Awakening: As a Person You Are a Blink in Time. As Being, You Are the Timeless Field

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:01]Consider this from the perspective of an awakened being who you are, actually undergoes a radical transformation.

[00:00:16]What you realize is that as a person you're not even a blink of an eye in cosmic time, but as a being, which is fundamental awareness, you are the field in which persons recycle and evolve and change identities in timeless now.

[00:00:43]Sounds like a very radical shift in knowing who you are.

[00:00:50]So this is a two-tiered way of speaking, and let's see what the awakened ones have to say about this to us both from, you know, spiritual literature, etc, etc. So from the cosmological side, the Purāṇas, which are ancient texts and ally texts, map human life into unimaginably past cycles, Yugas, Manvantaras, and Kalpas and even the lifespan of Brahma, which itself is just one blink or breadth of a still higher principle when you place an 80-year-old human life.

[00:01:38]Example me against a Kalpa or a full life of Brahma, hundreds of trillions of human years.

[00:01:45]It becomes exactly what I said, a momentary flicker within the cosmic ray.

[00:01:53]So stories like kakudmi, visiting Brahma and returning to find ages of passed on earth are classical illustrations of the blink of an eye, relativity of time in Vedic understanding.

[00:02:12]Yeah, actually this is very similar to modern cosmology.

[00:02:15]You know, you travel at the speed of light across the cosmos, when you come back, you know, people on planet Earth have lived many years and you’re still a much younger person talking about the relativity of time.

[00:02:33]But anyway, going back to what I was saying, at the level of Jīva identity, which is this identity, this is a Jīva identity.

[00:02:43]The Vedic tradition explicitly treats an entire human biography, which includes birth, struggle, death, afterlife, as a very brief episode within an endlessly cycling cosmos.

[00:02:57]That brevity does not make it insignificant because that same fleeting human span is given as a uniquely potent window for recognizing and transcending Saṁsāra.

[00:03:12]Saṁsāra means the soul's journey in the theater of space, time, and causality.

[00:03:19]Okay, now Advaita Vedānta then introduces an orthogonal access.

[00:03:28]Not how long things last, but what is aware of all durations.

[00:03:34]There consciousness Ātman, Brahman is described as self-luminous, unchanging, and not bound by time.

[00:03:44]Time and space I said to appear in awareness as objects, just like the body mind, this awareness is compared to a mirror in which endlessly different reflections appear and disappear without altering the mirror itself.

[00:04:02]So within that unchanging awareness, innumerable persons, Jīvas appear with changing bodies, minds, and karmic histories undergoing birth, death, and evolution across lifetimes.

[00:04:18]These identities recycled in the same field of awareness the way waves rise and fall on the ocean or rivers flow into the sea, the names and forms change, but the underlying water, pure consciousness remains one and the same.

[00:04:35]In that sense, there's a singular timeless now of awareness within which all temporal sequences, past lives, future lives, cosmic cycles are just modes of appearing and disappearing.

[00:04:52]So from the standpoint of empirical reality, which in Sanskrit is called Vyavahāra.

[00:04:57]I’m this person is indeed just a blink in cosmic time located within a vast chain of prior and future embodiments, but from the standpoint of the absolute reality Pāramārthika, I as awareness and the changeless field in which those blinks occur in.

[00:05:23]So the very measure of a blink or duration does not really apply.

[00:05:29]So let's rephrase everything that I've said in Vedāntic terms. As Jīva, a transient personality arising in Saṁsāra, the illusory world of space, time and causality.

[00:05:42]whose entire lifetime is negligible against the scale of basic cosmology.

[00:05:48]But as Ātman, the timeless ever present awareness in which Jīvas, worlds and Kalpas arise, recycle, and subside without ever touching the underlying reality.

[00:06:02]Therefore, think about the formulation I’ve given you, as long as it is clear that we are not talking about two entities, but two standpoints on the same reality, misidentified as person and time, and recognized as awareness beyond time.

[00:06:24]How amazing is this?

[00:06:27]Sarvaṁ Khalvidaṁ Brahma.

[00:06:30]All this is Brahman.