Most of us live like we’re running out of time. We find ourselves watching the clock, rushing to fit one more thing in. Our lives are falling through the cracks, and the walls are closing in. But here’s the twist – you are not in time – you are time.

We got the story we tell ourselves about time all backwards. We think of it as something external — a clock-like container we move through or a scarce resource we must manage. But time isn’t a backdrop, and it is certainly not a cage. Time is the living flesh of reality; it is the fabric of your soul, and the stuff making up your toes. I know this is a wild idea, but hear me out, because there is a kind of freedom at the end of this path that will not only set you free. Follow me this way and learn to live as an active player in this unfolding reality, not just someone following a script.

Share

Three Rhythms of Living Time

Think of your day as a living rhythm with three complementary rhythms. Each note weaves its own texture of experience.

The Future as Being — the light that shines through you, your noetic presence. The future is right here, with you, knocking on your door. You can literally taste it, and you can feel what would happen if you let it in. There are inspiration and awe around the corner, but it is nothing if you don’t open the door.
This is the spark of intention, the flash of insight that illuminates what could be. It’s the silence before sound, the stillness before action. Every time you pause, reflect, or aim, the future shines forth, transparent to the world through your illuminating presence.

The Past as Becoming — the current of embodiment, your evolutionary impulse toward evolution. You are feeling the enormity of everything that has ever been, and it is as sensuous as it is solid. This is your gift to the world, the way reality flows through you, and all you have to do is relax and let it transform the world in the ways you know it can.
This is where the pulse of vital life drums through your body and your bones. The past carries forward as muscle memory, inherited habit, and ancestral pattern. It breathes through your body in gestures, routines, and cellular rhythms. The past is never gone; it moves through you as life continuing itself.

The Present as Belonging — the weave of shared meaning, your embodied and ongoing transformation. You are right here feeling the enormity of this present moment, and you have a decision to make regarding how to proceed and what to enjoy. Make it meaningful and savor your satisfaction.
This is where you wake up. This is the key, your own unique call-and-response. You see, you are time itself having an experience, and all you need to do is turn around and take a look. The shift is simple, and yet the implications are profound. You are a moment of meaning in a sea of such things, and it’s time to get to work.

Time Freedom

This is where you wake up. This is the key to your own unique call-and-response with existence itself.

You’re not standing outside time, looking in. You are time, feeling its way into form. Every decision, hesitation, and act of courage is a moment of temporal awareness — the world learning through you what it means to move, to mean, and to matter.

The freedom to inhabit begins here: when you recognize that time isn’t a river carrying you forward, but a living field – a dizzying diversity of overlapping events, just like you – responding to your participation. Every gesture, every breath, is a conversation between what has been and what could be.

Turn around and take a look. The shift is simple, but the implications are profound. You’re not a creature passing through moments — you are a moment of meaning yourself. Fleeting and fecund, so full of life, and yet nothing but an instant, and so you better make it count. Or don’t. There will be more. And this is the other key. By some miracle, you will still be here. A local rhythm of the cosmos becoming aware of itself as time, and as you do this, you will find yourself empowered to imagine new possibilities.

This is not The Secret. What’s unfolding isn’t an isolated self manifesting outcomes with their handy-dandy vision board. Reality is all about consciousness events, just like you, temporal in their agency and awareness. There is no such thing as an isolated ego visioning futures. Reality is made up of overlapping ecologies of events, each empowered to act through their own unique triadic dance of presence, embodiment, and agential participation. Just like you, every event adds to the wild cacophony of worlds co-creating themselves, not in time, but as time.

You’re not passing through moments — you are a moment of meaning: fleeting, fecund, full of life, and gone in an instant. Make it count—or don’t. There will be more. And still, by some miracle, you’ll be here—a rhythm of the cosmos becoming aware of itself as time, imagining new possibilities.

You are a moment of meaning in a sea of such things, and it’s time to get to work. Not the frantic work of the clock, but the creative work of participation — learning to listen, to respond, and to co-create in harmony with the living pulse of time.

This is time freedom: not an escape from the temporal, but vital play within it. The art of inhabiting time consciously — with awareness, imagination, and grace — until the boundary between you and the unfolding dissolves, and you realize you were never running out of time at all. You were time running, and because of this, you can make time do all manner of things.

The Myth of the Present: Stop Trying to Be Here Now

Eckart Tolle got it wrong. Ram Dass was confused.
Too many spiritual traditions — what I call the myth of enlightenment — tell us to “live in the now,” as if time were a distraction from awakening. But you can’t escape time. You are time. Awareness doesn’t happen by fleeing the flow; it emerges through your participation with it.

