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“THE ILLUSION OF TIME”
By Cris Bolívar (April’21)
“Listen to the silence of the Being… Listen to its calmness… Listen to the soul”
In this article we will be focusing on the illusion of time, our illusory view of it and how to get out of this view.
We are living in a historic moment in which, in general, we are told that to be happy we need to achieve our dreams and goals and an expectation is created that we can accomplish anything that we set for ourselves, turning our backs to our vulnerability, our humbleness and our well-being, paying a high price for it.
Simultaneously, we are living trapped in rush and stress, with the sensation that we are short on time for everything we need to do and achieve. At other times, we might fall into apathy and procrastination given the sensation of helplessness, fear or lack of sense.
When the philosopher Bauman talks about “liquid times”, we can interpret that he refers to this crazy vicious cycle where everything serves the desire and immediate pleasure of achieving accomplishments, dreams and goals, everything is rapidly replaced... in an attempt not to fall for existential purposelessness and, paradoxically, coming down to exactly that.
From having to Being
As the psychologist and philosopher Eric Fromm put it, we are living alienated, immersed in a dual struggle between having and being, where the Being remains veiled.
This duality, fueled by our culture, denies us, destroys us and makes us live depending on an illusory chronos that governs everything, as Charles Chaplin illustrated very well in his movie “Modern Times”, totally valid today in a society where companies continue to focus on it and lead us into a titanic battle for “reconciling” our lives trying to flow from kairos.
|
HAVING / DOING |
Chronos, yang, goals, expectations, past-future, materialism, consumerism, objectification, alienation, disposal, artefacts, planification, conventional, control, linear... |
|
BEING / SELF |
Kairos, yin, sense, process, present moment, spirituality, connection, synchronicity, sync, nature, organicity, natural, respectfulness, systemic... |
Chronos, kairos and aion
Classical Greek wisdom spoke of three concepts of time: chronos, kairos and aion.
Chronos was the god and personification of time, driving the rotation of the skies and passage of time. It is the conventional, quantified clock time. The one that, like in ancient Greece, continues to dominate our culture that quantifies everything.
Kairos represented an unspecified gap in which something important takes place. Its literal meaning is “appropriate and fitting moment”, it has a qualitative nature, it´s the organic time of processes. It permits us to flow and respect the natural times.
Aion, god of the eternal time and prosperity, ouroboros, it´s the cyclic time, the “time of no time”, it represents the totality of existence, it´s the continous present that enables us to be in connection with the Being, with the here and now and the inner silence.
Although chronos helps us to organize ourselves with everyone else and the society, to manage our agenda, if it dominates us in excess we are moving away from the flow and we can force or destroy the process. As if in a pregnancy we decided for our convenience to give birth to the baby at 4 months of age, without being aware that in doing so we will have a miscarriage. We would not be respecting the natural laws, nor caring for us and the vulnerable being that we are. If that occurs, we move away from the Being and the natural states of the Essential Being: love, peace, silence... and this disconnection always has a very high price, it´s the egoic world in which we live where we demand and demand, in disharmony with the universe.
“Loving lives in the Being, emerges out of the soul, flows with calmness”
Let´s look at a poem that I wrote that describes them: “Being without time”.
Read it slowly, sensing the times and connecting to the experience to live from that perspective, ¿which situation would you most identify with?
I liked to live a while later
so I ensured that everything would be fine.
When the day had finished I would live it,
If it had rained I took the umbrella.
Everything seemed easier if I already knew what had happened.
But something did not go well,
there was a living outside of time
where everything escaped from me,
the train had already left,
life had gone.
So I decided to live a day earlier.
To get ahead of the future
I arrived before time,
lived what could be there to be lived,
I laughed at the joke that might be told tomorrow …
But something was still not working,
life was strange to me,
always happened outside of me,
inopportunely.
So I decided to live without hours,
drift in eternity,
without limits, without matter,
live meaninglessness
in a spiral outside of time.
But anxiety caught up with me,
the nothing came about me
and I got lost in the emptiness of time.
And there I realized … …
there is no time,
time was inside of me,
I was my time,
life itself does not have any time
and to live it with time is not to live it.
So I stopped life happening to me
…
without time
…
out of being
…
the Being without time
…
Living in harmony and completeness
Without a doubt, in this sense, the key to a fuller life lies in harmonizing the three concepts of time.
From the viewpoint of the Essential Enneagram we can represent it with the triangle symbol, as shown in figure 1.
In the Enneagram, the triangle represents the Law of 3, the harmonizing principle of wisdom, that opens us the door to an evolutionary transformation.
What we can read in the symbol is that the base of the triangle represents duality, the tension between the forces of chronos (active, dominant - thesis) vs kairos (reactive - antithesis). The top of the triangle symbolizes what happens when a higher level of consciousness and wisdom takes place and upon introducing aion, the tension disappears, everything aligns.
That means, when we are connected to the present moment, in inner silence, we are in harmony.
Buddhist Meditation, Essential Coaching, Essential Enneagram, between many other “tools”, can help us to make this process towards the Being, heal our wound and live our lives in improved harmony of the body-mind-heart, also represented through the three vertices of the triangle.
“Inner harmony is a place that remains in the world´s impermanence.”
The author. Cris Bolívar
- Founder and CEO of the Essential Institute.
- 30 years of accompanying processes of personal and organizational transformation. Essential Coach, trainer, consultant and international presenter.
- MCC, Master Certified Coach – International Coach Federation, ICF (USA), first Spaniard to obtain this certification, 2004.
- Creator of the Essentiality, the Essential Coaching and the Essential Enneagram.
- Graduate in Psychology and Graduate in Philosophie (Barcelona University).
- Master Consultant in Organizational Development (Israel).
- Author of diverse books and articles.
- Reknown by the General Counsel of the Official Psychology Association among the most relevant authors of the 20th century for her contributions to coaching.
- Reknown by Vikki Brock (expert on the history of coaching) as a pioneer and a pacesetter for coaching in Spain.
- Reknown as a “Teacher of Life” by Mestresdevida.cat
- Accredited by the IEA -International Enneagram Association- as an Enneagram Professional.
Please see amplified CV on: http://essentialinstitute.org/cris-bolivar/
