Does Time Exist?

Gregoire Davenas
Nov 3 · 8 min read

The Work and the Purpose of the Work

As I have been entering into a different layer of experience in my life, things that were uncertain became certain and things that were certain became uncertain. Having developed a new sense of intention that expanded across all activities, a feeling of blissful purpose awakened. Suddenly, everything fell into place. A harmonious dance between calculated path and unpredictable accidents from which emerged a unobstructed flow of meaningful existence. The activity and the purpose and the activity shook hands and opened the door to a new World. This does not mean that I was in a state of Awareness at all time, but that the moments of clarity were in alignment with the other moments of mechanicalness. Meaning that, even in the moments where I practiced my routine mechanically, automatically, with a relatively sleepy awareness, those activities were still aligned with the goals that my conscious self had set-up for me. Throughout the periodical emotional suffering or the physical exhaustion and the intentional devoted focus, whether my mind and my heart were opened or closed, the same direction, the same flow remained. No energy was wasted for all was directed toward that path. Furthermore, that direction was not targeted toward a materialistic state that I wanted to reach. I wasn’t guided by reaching comfort, making money, seeking validation, having more, in fact there was no real sense of ambition. The intent was the cultivation of the intent itself. It was learning about the intent and its nature. From that primary focus all other secondary goals were either eclipsed or started working for the primary goal. They all became means toward this one unified End which itself was the mean and the end.

Having gathered all my focus and all my actions in one place, I started experiencing feelings, understandings and even visions of a new kind. Deeper thoughts and deeper feelings which were not bounded by the constant changes of directions and contradictions of my usual emotional cycle and my intellectual loops started to emerge. Those thoughts and feelings seemed to appear more progressively and less reactively that the usual “I enjoy this”, “this hurts me”, “I agree”, “I disapprove”. They didn’t seem to take their substance from the context of the situations I was going through but from the alignment of all that which was composing the situation. Including me, my observation, and all the environment. By aligning with the cycle of Life, by dancing with the pendulum, my own intention was surviving the synchronicity and the unsynchronicity of myself with my environment. My Will wasn’t broken apart at each collision with the intricatedness and unpredictability of reality, it was at the contrary feeding from it, using it to find its own self. From this, an opened landscape devoid of obstacles seemed to clear out in the fog of my life. My devotion to this new work and my belief in the importance and the urgency to initiate it was itself creating a higher realm of possibilities. The deep knowing that my intent was here carrying me, unaffected by the illusions, the traps and temptations because it had seen and felt the unfulfilling deceptions of life, felt the hard burning mark of ignorance on the flesh. I say the flesh because this information was by now imprinted deeper than the rational knowing, it was felt deep in the chest and loud in the crane. I had to live forward or die backward. Starve the ego and feed the soul. The trust that my entire Being desired by now a different kind of life, that in fact this life was the ONLY ONE TO BE DESIRED and that nothing else could ever give me this taste again, crystallized an alertness inside of me. A silent witness stepped in my life.

The Witness

As this silent witness observed through my eyes, felt through my heart, listened to my voice, I had a new perspective on my self. A new idea of self-identity started being painted as I developed a familiarity with my own uncontrollable behavior. A distant perspective on my own coming and goings, on the features of my life, of my actions and reactions, a window into the absurd arbitrary decisions, tastes and beliefs that were weaving and passing through what I started to call “my creature”. Multiplying the number of new experiences I was throwing my creature into, my painting was growing in size and in detail. This painting was not just composed of words and concepts but also of emotions, sensations, colors, sounds, intricate music and melodies played by a thousand pendulums ringing midday and midnight at different hours. I was embodying different selves, acting, talking, dressing in different ways, nothing was static in me, everything was desperately constantly moving. My faith was weak, my word unreliable, my actions approximate and disorganized, but the witness was here. The light back there was lit in the darkness and I knew who was holding it. I had seen that light before, from very close in fact. It had come into my life it times when everything fell apart and my creature fell in state of high distress or self-threatening situation. It was a very specific state of Being which manifests itself by the falling of the veil of all the unimportant things in life, all that which clutters our mind with daily bullshit and materialistic stuff revealing a true honest love and self-love and a deep compassion for your creature with all its limits and all its immaturity.