To be conscious is to inhabit time — past, present, and future — at once. Stop sitting on your cushion trying to push it all away. You can stop time about as long as you can hold your breathe. So stop wasting your life, your time, your flesh and your psyche. Awakened awareness is just that, awareness of the flow and flummoxing idiosyncrasies of life.

This way lies what I call the freedom to inhabit: the capacity to live not as a traveler through moments, but as a participant in the world’s unfolding. A moment of meaning yourself. And that’s all it takes. A moment of awareness of your temporal self. Go ahead and wake up, what a wonderful story you have to tell.

You Are the Story Time Is Telling

The world doesn’t need another person racing against the clock. It needs people who know they are the clock — who understand that time moves as them, as love, and story, and creative conscious participation.

The future isn’t fixed. It’s waiting for you to reach out. The past is nothing to be forgetten. It is the living potential ripe in this very moment. There is no isolated now. No individual. No self. At least not in the ways that you have been told. There are moments of meaning, in which the noetic presence of the future and the vital embodiment of the past, light and life, make sense through the relational context of the middle, through love, the present feeling the tension of presence and embodiment, and through an act of awareness, temporal in character, making meaning from it all. This is where consciousness lives. This is the agentic middle. The moment within every event, in a world made up of events, through which past and future make love in the present. A new story, a new arc to the narrative, and it is all yours.

You are not running out of time. You are a moment of meaning. A moment of temporality that feels like consciousness. We are not running out of time. We just need new stories, and you have a story to tell.

You are what time has become — the world waking up to itself as you, through you.

So, breathe in. Feel the rhythm. You are the tempo of creation. And by some paradox, we don’t have a lot of time, we need you, to wake up to abundant overwhelming fecundity of temporal awareness. The freedom to inhabit, right here, wherever you are. That’s your gift and your birthright, time freedom.

The False Choice

For over two thousand years, Western philosophy has been trapped in a false choice.
Either reality consists of substances — enduring objects with properties — or it reduces to consciousness, the ultimate mind or spirit that knows them.

Materialists claim that only matter is real. Idealists reply that only mind is. Each side offers half the truth and calls it the whole.

What both miss is that reality happens. It doesn’t sit there as stuff, and it doesn’t hover there as spirit. Consciousness occurs. It emerges through events, as acts of agential participation, or moments of meaning.

The Problem with Substances, i.e., The Substance Trap

Substance thinking shapes nearly everything we take for granted. It keeps us in a cage, where people are reduced to material attributes. A tree is a thing with material properties. Even consciousness becomes a thing, or rather a series of things, all bumping into each other like electric impulses — patterns of neuronal firing cascading through networks of gray matter, shaped by chemical gradients, electrical potentials, and feedback loops. In this view, awareness itself is nothing more than the coordinated activity of neurons exchanging ions across synapses. Thought is electrochemical computation. Meaning is statistical correlation. The mind becomes a byproduct of biological hardware — an emergent pattern generated by matter in motion.

This creates impossible riddles. How do static substances ever interact if each is defined by its own self-contained essence? How can genuine novelty arise if everything that happens is only the rearrangement of what already exists? Why does time seem to flow—why do we experience change, decay, and becoming—if what’s truly real is supposed to be timeless and unchanging?

This is the heart of what the Fourth Way calls the Substance Trap, one of the great myths of enlightenment: the belief that reality is composed of enduring things rather than transient events. In this view, to be real is to persist; to change is to lose being. From Aristotle’s ousia (substance as what “underlies” motion), through Spinoza’s eternal Deus sive Natura, to modern physics’ search for invariant particles and universal laws, the same pattern repeats. Time becomes a secondary feature of reality — a way of measuring change in substances, not a constitutive dimension of being itself.

What’s real, according to this tradition, is what endures: the unchanging essence of a thing, the eternal law behind motion, the symmetry that survives transformation. Change, by contrast, is treated as suspect, a sign of imperfection or illusion.

But this gets things backward. What we call “substances” are not timeless objective units at all — they are stabilized patterns within a deeper field of becoming, brief coherences within the ongoing event of reality’s unfolding.

The Problem with Nondual Traditions, i.e., The Consciousness Trap

If the Substance Trap mistakes matter for what is most real, the Consciousness Trap makes the opposite error. It treats awareness itself as the only genuine reality and everything else — body, world, and time — as a temporary appearance within it. This view shows up in different forms across history: from Plotinus’s One and the Neoplatonists’ “emanations,” to Advaita Vedānta’s Brahman, to modern nondual philosophies that proclaim that only consciousness exists and the world is merely its dream.

