We arrive here already conditioned.
Every student comes into higher learning carrying an inherited assumption—that time is a line. Past, present, future. Three words laid out in order, moving left to right like text on a page. We imagine ourselves walking along that line, leaving a trail of outcomes behind us while reaching toward outcomes that have not yet occurred. Even the way we speak reveals it: past outcomes, present outcomes, future outcomes. Outcome thinking is built into our grammar.
But this conditioning is misleading. It locks us into a model of time as something that flows outside of us, something that carries us forward whether we will it or not. Physics, too, reflects this habit when it speaks of “events” and “intervals”—the things that happen and the spaces between them. It’s all outcome language, describing what has already been realized rather than what is actually happening.
To begin studying the Cosmic Dance, the student has to reimagine time completely. The truth is that time is not a river flowing past us; it’s the pattern itself changing form. You are not moving through time. You are being reconfigured as time. Every breath, every heartbeat, every emotion, every photon striking your eye—all are instances of reconfiguration. This constant reshaping of the pattern is what we call time.
The pattern is the Eternal Now. It is everything that exists, including you. You are not separate from it, not a passenger in it. You are the Eternal Now, interacting with itself through the form you currently recognize as you. The Eternal Now is one vast, dynamic configuration, always interacting within itself, always exchanging information, energy, and experience. You are a local expression of that, just as a wave is a local expression of the ocean.
We sometimes believe that if only we could organize things better—get all our ducks in a row—life would finally behave. That thought reveals how deeply we confuse ourselves with the manager of interactions. We assume we can choose what to engage with and what to avoid, as if we could curate our place within the cosmic pattern. But this isn’t how it works. You are not outside the system, directing it. You are inside it, participating as it.
Think of a white blood cell inside a human body. It has a distinct shape and function. It can tell that it is not a skin cell or a neuron. Yet it cannot choose to sit out the bloodstream or pick which cells to encounter. Its interactions are not optional; they are its life. The same is true of you. You are not an observer of the Eternal Now; you are one of its expressions. Every conversation, every thought, every sound, every unseen vibration is part of your continuous participation in it.
So when you feel the desire to control, to manage, to isolate, remember that those are just ripples of thought inside the larger ocean. You are not here to master time. You are time’s motion—the reconfiguration itself. The Eternal Now is not happening to you; it is happening as you.
If you can sit quietly and feel this, even for a moment, you’ll sense that the now is not a thin slice between past and future. It is an infinite field of ongoing change. Every moment is the whole pattern reconfiguring itself. That felt awareness—that living participation—is what it means to study the nature of time.