From this new relationship to my self and all its different manifestations to the world, I was seeing with clarity what my creature needed from the world and what the world needed from my creature. I was able to slowly, with patience, find the compass in myself and progressively plug my creature to experiences which were making the light go brighter, to adapt to the flow of experiences which were proposed by life and by keeping a eye on the light and the other one on the world I could find the balance that my creature was craving in the dark. Wiring myself to another source of stimulation, not the one which creates desire and jealousy but the other one, I was opening a window to a different life. This life was not dictated by the appeal of drugs, sex and fame or any of the toxic tricks of the system, it was dictated by my own energy. This light inside me became the only thing that my creature really wanted to obey. Meaning that the world had revealed so many contradictions in me, so many different I’s, so much blindness and so much self-deception, that the only force able to unify all those I’s could only come from the inside. But this force needed to be awaken for it fell asleep a long time ago. This awakening started without my consent of course when the foundations of my reality shook brutally under the collision of my dream with someone else’s dream. But it didn’t escape the everlasting cycles of life and didn’t miss to fade away like a ripple in the water. Echoing through my whole being, this ripple started resonating with other ripples outside.

The Message from the Witness

Reinforced by outside experiences and people, the light reached at times brighter intensities, revealing my own self and all its surrounding. The experiences that I needed to have and the people I needed to talk to became more obvious. There was not a thousand different ways in which my creature could find itself during the day, there was only the one that made the light brighter. All the noise faded away. I had a clear sense of where my creature would find itself during the day because I knew my creature and my creature knew this world. Everything became simple, the feeling of complexity in life disappeared. I started seeing simple patterns emerge around me, related to the books I was reading or the feelings that crossed me. Everything was referencing each other, my books, my work, my social circle, my life. This new sense of purpose extended to ideas and projects and ambitions. Those ideas were serving this purpose, they were aligning with the rest and projecting unto the future and everything around me. At moments of deep revelations I had visions of a totally different future which seemed not only be possible but reachable. A far distant idea from the previous idea that society had gave me of climate apocalypse, civil and international war, biological genocide, mass manipulation, etc… An idea of harmony between human, unbiased by the walls of screens we put between us, by the machines and facades we use to hide from life, a future a highly empathetic interaction between us and the world, of deep immersion into the flow of life, into the signal. Suddenly I had lost the idea that there was a future we were diving into, that I was a locked gearwheel in the giant machine of the system. The trompe l’oeil of the system had fallen and the promised apocalypse was not our path anymore. Above from the fear and false desires of my creature I was seeing THE HORIZON OF POSSIBILITIES.

Time was not a line anymore falling into oblivion with the rest of Humanity, it was simply nothing at all. There was only the present moment, a giant hall of a thousand doors extending across all the spectrum of emotions, colors, experiences, people, love, life. Time ceased to exist. There was only that light and the visions it was projecting around me. The mesh of global consciousness, the fractal ocean of symbiotic life flowing through all our words, all our actions. The possibility to move through that ocean and to choose the world that we want and simply start walking toward it. The Realization that this world of love and harmony is ours for the taking. That it is not impossible nor unlikely but actually attainable right here and now for starting to walk toward it is already plunging into the Essence of this better world. And that by starting to work on it that world already becomes yours wholly because there is no inevitable doom. There is only you and the world you choose to inhabit. The belief creates your reality. The manipulation of the media on the global “certainty” of an imminent doom project us unto that reality. This doesn’t mean that we must ignore the reality of the present situation, but we must not let it define our world of tomorrow. We must not let if frame our perspective or orient our life toward an impulsive reaction of fear or false expectation but use it to adapt our flow in the moment. The opportunity of a better life and the way to get there will emerge from our capacity to maintain our flow now. Tomorrow does not belong to us. Only the present moment. And from our capacity to flow in the present moment will emerge BY ITSELF the revelation of a better world. There is no tomorrow, there is no yesterday. There is US, there is NOW, and there is the FLOW.

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