It is the characteristic of our ignorant mind to conceive of a really three-fold time, with events that are to take place marked out clearly (though invisibly) on it, like the calibrations on a thermo meter. We imagine the present state of the individual to be something like the moving thread of mercury in it, inevitably having to pass these markings When once the mercury of human conscio usness rises to a certain level in the meter, the thread gets broken at its root, so that there is a break in man’s awareness of what he is fundamentally and basically. Such a conception is quite striking, but at the same time, it presupposses the absurd condition of our selves picturising ourselves as being different from, and therefore as being the onlookers of, this, thermometer of time-events. Seemingly more primitive, there is the concept of God as a remote entity, quite apart from, and out of this creation, even as a mechanic is outside the car which he has made, and directing the course of events much in a way in which a potter shapes the clay on his rotating wheel. Appealing each in its own way, these conceptions seem to be imperfect, and not testified to by the experiences of great mystics. Even if some mystics had experiences of this type. they invariably passed to the next stage of asserting the immanence of God or Light.
Mother’s sayings suggest one omnipresent reality, which is of the nature of Will and Consciousness, and hence yielding itself to such references as He, She, It. At the same time, this concep is the pivot of all teaching of Mother (as we formulate it from her sayings).
For there can be ‘events happening only to one who is just a part and not the whole: the whole will have only internal events” which correspond more or less with the passage of thoughts in one’s mind. The Umnipotence which is said to qualify the Absolute, distinguishes the universal Purusha (i. e. the unified consciousness of the whole of existence) from the microcosm. Man is not comple tely aware of, or capable of, controlling all the minute functions of his body cells, whereas the cosmic purusha, in the aspect of Siddhe swara (or Yogiswara) is conscious of and capable of controlling and knowing the workings of every particle of matter consciousness in Him. For the Universal Purusha (described in the 11th chapter of the “Bhagavadgeeta”), nothing can be outside’ Him: as such there can be no past, present and future. There is only the present characterised by pure awareness or ‘I – I’ as Bhagavan Ramana puts it. It is a total absence of the complete awareness of the Present. that chiefly characterises the Illusion, Maya or sleep of ignorance of the common man. Indeed, the Cacausian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff made the very startling observation that man does not live in the present at all, though he imagines he does. He said that man lives partly in the memory of immediate past ahd partly in the vague con jectures about the future, and that the present exists to him only as an assumed of hypothetical, indistinct joint between, the two. On observation, we realise that the truth of Gurdjieff’s observation is at the basis of man’s inability to fix his mind in meditation… thoughts about the past or musings about the future (including ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’), in short, about whatever is not of the Present. Whatever wavers and wanders is what we call mind. Mother once said, “The changing alone is the mind. The unchanging is itself God”. When the mind rests in the unchanging aspect, the wavering nature of mind called Maya is destroyed and one lives in the awareness of the Immortality, and Omnipotence – Omniscience – Omnipresence of the Self. Unless one has permanently achieved it, this realisation. however transient, is marked by a cessation of breath. “Breath is Time” said Gurdjieff. The Sufis watch breath. I also heard Mother tell several people that when the breath is closely watched, the mind gets stilled and with it even the breath gets suspended without any special effort. Even Bhagavan Ramana said that the origin of mind (wavering of thoughts) and breath is the same and that if one controls the one, the other is automatically controlled.
He also said that the origin of breath is also the seat of ego which can be reached in a single minded enquiry, “Who am I”. In all this, one attains a release from the illusion of the thrce fold nature of existence the perceived, the perceiver and the perception, Creation. God and self- into a realization of their oneness. When thus the barrier of breath is broken, the barrier of man’s identifica tion of Self with the body is blasted. This is what Mother, perhaps, meant when she said that it is possible to live even with the breath stopped, and that life impulse is not therefore the same as breathi In view of the saying of Gurdjieff, with the blasting of the barrier of breath, the barrier of Time is overcome and one attains the state of Eternal Present. This concept of all sense of Tine being based on breath is at the basis of Mother’s saying “Every moment is a yuga (cosmic cycles of Time which according to Hindus run into lakhs of years). All yugas are present in every moment.” This subtly suggests that all sense of Time-of Past, Present and Future-is based on the interval of a breath; that when the latter is known and mastered, the former is also known, not merely in its illusory threefoldness but in its unified aspect of Omnipresent. Omnipotent, Omniscient Godhead which Mother calls “the one which has become ALL”. She calls it the Mother and She is the manifestation of that. That is why perhaps She reveals in Herself, a phenomenal awareness of events that have taken place since the very moment of her conception by Smt. Rangamma (her mother), and even of events what happened years before her physical birth. Her awareness of what is to happen also shines now and then from behind the veil of secrecy with which she always hides her identity from the devotee. She even said, when someone expressed astonishment at her vivil momory of even the minute incidents that have taken place some twenty five years ago, that these events do not occur to her to have taken place so long ago. but that she actually sees them as if shey are happening at the present moment. “How strong is your memory!” someone exclaimed. “The question of memory arises only when there is forgetfulness. I have no forgetfulness at all” she replied. When someone asked her whether she believes that the Hindu concept of the four cosmic periods of Time (Kaliyugas Dwaparayuga, Tretayuga and Kritayuga) is True. Mother replied that the very concept of three-fold time on which is based the concept of yugas does not eem to her to be real. “If a hall is divided into three compartments by partitions, they exist as three only to one who does not see through them as though they were absent, and know what is passing on in the three compartments simultaneously. It is only one to him who can see and know across the partitions. There are no partitions for such a one. I feel that Time is one though experiences of time vary from individual to individual. It does not appear to me that Time exists as three divisions.”
Talking about astrologers, once she said, “To one who knows completely, there is nothing like Future. The one who tries to foretell the Future does not know.” Thus all her references to Time tend to describe as it the Absolute Consciousness-Existence-Bliss which, in our relative perception, seems to effect all the phenomena that produce in us the impression of three-fold Time. Hence She defines Taruna’ or the Moment to be God Himself, i. e; the impulse behind all creation which manifests itself as Time in our under standing when we look at Change in creation.