Time Is the Mind’s Creation

The past exists only as present memory. The future lives only as present imagination. You have never left this eternal moment.

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Transcript

During a 2019 talk at the Garrison Institute, Rupert Spira, the British potter turned non-dual teacher, dismantled our most basic assumption about time. To us, time feels absolute. Minutes tick. Hours pass. Days accumulate into years. But time bends, stretches, and exists only relative to the observer. The Eternal Now remains constant, only our awareness of it shifts.

His approach was characteristically direct, challenging the audience with a series of penetrating questions:

"There is no time. Period. Have you ever been to the past? Or the future? The past is thought. You think of the past, but you think of the past now. Have you ever actually been to the place or the past that you think about? No. It's not possible. Nobody's ever been there. It's a belief, just a belief that we all take for granted. Is it your experience that the now is moving along a line of time from the past to the future? Is the now moving? And how long does the now last? It doesn't last. The now doesn't last in time. There is no time for the now to last in. Now is not a moment sandwiched between two vast spaces. There is no vast space at the side of the now. The now is not a moment; now is eternity. The ever-present, not the everlasting. But when that now is filtered through the limitations of the mind, it appears as time. The mind is like a prism that refracts the now, which has no dimensions, into a single dimension of time."

This radical dismantling of time isn't new. A century earlier, Yogi Ramacharaka, inspired by the ancient Yogi philosophy, captured the identical insight:

"The moment that we become fully conscious that the eternal is the only real thing—and that Now is all of eternity that we are able to grasp with our consciousness—that it is always Now with us, and always will be Now—when we realize this, then do the relative terms 'past' and 'future' lose their former meanings to us… all are seen to be but slightly different manifestations of the great eternal Now, in which we live at each moment of our existence."

Two teachers, separated by a century, pointing to the same liberating truth. The past exists only as present memory. The future lives only as present imagination. You have never left this eternal moment.

Time is the mind's creation. The Eternal Now is your true home.