In the shallowest versions of this framework, the body is an illusion, and time is a kind of cosmic misunderstanding. In its more robust versions, birth and death are surface ripples on the infinite sea of awareness. Not an illusion, so much as an emanation or reflection. A lesser version of the original One. The goal in these nondual traditions becomes to “wake up” from the dream of multiplicity — to recognize that all distinctions, including self and other, subject and object, are unreal.

Modern versions of this myth dress themselves in evolutionary language but repeat the same logic. In Theosophy, the work of Sri Aurobindo, and Wilber’s Integral Theory, consciousness is said to descend (involve) into matter and then evolve back toward self-realization. Humanity moves through predictable stages of development, culminating in a final, nondual state. Despite the modern vocabulary, the outcome is the same: time is either an illusion or a journey toward a predetermined end.

A similar pattern shows up in many of today’s “direct path” teachings — from Neoadvaita to certain expressions of Zen, Dzogchen, and nondual Shaivism — where realization is framed as the sudden recognition that one was never bound to begin with. The world of appearance, in this view, has no ontological weight; it is a projection or play of consciousness that dissolves upon recognition. The emphasis falls on timeless awareness, not temporal participation. Even when described as spontaneous or immediate, this recognition implies that the temporal world is ultimately unreal — a veil to be seen through rather than a creative field to be engaged.

This creates a new set of paradoxes. If consciousness is all that truly exists, why does anything appear to change at all? If everything is already one, how can there be evolution, history, or creativity? If enlightenment means awakening from the dream of becoming, what is the purpose of experience, embodiment, or relationship?

Here lies the Consciousness Trap, the second great myth of enlightenment: the belief that liberation means escaping the temporal, that the highest truth is a timeless awareness standing apart from process and change. Like the Substance Trap, it denies genuine novelty, as it only allows recognition, not creation. Everything that seems to arise is merely the revelation of what was always already the case.

From the Upaniṣads to Advaita, from Plotinus to modern idealists, the story is the same: Being is eternal and complete; becoming is illusion or ignorance. Enlightenment, in this view, is a return to what never began, an awakening from the dream of time.

But this too gets things backward. Consciousness is not the timeless backdrop behind reality. Consciousness is what reality feels like from within, when an event achieves coherence in and through time. Awareness is not the source of becoming; it is the agential participation of reality itself, the moment when being and becoming recognize one another in through belonging; light and life co-create reality through love, agency, and participation. To reduce everything to consciousness is to mistake the reflective glow of reality for its generative depth.

The Temporal Turn, Consciousness is Time Waking Up to Itself

Reality doesn’t happen in time. Reality is time happening. Events don’t occur inside a temporal container; each event is time’s own unfolding, a unique act of creative coordination.

Consider your present experience. Are you a substance that happens to be conscious, or are you an ongoing series of conscious events? When you read these words, does a permanent self register information, or does meaning arise as a living relation between text and attention?

From our fourth way view, atoms, bodies, and thoughts are all relatively stable patterns within a deeper field of participatory events. Your body is not matter plus mind — it is an ecology of events (each of which is conscious), nested and interwoven across scales, from the metabolic to the mental.

The Three Dimensions and the Fourth Opening

Every event — whether physical, biological, or human — unfolds through three co-primordial modes held in creative tension:

• Noetic Presence — the intelligible pattern of light, insight, and being.

• Vital Embodiment — the living energy of life, power, and becoming.

• Agential Participation — the creative coordination of love, relation, and belonging.

And through them runs a fourth:

• Apophatic Freedom — the apophatic fourth of liberation, transparency, and the beyond. The mystery that prevents closure, the beyond through which novelty enters.

These are not individual standalone ingredients combined to make a thing; they are necessary modes of every participatory event. If you remove any one the process at the heart of reality collapses. Presence, i.e., the light and embodiment, i.e., life have no meaning outside the context created through their participation, i.e., love. Presence without embodiment is abstraction, there is no such thing as a singular Being sitting there like some ultimate awareness all by itself. Consciousness is always aware of something. Nondual teachers will differ on this point, but they give away their argument as soon as they get to the end of how long they can hold their breathe. Embodiment without presence is chaos. There is no singular substance that makes sense of the world outside of its relationship to future-oriented light. Participation requires the tension of opposites, and becomes a nihilistic void without relational events.

