When a certain event is happening, I feel that I have already experienced it before. When I think about it, I realize that the event has repeated itself exactly as l had seen it earlier, but I don’t know where I have seen it before. Earlier on I was just thinking about it, and this thought-event had already passed away with nothing I could do to change it. I just became an observer. This keeps happening to me many times. Will you please tell me what is it?
—Vivek, India
Dear Vivek,
First of all, my apologies for answering so late. Concerning your question:
There are two levels of existence and time. One is God’s level, also called the superconscious level, where everything happens at the same time: past, present, and future events all happen together, in the “Eternal Now.” Great Masters have access to that state, and can exactly see what happens in the future and what has happened in the past. Swami Kriyananda explains it as a big book, in which we normal human beings can only see the one page we are on right now. But true Masters can open the book on any page, going back and forth seeing the stories which will happen later, and which have happened earlier.
The other level is our normal level – here on earth, where we live in the sequence of past, present, future. Here we can (and must) change things, and can shape our future. Here we are under the law of cause and effect, of karma, and of free will.
Some part of your mind has access to the first level. It can see at times some event which will arise in the future. Then this event actually happens in reality. It’s called deja-vu.
Try to meditate on this puzzle: there are events you may see, and indeed you can do nothing about it. You are an observer, outside of this earthly drama. But then there are “hunches” of what might happen, where you can do something to change it.
It’s all not easy to understand and to differentiate. So let your meditation be your Master, teaching you how to grasp the mystery of time and how you have already seen earlier events which then happen to you. Maybe such meditations will help you to break through the delusion of time. Time and space, our Masters teach, are nothing but delusions. They are not truth. Good luck.
God Bless you,
Jayadev
