women who have had a taxing day at the office. Perhaps the day went
well-perhaps not. My students are all sons, daughters, husbands,
wives, workers, parents, male, or female. A thousand threads of iden
tity bind them to the floor as they lie in Savasana, like Gulliver im
prisoned by the threads of the midget Lilliputians.
Savasana uses techniques of relaxation to cut the threads. The re
sult of this is not, as in meditation, freedom, but loss of identity. I do
not say loss of false identity because in the world in which we function,
these identities are real. Yet taking the long view, they are unreal. Even
the fact of being male or female is an identity that can be put down.
To relax is to cut tension. To cut tension is to cut the threads that
bind us to identity. To lose identity is to find out who we are not. Did
I not say that intelligence is the scalpel that cuts away the unreal to
leave only the truth? As you are lying on the earth in Savasana, do you
not, when the posture is harmonious and balanced, feel both present
and formless? When you feel present yet formless, do you not feel an
absence of specific identity? You are there, but who is there? No one.
Only present awareness without movement and time is there. Present
awareness is the disappearance of time in human consciousness.
The problem with Time is this. We can conceive of it only in spa
tial terms, like a running river or a piece of string. We divide up the
string into decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
These are lengths of time, and whatever time is, it is not fair or accu
rate to treat it as a dimension of space, something to be measured by
length, like a wall or a bookshelf. Another problem is that we consider
time to be empty, devoid of meaning, like an empty bucket unless we
fill it up with something, our activities for example. Whatever else time
is, it must be fully realized in and of itself, in its own nature, like a
flower growing in the desert that needs no observer to fulfill the po
tential of its own beauty. If you try to imagine time without using spa
tial concepts, you will find it extremely difficult. That is why I say we
have not yet intq�rated time in our consciousness, as we have done
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