Consciousness as Temporal Awareness

Here is the central claim of Fourth Way philosophy:

Consciousness is the temporal awareness that emerges when presence (noetic intelligibility) and embodiment (vital immediacy) are held in creative tension through agential participation.

It is not a substance or a cosmic background mind, but the felt interior of an event. It is what reality feels like when being and becoming achieve coherence through belonging.

Consciousness, then, is time becoming aware of itself — the agential participation through which the world experiences its own unfolding.

Examples of Temporal Awareness

A couple of examples might help. First, an ecology of events oriented toward life and becoming. To do this, consider a single-celled organism floating in nutrient-rich water. Its membrane isn’t merely a physical boundary; it’s an agential, i.e., an iteration of consciousness, emerging as an interpretive interface. The membrane of the organism senses gradients — differences in chemical concentration, temperature, and light — and turns those differences into action. The moment it orients, moves, or absorbs, it coordinates presence (recognizing pattern), embodiment (metabolic energy), and participation (relational response) through a agential act. This is a moment of meaning, i.e., an overt expression of consciousness, and this conscious awareness is temporal. What it “feels,” in the most primitive sense, is temporal differentiation: a before and after, a sense of moving from hunger toward satiation. This is the faint glimmer of consciousness in which the world beginning to feel its own unfolding from within. This example illustrates an event that is oriented more toward life than light or love. There are events that orient in different ways.

Second, consider an ecology oriented toward light and being. To do this, imagine a realm of events whose coherence is primarily noetic rather than vital — a luminous field of intelligibility in which pattern outweighs transformation. Here consciousness manifests as abiding awareness, a radiant stability in which movement appears secondary or even illusory. Agential participation and embodiment are still present, but their dynamism is minimal; they serve the overarching emphasis on pure presence. This is the standpoint many nondual traditions describe when they speak of “resting as awareness” or “the unchanging witness.” The perception that “nothing ever happens” arises because consciousness here identifies entirely with the dimension of light — the noetic presence that perceives but does not act. Awareness becomes absolute clarity without contrast. From this perspective, time seems still because the vitality that generates temporal flow has been bracketed out. What is experienced as timeless consciousness is, in fact, a light-oriented ecology — a domain where the emphasis on being eclipses the creativity of becoming.

A third example involves a human ecology oriented toward love and participation. Imagine a person engaged in a practice of empowered imagination — an artist, ritualist, or contemplative who recognizes imagination not as fantasy but as a real faculty of participation. In this ecology, consciousness is neither the reactive sensing of the organism nor the pure stillness of light, but the relational creativity that binds them. Each image, gesture, and word participates in the co-creation of reality: presence gives form, embodiment supplies energy, and participation weaves relation. Time here is palpably alive — an unfolding conversation between self, world, and possibility. The person senses that imagination itself is an instrument of reality’s becoming. To imagine is to collaborate with time. This is consciousness as agential participation: the world thinking and feeling itself forward through human creativity.

These three examples illustrate how consciousness always arises within an ecology, but each ecology emphasizes a different dimension of the triad. Life-oriented events, like the single-celled organism, reveal consciousness as the pulse of embodied becoming. Light-oriented events, as in the nondual realm, express consciousness as luminous presence. Love-oriented events, as in empowered imagination, show consciousness as creative participation. Each manifests a distinct balance of vitality, intelligibility, and relationality. Together they demonstrate that consciousness is never static awareness or isolated substance but the living coordination of being, becoming, and belonging through time—the world feeling its own unfolding in endlessly varied ways.

Agency → Liberation → Diaphaneity is thus not a ladder to climb but a rhythm of transformation available to every event, from atom to cosmos.

Time Freedom: The Human Gift

Humans are distinctive not by intellect alone but by agential temporality—our capacity to move consciously among past, present, and future marks us as peculiar within reality. Not unique, but among those ecologies that emphasize agency and awareness of temporality over other modes of being. The ability to engage time in a consciousness way is what our fourth way philosophy calls Time Freedom.

Time freedom is the ability to move through time as time — to navigate across scales and ecologies of events, affecting temporal reality itself and aligning personal agency with the creative rhythm of the cosmos. As humans we enjoy the freedom to inhabit the living weave of temporality consciously — to remember, anticipate, and imagine across multiple horizons, participating in the world’s unfolding through the coordination of being, becoming, and belonging. It is not freedom from time but freedom within it: the art of inhabiting temporal life with awareness, creativity, and grace.

Why This Matters

Event-based ontology changes how we understand everything:

• Knowing becomes participatory rather than representational—truth arises through relation, not abstraction.

