Question: What is eternal Time?

Sri Chinmoy: There is earth-bound time and there is Heaven-free Time. Early in the morning, we look at the clock and think of going to school or going to the office. This kind of time is limited: It is divided into seconds and minutes and hours. On a particular day so many hours we shall study, so many hours we shall rest and so many hours we shall mix with our friends. When we use one hour for a particular purpose and the following hour for something else we are dividing time into parts. Each time we divide we see that there is an abrupt halt. This is earth-bound time. But when we pray and meditate we see time as a continuous flow. We feel that we are rivers, constantly flowing without interruption. The river is flowing toward the sea, its source. When we think of ourselves as a river, we feel that our existence is a continuous flow; our existence has come from time immemorial and it is flowing toward an eternal, infinite Reality. This is Heaven-free Time.

From earth-bound time we get constant suffering. We become a victim to earth-bound time. At this hour we have to accomplish something; otherwise we feel that we will be totally lost: the world will ridicule us or we will regard ourselves as a total failure. Time is limited, energy is limited, opportunity is limited, capacity is limited — everything is limited. But the moment we go deep within, we feel that we are freed; we are enjoying Heaven-freedom. When we meditate we soulfully establish an access to something unlimited, ceaseless, eternal and immortal. It is only through proper meditation that we can free ourselves from the limited time that has been assigned to us. There is no other way. In sublime, deep, profound, high meditation we see that there is an eternal Time, which is without limits and without sections, and we can grow into the very current of that ever-flowing eternal Time.

Once we become expert or advanced in our meditation, then what we feel within during our meditation becomes a reality in our day-to-day multifarious activities. In the beginning, only during the meditation do we feel that there is something called eternal Time. The moment we face the outer world we are immediately baffled and lost, because we cannot synthesise earth’s outer time with the inner timeless Time. But there comes a time when we are well-established in our inner life and are able to bring forward the Heaven-free Time into the hustle and bustle of life. At that time the inner world will constantly supply its wealth to the outer world. We have to be fully aware of the capacity of the inner world, which is always free, and of the capacity of the outer world, which is always bound. If we can dive deep into the inner world, where time is unlimited, and from there bring forward this limitless Time into the outer world, then the worries, anxieties and insecurities of the world cannot plague us. With our eternal Time we transform everything. If we have fear, we transform fear into divine courage; if we have doubt, we transform doubt into faith; if we have insecurity, we transform insecurity into security. Earth-bound time makes friends with the things that are perishable, but unfortunately some of these things don’t perish so easily. But if we can bring to the fore eternal Time, then we will see that all negative forces will be transformed.