Getting out....coming home....

A young man is driving to work. He looks out of the window and watches his dreamgirl standing outside her house, talking to a friend. As he turns round a bend, he loses control and the car rams against an electric pole. With a sudden jolt he loses consciousness.

A moment later when he opens his eyes things appear very strange. He's still in the same broken car but he's balded, has a moustache and also a pot belly. He's no longer the twenty year old in jeans but a middle aged executive in formal attire. The dreamgirl he saw just a moment ago outside her house is now sitting beside him--she's his wife and she's screaming at him for not being careful while driving. In short, in a small accident he has jumped out of time and has landed up in future, yet retaining his awareness of the past!

This was the storyline of a fantastic french movie that was telecast on TV5 Asie. The story then moves back and forth as the protagonist tries to make sense of what has happened to him--he's now the head of a multi-billion shoe manufacturing firm , yet his close childhood buddy is now his chauffer! Till yesterday he was dreaming about marrying his sweetheart but now his grown up daughter comes to his cabin to discuss her marriage plans! Everyone around him are going about their lives and he's the only one in a dilemma--stuck between past and present. His family and friends think that he's gone mad and although he's bewildered at the turn of events and tries to put the pieces together, he suspects that maybe they are right--he must have truly gone mad. The entire movie was told in a comic style yet nothing was trivialised, the tension between reality and fantasy maintained and heightened till the very end ( I missed the final part of the movie ). You realise the crap that's dished out in the name of entertainment nowadays when you're exposed to such works.

I remember this story because like everyone else, time is an important factor for me. We live within the constraints of space and time-- everything in our lives is time-bound. We may not exactly live by the clock but the clock is there always, deciding and determining our moves and ways of life. Mystics say that time is a river and one can get out of it and enter it at any point, either in past or in future. In that way, the future has already happened!

As our life gets more and more faster and hurried with every passing year, you sometimes wonder if everything you're going through makes any sense. It's as if you're caught in a raging current of time that's pushing you ahead; the only thing you can do is stay afloat and allow the river to carry you further. Everybody's in a race but how many know why we're running this race of life-- or how many care to know? Very few of us have the time and interest to stop on the way, sit down under a tree and figure out what all this is about.

We speak of education, empowerment, ending poverty, providing justice for all, equality and what not. Rarely are we bothered about the mystical side of life where everlasting solutions to our dilemmas and illusions lie. And when we speak of meditation, it's more of a healing or stress-busting exercise rather than a tool that can connect us to the Supreme power and transform us into the divine beings we truly are!

And how wonderful would it be if one could get out of this dimension of time and enter it at will at any point! Going back to the past or visiting the future or experiencing the vertical dimension of time in the present moment--not just in our imagination but in reality! Maybe this is possible for spiritually accomplished masters. But if each one of us carry the seed of enlightenment within, this should be a possibility for everyone some day or the other.