Quotes about Timeless

Hoop Dancer is a rendering of my understanding of the process by which one enters into timelessness -- that place where one is whole.

One, two, three, four....The clock in the kitchen struck twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance of intensity, of deepening mystery.
"Luminous bliss." From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. "Luminous bliss." That was as near as one could come to it. But it---this timeless and yet ever-changing Event--was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator,. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.

    And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.

    And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.

    Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.

The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.

If Spirit has any meaning, it must be omnipresent, or all-pervading and all-encompassing. There can't be a place where Spirit is not, or it wouldn't be infinite. Therefore, Spirit has to be completely present, right here, right now, in your own awareness. That is, your own present awareness, precisely as it is, without changing it or altering it in any way, is perfectly and completely permeated by Spirit.

Furthermore, it is not that Spirit is present but you need to be enlightened in order to see it. It is not that you are one with Spirit but just don't know it yet. Because that would also imply that there is some place Spirit is not. No, according to Dzogchen, you are always already one with Spirit, and that awareness is always already fully present, right now. You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness. There is nowhere Spirit is not.

Further, if Spirit has any meaning at all, then it must be eternal, or without beginning or end. If Spirit had a beginning in time, then it would be strictly temporal, it would not be timeless and eternal. And this means, as regards your own awareness, that you cannot become enlightened. You cannot attain enlightenment. If you could attain enlightenment, then that state would have a beginning in time, and so it would not be true enlightenment.
  
Rather, Spirit, and enlightement, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now. Something you are already looking at right now... We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it. We have all the necessary cognition, but not the recognition.