Accessing Timelines

Here is a quote an excerpt from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.  This excerpt is not verbatim to the book, as I skipped around to piece it together.  I have a follow-up perspective below the excerpt as well.

“A large part of people’s sense of self is intimately connected with their problems, creating an illusory sense of self, invested in pain and suffering.

The root of unconsciousness is identification with the egoic mind, which includes emotions.  Once you step out of this, you become present.  When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it.  The mind in itself is not dysfunctional.  It is a wonderful tool.  Dysfunction sets in when you seek your sense of self in it and mistake it for who you are.  It then becomes the egoic mind and takes over your whole life.

Remove time from the mind and it stops, unless you choose to use it.  To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time – the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.  This creates preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.  The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form.  Both are illusions.  The more you are focused on time – past and future – the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Why is it the most precious thing?  Firstly, because it is the only thing.  It’s all there is.  The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant.  Life is now.  There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.  Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind.  It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.

Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside of Now?  Do you think you ever will?  Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside of Now?  The answer is obvious, is it not?  Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.  Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.  When you remember the past, you are doing this Now.  When you think of the future, you are doing this Now.”

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My perspective on this is to also use memories of when I accessed the Now from my past.  For example, when I was living in the country in High School, I remember walking out in the woods on a sunny day, and I felt very joyful and time disappeared.  Although these kinds of experiences are in the past, they were Now moments that I can use as chosen.  I can also create new timeless moments in the present.  I can, for example, go for a walk in a park, admiring the scenery and the special essence/atmosphere of the park.  Whatever can be used to access joyful timelessness is key.

Here are a couple rare cinematic examples: