When Things Stop Moving

 During the group meditation practice tonight, we talked a lot about the idea of time not really having an existence in the absolute sense. While conventional wisdom teaches that there is a past, present and future, the ultimate sense of the mind is beyond time itself. I believe that once a person stops attaching to thoughts, they lose the sense of time. What is time, after all, if not the ability to bind certain ideas or thoughts together, as Korzybski might put it?
   Time doesn't stop, however, unless a person really works at it. I am saying that for the most part, I am attached to moments and am engaging in things in a certain way, which is what gives rise to a past, present and future. If I see a cake and then start to salivate and think about how nice that cake is going to taste if I get a hold of it, I am already stirring up all kinds of thoughts about time. Here I am now, craving the cake in the future that has just arisen in mind previously. But if I were not so attached to the thought of cake in the first place, would all this have been perceived as happening?
   I have often heard the expression that human beings are 'makers' of their own destiny and fate. I never quite understood this expression, until I started to learn about the Buddhist concepts of time and karma. As long as I am associating certain experiences with ideas of like, dislike or neutrality, I color my world and create seeds for a future world. An easy example of this might be the current trend in global warming. The world that is collectively resulting today comes from a lot of previous ideas and thoughts, many of which relate to this unbridled optimism of consuming as many things as one wishes to feel affluent or more distinct than others. But this in turn  comes from the idea that I have a body that continues across space and time. If I didn't have such an idea of having this distinct body that can be filled or deprived, would I have so much craving?  Wouldn't there simply be no sense of past, present and future to connect?
    The point, however, is that the human world is composed of distinctly human kinds of attachments: food, companionship, material things, shelter, and so on. And in some regards, that world is perpetuated by its own desires for comfort, security, and power over the physical world. Meditative practice is not meant to take a person out of that world of time, but to allow a person to see how time arises, and to be clear about it. Then there is much more room to be unmoved by the passage of time, to the point where one can play with time to influence others. In this case, we don't think of time as an accomplishment or as an end point anymore but rather as a kind of creative unfolding and combining of thoughts that don't necessarily require combination at all.