The Illusion of Time
Time is not experienced, only the Now is experienced. In this talk, Eckhart brings a sense of clarity around our experience of time. He describes how the unconscious mind is always unhappy in the present moment because it is always looking to the future for something better.   He explains how the mind creates a story of me to build up a false sense of self, the ego. The ego always hopes to find what seems to be missing in the present moment by looking towards the next moment which never arrives except as the Now. This unconscious state of being relies on our thinking mind, on our understanding of past and future as important, crucial elements to our existence. Eckhart describes past and future as only thought-forms , concepts created by the mind which are used to understand change. The mind-made sense of self , or ego, is always searching for meaning. At the most basic level, the creation of a self implies that there must also be the other . Eckhart explains that the more one identifies with thinking, the more the ego is in control. Thus, it becomes more difficult to sense your own aliveness, the shared consciousness of all life. Eckhart describes how the ego struggles to create meaning in an unconscious world by seeking it out through interactions and behaviors that provoke responses. For example, he notes that conflict can be one way for people to feel alive, if only on a negative level. Pain, suffering, and human drama can create a secondary sense of aliveness, which he explains is a substitution for the real sense of aliveness - that which comes from simply feeling the timeless consciousness that you are, which resides beneath all forms, including thought. --Natalie Schreiber