with the three dimensions of space. The power of science is the proof
of our ability to project ourselves in space. But space without time is
like muscle without brain.
Time appears to us to move, to flow, and to have duration, length;
therefore to be spatial. In other words, we are caught in the apparent
movement of time. Yet all spiritual paths talk of the primordial im
portance of living in the present. So what is the present moment? Is it
a second? Or something smaller? Logically, the present can only be an
infinitesimally small unit of time, that is to say a second divided by in
finity. There is no such thing. As a length of time, the present simply
does not exist. How then can we live in the present? It is a paradoxical
impossibility.
We have to find the present by other means. The only way to do
this is to divorce it from past and future. In that way, time cannot flow.
Literally it stops, as it does in meditation or samadhi. Savasana is the
key to this understanding. All our identities, our affiliations link us to
past and future. Nothing at all in our lives links us to the present ex
cept the state of being. Acting takes place over time; it has duration.
Being transcends time. A state of being can be achieved only by cutting
all threads that bind to past or future. I was born a man; I will be a
man tomorrow. Can I now, in Savasana, put down even the sexual
identity that links me to past and future? Can I exist in a discrete
awareness of time in which neither past nor future impinge or taint the
present? Savasana is being without was, being without will be. It is
being without anyone who is. Is it any wonder that it is the most diffi
cult asana and the door to nondualist meditation and the cosmic fu
sion of samadhi?
When past and future are discarded, what remains must be the
present. Suppose you spend five minutes in the present in a wonderful
Savasana. Is it a five minute Savasana? No. It is an infinity of present
moments, discrete and juxtaposed, but not joined or continuous. It is
like looking at a roll of cinematographic film, in which you can see that
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