Becoming Is Time. Being Is Timeless

Saturday, 9 May 2026, 2:39 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Overhanging the gorge are great angular outcroppings of volcanic rock—solid and sharp-edged protrusions from some long-ago eruption of a nearby volcano.

In many places, the sheer sides of the gorge have huge slabs balanced on top of them–some looking like a giant stonemason has placed them there. Other large formations, with deep fissures where they meet the canyon wall, sit vertically in precarious positions, awaiting the next major earthquake to send them tumbling into the stream below.

Beyond the gorge, gently sloping grasslands ascend to the base of the sheer cliffs that form the perimeter of the canyon. Perched near the precipice under one of the plentiful oaks, I can hear the rushing of the stream at the bottom of the glistening gorge, which stretches for hundreds of meters down and away.

Directly across, beyond the narrow gorge within the relative sanctuary of the large canyon, are majestic cliffs, rising hundreds of meters into a cloud-scudded sky.

Big buzzards, masters of the air currents, appear as lumbering leviathans next to smaller, more agile woodland hawks that follow in their wake, screeching as they wheel and dive into the trees at the foot of the cliffs.

Native Americans loved this canyon, and revered it as sacred. They were wiped out, driven off and assimilated into a dominant culture that thought of the land only in terms of profit. But listening deeply in the meditative state, one hears echoes across time of their lives.

The mind in meditation is like a laser effortlessly boring through the strata that’s accumulated in content-consciousness – the debris not only from one’s own life, but also from the lives of previous generations.

Through the widening spaces of silence, light pours into one, and one shares, however briefly, in the infinite intelligence beyond cognition, knowledge and experience.

Even for adept meditators, perhaps even for fully illumined human beings, the meditative state is not a constant, but a quality of mind that has to be renewed each day by making space for undivided and undirected attention.

Nature is crucial to the process, though a mindful walk through a park in the middle of a city, followed by a half hour’s sitting in one’s flat with the light flooding in as the bustle goes on below, can be sufficient to generate a radical shift in consciousness.

Intensely but passively watching memories as they arise extinguishes them, at least temporarily. Few people see how important it is to do so, since the vast majority of people believe they are their memories.

Being is the only thing that actually matters, but becoming sells, especially with regard to enlightenment, because time and self are all we know.

Though breakthroughs occur, and transmutation is essential, one does not “attain enlightenment.” One enters the infinite dimension of being through the back door, quietly and anonymously.

So there’s no end to reach, and growth occurs through negation. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s the paradox of consciousness.

Man’s consciousness is based on time. Not chronological time, but psychological time–becoming this or that. We’re nearly always looking forward to something, or back through the warped lenses of our memories.

To some degree looking forward to things is healthy, but when time-bound consciousness is all one experiences, one is a slave to becoming.

Time is obviously necessary for carrying out tasks, but employing time prevents radical change and true revolution.

Astronomers often say that when we look out at a distant star or galaxy, we’re seeing it as it was many light years ago, since it took the light from the object a million light or more years to reach us.

But if you think about it, that's nonsensical, since the entire timeline of the cosmic past is enfolded in the present, and we're simply witnessing it with powerful Earth-based or space-based telescopes. Human time and memory is a very different thing, deforming the present and denying being.

That’s why psychological time is antithetical to transformation and revolution. Spiritual growth occurs when time as the past, spilling over into the present and projected into the future, ends.

One cannot stop the world from going to hell. One can only stop adding to man’s division and fragmentation, ecocide and genocide by ending time and becoming within oneself every day.

Though I haven’t completely ended time within myself, there is a daily re-experiencing of timelessness. My question is: why does the brain revert to consciousness based on memory and time?

Though it requires diligence, the shift from becoming to being always occurs unexpectedly. So how does one even know when psychological time stops? Because the mind no longer looks forward or back, but simply, effortlessly, remains with what is.

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail