Falling in Love with Time

With Saturn's transit through Pisces, our ability to peer through Time and into the heart of the Timeless increases.

"Existence is a reality, but reality is unreal." —Hassan Shushud

DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT TIME as something (or someone) you’re in a relationship with? I think we all do, but we don’t acknowledge this relationship consciously.

This is understandable. For most of our lives, we avoid developing a welcoming relationship with Time. Instead, we feel that Time is stalking us, cornering us, going too fast or slow. Time is anything but accommodating and ‘just right.’

The Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku writes about our relationship to Time like this:

“Existence itself depends on time and necessarily partakes of the derivative past-present-future structure and also of transitoriness.”

This is another way of saying that without Time, we couldn’t see things as they appear in space. And we’d have no way to register experiences because everything, both internal and external, would exist as an amorphic blob—an “everything, everywhere, all at the same time” condition.

Tarthang continues:

“Things are here, in the present, only to pass out of reach. ‘Things’ are desired…but are ‘not yet.’ We have become so conditioned by this trend that all our hopes and aspirations amount to filling up little slots in a sort of personalized past-present-future grid. We are literally timing ourselves away.”

In astrology, two planets correspond to our day-to-day experience of Time.