• Ethics becomes relational rather than rule-based—good action expands mutual temporal freedom.

• Cosmology becomes evolutionary in the deepest sense—reality itself is a living advance into novelty.

• Spirituality becomes temporal rather than escapist—liberation leans into transparency within time, not flight from it.

The living cosmos is an ecology of events, each co-creating the next iteration of events. To see oneself as such an event is to recover belonging at every scale — from heartbeat to galaxy to god.

The Invitation

Event-based thinking is not a theory to adopt but a practice of participation. Every conversation, decision, and breath is a new event in which light and life meet and co-create through love.

To live this way is to remember:

We are not things enduring or spirits observing, but events becoming — each moment of meaning a chance to practice the freedom to inhabit, right where you are.

The path is simple. All you need to do is realize that you are time itself waking up to its own mythopoetic form of participation.

We are time having an experience of embodying novel possibilities.

These questions are born out of the muddled mess of mind vs. matter that we have inherited from the long history of dualistic ways of thinking about the world.

Share

For centuries, philosophers have debated whether consciousness is something separate from the physical world or just another aspect of material reality. But what if this entire way of thinking about ourselves misses something fundamental about human experience – our profound ability to embody time itself?

Throughout my work, I explore how our fixation on the mind-versus-matter debate has obscured a deeper truth about who we are. On one side, we have thinkers who see everything as ultimately physical – reducing consciousness to mere brain activity. On the other, we have those who insist that mind and matter are fundamentally different substances that somehow need to interact. But both approaches miss how we actively participate in time's unfolding through every moment of our existence.

To put this very simply, we are time having an experience of embodying novel possibilities.

John Locke and Our Identity as Time

As we look for the origins of this insight one good place to point our attention is the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, who made a remarkable observation we often overlook. He suggested that what makes you "you" isn't some unchanging substance (whether physical or mental) but rather your ability to remember and connect your experiences through time. This might seem obvious, but it's actually revolutionary – it suggests that our identity emerges through our capacity to embody and integrate our temporal experiences.

Alfred North Whitehead’s Agential Participation

However, Locke's profound insight was partially buried under later philosophical developments that pushed us back toward seeing reality as split between objective physical stuff "out there" and subjective experience "in here." Enter Alfred North Whitehead's transformative process philosophy. Writing in the early 20th century, Whitehead proposed that reality isn't made of static things at all – whether mental or physical – but of moments of experience that actively shape themselves by weaving together past influences and future possibilities.

Consider how you experience any given moment. You're not just passively recording external reality or having isolated mental states. Instead, you're actively embodying time itself – incorporating your past experiences, engaging with your present situation, and reaching toward future possibilities. This dynamic integration isn't just a feature of human consciousness – it's the fundamental pattern of reality itself.

[This] is the fundamental pattern of reality itself.

Fourfold Theory of Embodiment

I developed this understanding through what I call a tetradic (four-fold) model of participation. This model shows how each moment of experience unfolds through four interrelated aspects:

• Being: We're drawn toward future possibilities, feeling their pull and promise

• Becoming: We carry forward and transform our past experiences

• Belonging: We actively structure our present moment, creating coherence

• Bringing-Forth: We embody as something genuinely new, some emergent possibility, through this process

This might sound overly philosophical, but it is really quite simple. It describes something we're all intimately familiar with – our lived experience of embodying time.

Think about how you navigate any significant moment in your life. You're simultaneously holding your past experiences, engaging with present circumstances, and reaching toward future possibilities. Through this process, you're not just existing in time – you're actively participating in its unfolding.

A Profound Alternative to both Dualism and Nondualism

This perspective offers a profound alternative to both the reduction of mind to matter and the splitting of reality into separate mental and physical realms. It suggests that our ability to actively shape our experience – our agency – isn't some mysterious exception to natural law but reflects our fundamental capacity to embody time's creative advance.

Our agency… reflects our fundamental capacity to embody time’s creative advance.

If you're interested in exploring this idea of agential participation more deeply, including their historical development and philosophical implications, I invite you to read my full article for paid subscribers where I trace how we got caught in the mind-matter divide and develop in detail how our ability to embody time offers a way forward.

Get 20% off forever

What makes this perspective so exciting is how it transforms our understanding of both consciousness and nature. Rather than seeing ourselves as either purely physical mechanisms or ghostly minds somehow controlling bodies, we can recognize ourselves as active participants in time's unfolding. This isn't just philosophy – it's a new way of understanding our profound capacity to embody and shape the temporal fabric of reality itself.

Read the Full Article

Introduction

Read more

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!