There was a Master who had several disciples, and one of them kept pestering and pestering; and the Master kept on saying patience, patience, wait, wait. But still the disciple continued nagging at the Master, taking every opportunity to ask him for God-realization. So finally the Master decided to settle the matter. He said: "Tomorrow morning at 5 o'clock I shall give you God-realization. But you will have to stay awake all night, and at exactly 5 o'clock knock on my door, and with your knock I will give you Realization." The disciple was naturally delighted and excited. He began his vigil, and faithfully stayed awake the whole night until a few minutes before 5 a.m. At that point he fell asleep. But to the door of the Master's room comes the milkman and knocks on the dot of 5 o'clock. He got God-realization.

Baba said some remarkable things about time. "Nothing has ever happened and nothing ever will happen." — "Time is the interval between your very first imagination and your very last imagination." An interesting book on time and space is:

TIME, SPACE AND KNOWLEDGE. A New Vision of Reality. Tarthang Tulku, Ill., 306 pp., Dharma Publishing, $6.95.

As an example of these points, we can consider the experience of 'love'. Love is very fulfilling, it inspires an open, honest, and free-flowing way of being. Nevertheless, it often seems to be accompanied by drastic emotional turnabouts and problems. Apparently there is something more subtle involved that interferes with the positive quality of love. This subtle interference is due to love arising from the fundamentally hungry character of the 'consolidating-self' tendency. Our love is based on a deep-seated sense of being off-balance and of needing to get.

Though the essence of love is a genuine healing quality, if we do not directly contact it, then there is the danger that all our interactions and attempts at love will become tainted by craving. All our positive actions and feelings may then change, like milk which turns sour. Craving sets up a constrictive field (or 'space') in which no positive, expansive feelings or healing can take place. An initial fascination or anxiety stimulates craving, which gives way to grasping, only to create further anxiety — instead of fulfillment. This process, based on craving, is addictive, once it starts it almost cannot be stopped.

Like the thread linking a strand of beads, craving (which is itself based on the frozen belief in the autonomous 'self') binds and perpetuates our endless cycle of frustrations. The self draws apart; it is not completely in experience, so lower time immediately starts. It is as though the self were resting quietly inside an egg. As soon as it breaks the egg and pokes its head out, the self becomes subject to a life of continual travail. It is instantly subject to the need to jump around and try to collect and fix things. The self seeks to love and this shows that it is not in love. This is entirely a consequence of the self’s attempt to consolidate itself and its world outside a continuum of knowingness, so that it needs to know.

By being based on lower knowledge, our operating model for love is flawed at a very fundamental level. No intensification of effort along these lines, or variation of this theme, is going to correct the problem. The same applies for all our approaches to fulfillment.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the lower knowledge orientation regarding the basic aspects of life may adversely affect their fulfilling quality, even though quantitatively they may be abundant. But by using a more open-ended 'knowing', we can tap the nectar of love, and can discover a healing and fulfilling quality which is unbounded. We are then truly in love, and this love is itself not a possession but a gift, enjoyed and shared within 'knowingness'.