“You can spend your time making money, but you cannot spend your money making time.”
Time is the most valuable commodity we own. Time is short and grows shorter by the day. No matter how wealthy you become, you can never buy back an hour of time. Lengthening the lifespan is also limited, and unexpected occurrences could happen at any time, if it’s your time. So with age and the realization that time is becoming more precious, I focus as much as possible on what is most crucial, what is to be remembered, what is worth the time. And this applies to what I pay attention to as well as what I write.
Time and freedom, I have heard it said, are the two most valuable things in the world. Money does buy a greater degree of freedom... of choice. Free choice is the essence of freedom, and that comes when you have added material wealth to buy your choice type of freedom. But even without wealth, one can still find a type of freedom sometimes unobtainable to even the wealthy.
Freedom as given by money is the most sought after treasure in the material world, one might accurately suggest. Yet time is more valuable than freedom or money because you only have so much. It is the most deflationary commodity in existence. More so than gold or Bitcoin. Human life is limited. No one has lived more than 112 years for example, that any of us personally know. It’s a rare anomaly. Even the king must die.
That being said, there are allegedly those that don’t die. The yogis of the Himalayas who meditate for decades, are apparently able to slow down the ageing process, and maintain a degree of youth, though that may be one in a billion people able to achieve that. What a sense of freedom that must bring. What to speak of the insights one must be accessing in that sort of state of consciousness. You will by then have learned how to become separated from the body and return at will, to travel otherworldly realms, of imaginable bliss and pleasure.
Another school of thought suggests that we may take numerous births in one body after another. This is verified in the Sanskrit text called Bhagavad Gita, a classic of the Vedas.
देहिनोऽस्मिन्यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा ।
तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति ॥ १३ ॥
dehino ’smin yathā dehe
kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
tathā dehāntara-prāptir
dhīras tatra na muyati
"As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from childhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change."
Bhagavad Gita as it is ch 2:13 translated by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta
Such ancient references to the journey of the spirit soul, or the real self, over numerous lifetimes, is coming from the same texts that describe the yoga techniques to extend life so that you have the time to awaken full consciousness through meditation. It is all alluded to by long forgotten practitioners from a bygone era, yet some of the knowledge sinks in to some readers who apply the same techniques and achieve similar goals today.
In the late nineteenth century there was a poet and visionary who lived in India, named Bhaktivinoda Thakur, and he had some experiences of enlightenment, thereafter compiling a great deal of verse glorifying the divine and expressing his relationship with his deity, or focus of meditation. And in one of his songs he writes in Bengali:
anādi karama-phale, paḍi’ bhavārṇava-jale,
taribāre nā dekhi upāya
“My dear Lord, I cannot remember when I somehow or other fell into this ocean of nescience, and now I can find no way to rescue myself.”
We should remember that everyone is responsible for his own life. We are not here because of someone else’s plot or narrative. We have brought ourselves to this conditioned state of being, and we are responsible for getting ourselves out of it. We can call upon assistance, and do what it takes to attract the attention of those who may be able to assist us, but it is up to us to make the effort. Otherwise we are stuck here, lifetime after lifetime, according to the Vedas.
If you are in the field for the sake of service, then returning to continue serving the others on their journey, like knights along the pilgrimage path to Jerusalem, is not a problem for you. There is so much time in that case, and so many souls to see to, that with all the time in the world, we might forget our real purpose and become complacent, almost fall asleep or forget the details of the mission. But if we have the mission burned into our psyche well enough, then we carry with us the inkling of memory, and the right catalyst triggers the crucial memory once again.
If we’re really fortunate, we come across or attract someone who can shed some light on the matter and show us the way, to a degree, and we make valuable strides forward on our long walk to freedom. After all, time and freedom are the greatest treasures to the mortally caged soul forgetful of their roots. However, when the yogi realizes the eternal nature of self, and awakens the compassion for every other soul, in the mood of the bodhisattva, then s/he may take the time to return time and again to assist more souls out of this mortal inconvenience.
A lifetime of preparation in the childhood and youth is a small time to invest for the great work that can occur in maturity, with the knowledge and experience gained over a lifetime. And then, when the time is right, some service to the real cause can be rendered, and that cause is the one of freedom. When time is no longer an issue, then freedom is the prize to be attained at the end, and to be free we need to know the nature of the prison and the limitations we are in compared to the potential freedom available.
Knowing theses things, in relation to each other, can act as a catalyst to aspirations for a return to the source, the eternal abode, the original nature, not as the all-pervading oneness of brahman, but rather the simultaneous oneness in quality but difference in quantity, experienced in a relationship with the absolute as an eternally fragmented part and parcel, as a jivatma in relationship with the paramatma. Such relationship is the nectar for which the soul is forever eager. This is the real freedom from bondage, this is true liberation. Nothing less will do.
