The measurement of time is beginning to lose its meaning for me. Apart from arranging for appointments or making plans with friends, the urgency of staying “on time” or paying attention to time is weakening. The past is becoming more of a blur, and it is becoming less important to remember just when it was I did something. Like yesterday, I was trying to remember when I went to visit my brother, then decided the timing was totally incidental to the visit.
Some of this change in my perception, or non-perception of time is due to my developing an empty mind. My attention to meditation is carrying over into my daily activities, and increments of time are fading. I have less sense of the passage of time. I am becoming more convinced that the progression of time or the breaking into sequential moments is an illusion. There is simply the dimension of time, and the measurement of its progress is a useful artifact for my intellect.
This realization has been reinforced by my studying the development of life on earth, a process that has been going on over 3.5 billion years to the present. Seen in a glance, as a whole, it is but one action. The years stacked next to one another by millions, thousands or decades of measured years are but one singular event. And I am part of that moment.
In concrete ways, the past is still taking part in me. Even though I can impose measurements of time on snapshots of the past, the history of my origins, the emergence of my life is one event. It is a singular event that is mirrored in my individual development, from the mergence of that egg and sperm to the breath I just exhaled.
To put things in order so that they make sense to my intellect, it is useful to impose a grid of a day, a month, a year or an eon on the dimension of time. But I can be aware of time without the aid of measurements. First, I must develop the skill of an empty mind. Then, in a flash, it makes sense.