The Day the Clocks Melted

by Jon Atwater, H.W.

I was in my first year at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was a great place for me—close to my parents in Arvada but far enough from them as well! The campus was beautiful, the buildings of sandstone and red tile roofs were in a romantic Italinate style, with the Flatirons and the foothills in the background. The university offered many majors in both graduate and undergraduate courses.

I haunted the enormous university bookstore where I could look at all the class titles and then look through the required books. There was an upper level philosophy course and a book by Ludwig Vittgenstein. I opened a page about in the middle of the book and read: Eternity consists not of endless temporal duration, but of the eternal now.

WHACK! Just like that I was off the temporal treadmill! Knocked into freedom in the only place you could go, the infinate, eternal NOW! I just stood there stunned. Wow! Gobsmacked! I had a felt presence in the now, in the eternal now. OK, I admit, it was the most powerful sentence I ever read! Transfixed and timeless, I just stood there. Eventually I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf.

Once you cross the threshold into the timeless you are changed forever. The koan had done it! Not really a koan, maybe even more powerful. To experience the now is to be free of the past and also the future. Not limited or fleeing past hurts, nor avoiding future fears or anxiety. A glimpse, in itself, will not free you, but you have found the door! In the future, meditation would take me to this place or timelessness again. To be part of the eternal, the now, the all, source, truth, love!