What time is it NOW? If you are looking at your watch to find out, you are a victim of one of the greatest mass hypnosis on earth! And you are not alone. Each one of us is imprisoned in the net of time.

Your watch might say it is 7:15 am. But look around at the other clocks in your house. Are they exactly showing the same time to the second? Probably not! They might be running a few minutes apart. For our normal consciousness, this is not a problem. We assume that there must be an exact time RIGHT NOW, which someone (probably the government or GOD) must obviously be maintaining.

It is not even surprising to us that in Singapore, it might be 9:45 am on April 10th right now or in the United States, 7:45 pm on April 9th. This is because it is a commonly accepted notion that there are different time zones. But note that the earth is not physically but only conceptually divided into longitudes. We are taught so many things in history and geography early in childhood that we fail to question anything and get so busy with our life that we never get around to examining the nature of reality.

If on the earth, there are different times at different places, what time is it actually NOW?

We are so hooked to the watch and the time it shows, that our whole life revolves around it. We wake up at a certain time, have to catch a bus or train at a certain time, reach office at a certain time, meet a friend at a certain time, cook pizza in the microwave for a certain time, grow from a baby to an adult in a certain number of years and so on. It is so so obvious that there IS time that no one questions whether time exists in reality. I know that no one is going to believe this, but if you are one of those inquisitive types and want to know the “behind the scenes” story then please pay attention.

You will at least accept that the clock is just an instrument. If the clock stops, the time does not stop. This is our conventional understanding. So if time never stops for anyone, can we see it moving?

Look at any object around you – say a door. Observe very keenly. Do you see it moving from the past minute to the present minute into the next minute? Or do you see it coming from the future into the present and fading away into the past? If you do not claim to possess divine vision, you will just see the door. You will not see it going anywhere or coming from anywhere.

And that’s a fact. The door is there right now. The wood, out of which the door gets its shape and name, is decaying in the context of its surrounding environment due to heat and moisture and maybe termites. This process cannot be seen with the naked eye on a second to second basis, but is happening and cannot be denied. You can look at the door after 10 years and you will surely see the change.

So if you tell yourself that the door that you see is actually changing right now due to the moisture and heat, it will actually be the truth compared to believing our normal consciousness that provides a false picture of a permanent and unchanging door.

So it is with everything around us, including ourselves. Everything is continuously changing. Now look at the clock and watch the second hand. It is moving and changing its orientation continuously. One of the first things that was taught to us as a child (who was changing all the time growing into an adult), is to read the time from the clock. So we see which hand is pointing to which number and speak out the time. But if you drop the interpretation and just see the hands, they are only changing their position continuously. This change of position is interpreted as different times.

Fundamentally, there is only change. Time is a concept invented to have a common measure of this change. Time does not exist by itself. When the world had not changed so much, people used a sundial to note time. The change in the position of the shadow on the sundial, caused by the change in the position of the sun was a proxy for time. Today we might use the vibrations of atoms as a proxy for time but the analogy is the same – one change is used to measure another change. There is no time, only change.

We are so deeply caught in the illusion of time that we think that changes happen in time. This is not true. There are only changes, no time. The concept of time is used only to achieve a certain purpose. When you are going to meet your friend at 5pm, it means that both you and your friend will try to change your positions to the decided point along with the sun changing its position to a certain point.

If you stare at the open sky for a while, you tend to lose the sense of time. This is because there actually is no time. Only when you see about you people rushing around or when thoughts start running in your mind, that you are fooled about time.

There never was any history. Everything that has happened has happened now and will happen now. Some people had calculated that the earth was created in 4004 BC. Today some people believe that the universe began some 13 billion years ago with the big bang. None of this needs to be believed because it is all an interpretation of their observations.

Everything is continuously changing. That is the only truth. If you just watch the change continuously without the notion of time entering your perception and if you are lucky, you might get a glimpse of what is timeless, the very fabric of existence, who you are, GOD! Life will not be the same for you after that!