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Eternity Is Vertical

Truth cannot be old and cannot be new either. If truth can be new then one day it will become old. Whatsoever is new today will be old tomorrow. Truth is never old, hence it can never be new.

Truth is equivalent to existence. In a way, it can be said that it is as old as the mountains, and as new as this morning’s dewdrops – but that is only a way of saying. What is being said is that truth is eternal.

But there are people who are very much interested in the old. They are past-oriented. They believe in something only if it is very old. The older it is, they think, the better it is. All that is old is gold for them. They go on trying to prove that their scripture is the oldest scripture in the world, their religion the most ancient.

There is another group of people who think the new is always better than the old because it is new.

It is more evolved, more improved, more refined.

These are the two kinds of people; both go on missing the truth. One is past-oriented, the other is future-oriented; and truth exists now, neither in the past nor in the future.

For the past and future you will understand something about time, because basically it is a question of understanding time and its process.

Time moves in a horizontal line from past to future. Time’s movement is linear; hence it is shallow, it can’t have any depth. One moment is followed by another moment and so on, so forth. Before you can catch hold of the moment it is already gone, so you cannot move into depth. You cannot dive in time; you can only float, you can only swim. It is very thin, it has no depth. It is horizontal.

Eternity is vertical: it moves into depth and into height. Just think of the cross of Jesus: that is a symbol for time and eternity. The cross is made of two lines, one horizontal on which Jesus’ hands were nailed, the other vertical on which his body was nailed. The cross represents the whole phenomenon of time. The horizontal line is history, politics, the mundane life, the world of events, the world of facts. The vertical line is the world of truth, not of facts. The vertical line is the world of absolute reality, of God, of nirvana, of meditation.

Whenever one starts moving into the vertical world, one simply goes beyond time. Then there is nothing new, nothing old. Truth only is.

Time, the horizontal line, consists of two things – past and future. The present is almost absent. You never become aware of the present – or have you ever become aware of the present? – Because the moment you become aware, it is already past. You always become aware of the past.

You cannot even utter the word “now,” because when you have uttered it it is no longer now. The present that you think exists in time is almost nothing. It is sandwiched between the past and the future. The past is big. Look backwards – it stretches and stretches, and on and on. It seems to be beginningless. And so is the future very big – it goes on stretching ahead of you, on and on, endlessly.

Between these two big phenomena, past and future, your present is just a sandwiched atomic moment of which you cannot even become aware. The moment you know it, it is no more there; it is already gone. You only become aware of the past. So time consists of past and future.