94. Time and Me.

What is time?  This is a difficult question, which assumes that there is an answer.  It’s the assumption of a positive answer that 'objectivises' time. This assumption is also is what, is enabling ‘time’ to exist as, an independent thing. Time is thus a concept or agreed upon term, used in communicating one’s idea with another; as if such a ‘thing’ called objective time exists. If you ask someone to define time, he could not make it tangible.
Time is an idea to 'grasp' change or movement. So you choose a frame of a second or hour or a day, mentally. This frame can take a story of an event to fill that frame. The frame of time is purely mind made or imagined, as physically other than now, nothing is 'sensable' directly. Its the sense of duration that makes a feel of time through knowledge, that 'change is with respect to time'. So change gives rise to time rather than time gives rise to change. A sense of space make three dimensional objects ‘seem’ to exist and a sense of time seems to make 'change or movement or event' as a 'story' of change to exist. 
Duration is memory dependent and arises with a ‘sense of perception’ wherein, what is already perceived seems to overlap with what is now being perceived as if, the previous existence continues into the present.  So we have persistence of vision, sound, smell, feel, etc, from the previous moments into the present moment. This drag smoothens each frame that is perceived, to make continuity to what is perceived  seemingly increasing the present frame of time from past to future. The perceiver ( sense instrument or body) within the frame of time is also appearing to change, even though the fact is that its the unchanging element that can perceive change.
If you take a movie film, and run it at slow speed, it is all frames. At a certain speed, it feels like a movie and at full speed it may just be white light. So the existence of a movie to the film is a matter of resonance between the perceiver’s persistence of vision and the speed of at which perception is displayed. So the experience of movement or duration in the movie is purely a type of synchronicity of perception and display. In case something happens, to change your sense of perception, the whole world may crumble on itself! So the existence of the world is magically maintained through a sense of ‘duration’ to what is perceived using a magical memory, that is somehow maintaining the ‘reality’ of ‘things’.
It doesn’t take much to see through this ‘fact’ that all there is -is -a magical operation happening, what we call life, wherein a world is maintained on a mental screen, magically through the use of direct perceiving, memory and a time lag of the perceived sensations, that gives continuity to the world having ourselves also as perceived.
What is eternal is not recognised as such, because the process of recognition, being the intelligence of what eternal is,  is purposely designed to make feel one content of cognition as a cogniser of the rest to create reality of an illusory separation in the content of display. The concept of time, being real or feeling real, ignores the possibility of timelessness or that there can be something as absence of time or something beyond the concept of time as intemporal or eternal. When the basis of existence is accepted vide a time concept being real, the unreality of time is sacrificed for good. Thus the ignorance of the eternal sets in due to the strong belief in the concept of time, or a bondage to concept of time.
Such an ignorance that time could simply be a concept with no independent reality, is the obstruction in seeing the factual reality of existence ( of objects or world).  This ignorance is identical with the ‘me’ thought. Seeking the source of such ignorance will automatically result in the vanishing of time and ‘me’ concept, as both are realised as illusory concepts that make up the illusory reality.
The absolute cogniser or the ‘I” concept is purely and entirely a ‘temporal product’. The ‘sense’ of continuity of the ‘me-sense’ is subject to the feel of temporal extension of perception. If you apperceive what ‘time’ is, it must simultaneously dis-appear as an object in the mind.  It is then revealed that the essential element that constitutes a me-concept and objectifies it, also dis-appears, for the simple reason that neither ‘time’ nor the ‘me’-concept can have any objective quality to sustain. They only have a mental strength that holds their reality.
The ‘me’ concept and ‘time-concept’ are inseparable from the intelligence that creates it, like light creates brightness. The intelligence or the Absolute or 'I' principle plays out the mind to create both me and time. However 'me' and 'time' which are expressional aspects of the absolute create a feeling of reality to me and time and thus all objective seeing sets into the subjective creation. Magically me and time are believed to have independent objective existence, even though there is nothing objective about them.  The concept of ‘sequential happening’ in time believed to be sensible or logical or real, mentally, is the foundation of the ‘notion’ of bondage. As long as the concept of ‘time’ is left untouched, with objective existence, its subject, as the perceiver, is precisely the ‘me’ concept that remains unquestioned. That is why the nature of time must be investigated into.
Trying to remove the me-concept, and retaining the time concept implies that the mechanism of functioning of perception is not recognised. On the other hand, if duration is ‘seen’ or felt as invalid, as an objective existence to which we seem to be bound, but as an essential part of appearance, then removal of duration would necessarily remove all that seems to be ‘existing’ in time. Then the supposed objectification of time and me ceases, leaving ‘us’ as what ‘in- temporally’ we are. As long as we regard space-time to be objectively factual, we are bound and tethered.
The term ‘absolute’ is just a symbol for the functioning of mind as a ‘split’ into relative duality, consisting of conceiving ‘other than self’ as a space- time entity or the world and its interdependent counterpart ‘self’ also as another space-time entity. This dual or divided functioning of mind , referred as merely ‘mind’ by Maharshi, appears as the conceiver or the functioning ‘I’, temporally extended in duration. So ‘I’ thought is really the Mind.
The only way to subjugate the concept of time as an objective reality, external to ourselves, is by identifying ourselves with it, which is apperceiving that, it is what we are., not objectively but subjectively. When we recognise ourselves as temporality, we have only to apperceive that temporality and in-temporality and inseparable, each being aspect of the other, one appearing in movement and the other static. They are twin modes of cognition, temporality accompanying and making all phenomenal existence possible and intemporality remaining noumenally ‘eternal’.
As ‘time,’ we are Intemporal and as ‘intemporality’, we are time. So we all can say, Intemporal, I am Time;  temporal, I am eternal.