"Time is a factory where everyone slaves away earning enough love to break their own chains." -Hafiz
How can it possibly be mid-June already? Summer Solstice is right around the corner! What happened to the light growing half of the year? One view of the Cosmos is that time runs in a linear fashion, yet this does not seem to correspond to my perception of reality (or that of quantum physics'!). So many of my conversations with friends and colleagues over the past weeks have revolved around strange distortions of time, looping and folding, speeding and slowing, escaping and expanding, circling and spiraling.
Is the Universe spinning faster and faster towards increasing entropy? Perhaps...
Can we consciously shift our relationship to time, i.e., practice some time magic? Let's try...
Consider this possibility: time is an illusion, created by a culture of commoditization and scarcity consciousness. In Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein writes of the monetization of time, and how we have become enslaved by scarcity - scarcity of life and happiness: "For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short."
Think about the language around time, consider these aphorisms:
- we are living on borrowed time
- time is money
- can't afford the time
- never enough time
- time is slipping away
- no time to waste
- wasting time
- spending time
- time got away from me
- Can you think of any others?
(Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" 1931. A surrealist landscape where time bends and melts over itself.)
Leap from a habitual pattern of thinking in terms of scarcity - of not ever having or being enough - to the truth of your vastness. This world is ceaselessly pulsing in and out of pure potential. Every moment we merge with the infinite Oneness, then re-emerge into space, time, individuation, diversity. This is spanda - the pulsation of life. This is where we can call on Kali and Eris to be our guides into and through the chaos of reorganizing matter.
Om Klim Kalika-Yei Namaha
This is one of the many mantras to Kali, a Hindu deity renowned for her fierce and bloody ways. She is socially unacceptable, so to speak. Her energy has the power to obliterate, and be forewarned, if you choose to engage with her, your very sense of self may be obliterated...but that's another story for another day.
One of Kali's names is Supreme Goddess of Time. In the sequence of Initiation, Inspiration and Creation, she is first, she is the Initiator - the spark that consumes and activates BIG transformation. This time on the planet is one of Great Initiations and Transformations. We are at a bifurcation point - a chaotic moment of incredible potential, when the smallest change can create dramatic qualitative shifts in the direction and expression of life.
Many of us are being called into an entirely different relationship with the world - internally and externally - we are being called out of time as we have known (learned) it. The Goddess that rules this expanse of time out of time - this chaos of potentiality - is Eris. She has been in the shadows for a long time, yet I feel Her rising from the Underworld and the depths of the Unconscious.
Even though Kali and Eris are of a different Cosmologies, I feel that they are sisters - both, expressions of the Dark Goddess who stirs and scrapes at the bottom of the Cauldron. And, what is the black sticky crusty stuff in the Cauldron of Time? Fear, scarcity, lack, miserly greed, isolation, competition...never enough.
Never enough? Enough? Not enough? Not good enough? Oh, this a disease of the patriarchy! What if, instead, there is enough, way more than enough? What if we could hop into another orientation to life in which there is more than enough, in which you are more than enough? Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects: "Can anyone remember when the times were not hard and money was not scarce."
Can you remember? It's time to remember, to recall a time of abundance - abundant time, abundant self worth, abundant gratitude. What if we believe, truly believe, that we have all the time in the world, and/or that time as we know it is far from Truth? There is no time but the present in all its multilayered fullness. Then, we can move out of the anxious hurried world, into infinite space. How? Keep reading...
Time Magic, A Practice:
Memory, deja vu, Dreamtime, meditation, and ritual/ceremony transport us out of "normal" time. When we close our eyes, we can drop into an altogether different reality and relationship with time, traveling across eons, and journeying through lifetimes. We step out of "normal" time and space into something else entirely.
Consider time as cycles within cycles, a Celtic knot becoming more intricate with every breath. Within the space of every breath is a small miracle. As Lorin Roche writes in his beautiful rendition of the Vinjana Bhairava Tantra, The Radiance Sutras, Yukti 3:
“Enter these turning points,
Where the rhythms of life transform
Into each other.
Breath flows in, filling, filling
In this moment, drink eternity.
Breath flows out, emptying, emptying,
Offering itself to infinity.
Cherishing these moments,
Mind dissolves into heart,
Heart dissolves into space,
Body becomes a vibrating field,
Pulsating between fullness and emptiness.”
Step into that space in between the end of your inhalation and the beginning of your exhalation. Rest in the chaos. Call on Kali and Eris. Allow the chaos to transform you, utterly and completely. The most interesting thing about this simple practice is that it's not a big deal, until suddenly it is...and you find yourself in the midst of pure potentiality, eternal and infinite, beyond all concepts of time and space.
Blessed Be.
Copyright © 2015, jennifer marie lane, All rights reserved.
