The timeless is not continuous
The conventional, everyday conception of time consists of the past, present, and future. This conception is itself timeless, meaning that it takes no time to arise. Yet, because the human mind is so conditioned by this conception of time, it mistakes time as an inherent quality of reality. Reality is inherently timeless. One could ask oneself, when does the past occur? It can only occur now, in the form of memories. When does the future occur? It can only occur now, in the form of projections. This is, in the logical sense, why the present contains all of time.
The mind might further objects that all of time cannot be contained in the present, because the past seems to exceed the present by an infinite degree. The past has many forms, such as an incident a minute ago, or an incident ten years ago, or an incident before the Earth existed. All that continuous occurrence could not possibly be contained within a present which has no space in itself. This seems to be true, but the error here is that the mind still operates in terms of continuity, which is itself time. The mind wants to use continuity to prove that there is continuity. The mind wants to use the continuous past to prove that the past is continuous, and therefore exceeds the present. Whereas, the continuous past is only a concept which is itself not continuous, but momentary. The continuous past arises momentarily. The continuous past arises presently. The same is true for the future.
Essentially, neither the past nor the future has real continuity, but it only seems to have continuity. The past or the future appears to span over a great length, but this very appearance has no length. Therefore, it is not necessarily true that the present contains all of time, because there is no time as continuity to contain in the first place. There is no time as continuity. There is only what is present.
What is present is already timeless. There is no need to search for the timeless. The immortal, which is something that can never die, is simply present. It can never die because it is the very nature of everything. Things are perceived to die because they are perceived in terms of time. Immortality, therefore, is beyond time, and can appear as time, but is also not time. Death is an impossibility when the timeless is understood. This does not mean that there is continuity after death, such as reincarnation, which is only a comforting escape from the timeless. The timeless is not continuous. There is absolutely no interval in the presence for any real continuity to exist. Therefore, the seeing that there is no continuity is the deathless.
Cover photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash
