dissolve into an awareness that contains the whole movement of all time and therefore all change.  It’s is if you have watched a movie and you now carry an awareness of the whole movie.  It’s not an awareness of each of its component parts or individual characters, but just an instant sense of the whole story.  The awareness that grows when you are still and silent at the ‘hub’ of your consciousness contains a similar knowingness.  It is an awareness of the perfect completeness of ‘the whole story’ of  ALL time and spatial change without needing to sequentially think it through.  The need or desire to understand it in any way disappears. 

 …And NOW!
And so it was with many of the ancient cultures, with some philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and even with some of the eastern mystics.  Their practice of stillness, their deep interest and search into the mysteries of time and change, led them to what they believed was a more enlightened awareness of the ‘whole story’.  They saw, with their inner eye, from the ‘hub’ of a still and silent state, the perfect cyclical nature of all time and all change in the context of the whole story of human kind.  It was walking round a lake one day that Wittgenstein declared that he have been in this exact moment in this exact place thinking the exact same thoughts before and that he would be again.  He believed he had realised the perfection of the greatest cycle of them all.

When we do realise that past and future are simply ideas, when we stop clinging to memories and indulging in hopes, we come know that life only happens in one singular, infinite moment called NOW. During more recent times there has been a rising awareness alongside many resurrected ancient teachings that there is only ‘NOW’ and that living in the present moment is the only way to fully experience the true beauty and richness of life.   Many schools and teachers of meditation and contemplation have sprung up to offer their approach to restoring this ability to perceive and hold an awareness of ‘the essence’ of all time and all space in the NOW!  Unfortunately we have developed the tendency to become trapped in our memories, or preoccupied with worrisome futures.  Agitated by thoughts of non-existent yesterdays and fictitious tomorrows, attached to our histories, indulgent in our imaginations and seekers of perpetual stimulation we find it hard to ‘be still’ and at the hub of our consciousness.  We are ‘caught’ by and ‘addicted’ to change and consequently develop the habit of missing the present moment and therefore a large part of our ‘real life’.  ‘They’ remind us that in the world we all share ‘reality’ is only NOW and never in the past or in the future.

Infinite Opportunities
Being mindful of ‘the moment’ and knowing that the reality of NOW is the art of seeing that every moment has a value of it’s own, even if the experience of that moment does not connect with any of our ambitions, or goals, or mental preoccupations.  Every day contains infinite opportunities when we can return to being ‘in the moment’ and therefore beyond the ‘pull’ of past and future.  To spotlessly clean a window, or sweep leaves for the backyard, is a physical experience that has its own significance and nobility.  This is one reason why monks of many faiths recognise the spiritual value of routine agricultural work, such as digging, planting and other activities that we might normally consider tedious and banal.  They knew that the time signified by the machines we call clocks was nothing compared to the timelessness that could be experienced by being fully present in the moment, fully mindful of whatever action is being performed.   They knew that the cycles of change into which we offer our activity, were made of unlimited moments of NOW.  They knew that the deepest peace was not to be found in anything ‘in time’ but only by going beyond time, beyond the drag of memory and the temptation of speculation.  Their life was dedicated to finding the entry point, the doorway to the eternity that is defined by time’s cyclical movement, while still living and moving through time.  They heard and felt a call that we all hear, albeit faintly, to return to the centre, to the still point, to the NOW, around which our life revolves perfectly even with all its imperfections.  

 What does time mean to you?

The past is history, the future a mystery and the present is all there is 

Breaking the habit of time consciousness - leave your watch at home today.  See how often you think, “What time is it?” and look for a clock. 

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Ross Galán, NLP Spiritual Life Coach
at the Spiritual Life Coaching School