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Timelessness Quotes

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Timelessness Quotes

“I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through. And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can. And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art!”

“In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness.”

“There is no time in what you are going through. Your suffering is a place, and you don't know whether you can ever leave this place. You don't even have enough hope to wish that it be over faster. Faster doesn't exist, any more than time itself. You are not alive enough to measure it. You live in a present of incessant pain.”

“What is personal death? Asking this question and pausing to look inward - isn't personal death a concept? Isn't there a thought-and-picture series going on in the brain? These scenes of personal ending take place solely in the imagination, and yet they trigger great mental ad physical distress - thinking of one's cherished attachments an their sudden, irreversible termination. Similarly, if there is 'pain when I let some of the beauty of life in' - isn't this pain the result of thinking, 'I won't be here any longer to enjoy this beauty?' Or, 'No one will be around and no beauty left to be enjoyed if there is total nuclear devastation.' Apart from the horrendous tragedy of human warfare - why is there this fear of 'me' not continuing? Is it because I don't realize that all my fear and trembling is for an image? Because I really believe that this image is myself? In the midst of this vast, unfathomable, ever-changing, dying, and renewing flow of life, the human brain is ceaselessly engaged in trying to fix for itself a state of permanency and certainty. Having the capacity to think and form pictures of ourselves, to remember them and become deeply attached to them, we take this world of pictures and ideas for real. We thoroughly believe in the reality of the picture story of our personal life. We are totally identified with it and want it to go on forever. The idea of "forever" is itself an invention of the human brain. Forever is a dream. Questioning beyond all thoughts, images, memories, and beliefs, questioning profoundly into the utter darkness of not-knowing, the realization may suddenly dawn that one is nothing at all - nothing - that all one has been holding on to are pictures and dreams. Being nothing is being everything. It is wholeness. Compassion. It is the ending of separation, fear, and sorrow. Is there pain when no one is there to hold on? There is beauty where there is no "me".”

“How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.”

“Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are all born, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death and making sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it.”

“Scorpio, setting . . . Sagittarius, Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their configurations all at once right, recognised, their pure geometry scintillating, flawless. And to-night as five thousand years ago they would rise and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces; and the Ram; Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades.”

“Meditation is spending time with the self. It is the time to be intimated with the soul.”

“Night after night on starry wings Night lovers soared so high Miles apart, across the oceans Their love forgot to sigh In heavenly flight’s timelessness That highest height treasured Into the deepest of all blues Their depth of love measured. From the poem 'The Ballad of Night Lovers”

“Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.”

“As researchers of the paranormal, we must understand there are ways to change the rhythm of time within us, ways to change the beat. These ways have been known since the beginnings of civilization, and possibly much earlier. And these ways would require no more effort than simply recognizing the secret rhythms of things. Moreover, we may learn to beat with them and begin to perceive a different kind of space, and ultimately discover an altogether different conception of reality…”

“I feel you calling, in the autumn sweet transformation. I have reached my brightest green to the gold burning sun. I have folded my colours into the wind, bright colours taken to the sky. My silk has gone to moisture in the rising atmosphere and I am your colours again, deep and warm. I hear your calling and I answer, I come back to you, to slip inside the dark. Will I be found by the decaying things? Will I be found by the roots and drunk by tree and flower? Will I slip and mingle and roll along, find my way to a river and with it dance, and give myself in a sigh to the ocean? Will I scatter, a few fragments of sand – my body to glisten beneath a caress of moonlight as I make my way towards no more as I find my way to forever”

“Catch a customer with emotion and you will have a customer for a day; but, capture a customer with value and you will keep a customer for a lifetime. I truly believe in good, old-fashioned values when it comes to business. That is what timelessness is made of! At the end of the day, the question is, “Do you want to build a good hut for a day or do you want to build a good fortress for a lifetime?” Quality, value, understanding the needs of your clientele— that’s how you build a legacy. Connect with people, because you can never underestimate just how many people out there are yearning for any form of good interpersonal connection that they can find and when you can provide that as a brand name, you can allow the person behind your business to shine through. That’s how timelessness is created. It’s not created by luring people into a myth; it’s created by making connections, by remembering people’s names, by being genuinely interested in everybody.”

“She weaves me anew, sacred and true Naked to her strength, I hear anew I need not even seek her for, she is here with me. Infinite space, sacred hums where all returns to one. The truths revealed and the lessons unraveled Seeker of time, I need not even travel All is here, with this one sacred love, sacred embrace.”

“There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.”

“Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.”

“Man can exist in two ways. He can exist in time, where we ordinarily exist. To exist in time is bound to bring death. There is birth and there is death. Man can also exist in eternity, where there is no birth and no death. Mind moves in time in sequence. Time is linear, andmoes from point A to point B. Work is done by the mindwhich is why the universities, the schools and the colleges train your mind, because society needs skilled workers. Eternity represents meditation. Meditation means to jump out of the mind. It means learning to be absolutely inactive and doing nothing for a few moments. You have only to sit silently, doing nothing, and everything goes on happening of its own accord. Meditation is not something that has to be done, it is something that has to be understood.  If you understand meditation then that is enough. Then you can sit anywhere and fall into meditativeness. Meditation is not action, but a state of silence, a state of inaction where everything stops. Time stops, movement stops and you are in a total rest. And those are the moments when you know that you are immortal. You know that the body will die, but you are not going to die. Then all fears disappear, because all fears are rooted in death. And to be fearless is the most fundamental thing for living joyously. The fearful person cannot live joyously. He cannot love, because he is afraid. Meditation is learning to be adventurous, always ready to go into the unknown and always ready to explore that which is not known. He is always ready to take risks, because he knows that there is no death, so there is no fear. Then to live dangerously is playful. This depends on one thing: that one has some experience of one's immortality. It depends on the experience that "I was never born and I will never die." This is possible through meditation. A meditator has to learn to do only the essential in life and not waste one's life on doing the non-essentials. You need to learn what is important and meaningful in life. A meditator has to learn how to relax, how to rest and enjoy rest. And slowly one settles into one's inner being, into one's own centre, and the moment you touch your centre you touch eternity, timelessness, That is what meditation is: an exploration of eternity.”