Time was not "lost", "lacking", or "subtracted". Instead, the impression was of being beyond (any conceivable personal notion or conventional constructs of) time. No time existed. Neither this word nor this writer existed.
Now you may be able to glimpse the scope of kensho´s dissolution of time. For at each end, all prior limitations have lapsed. Only vacancies remain. At left, no archer, actual or implied. No notch at that back end during infancy. No feathered interval since then. Off to the right, no arrowhead points at some imaginary future. No willful complusion must fire any arrows off toward some actionable, longed-for destination.
Instantly, the former subjective sense of "time" has opened out, at both ends, into a zero state beyond timelessness. Off to the left? Nothing retrospective. Off to the right? Nothing prospective.
What happens within that (former) narrow "window of now?" It still registers, and encodes, the ongoing sequence of unique events. Part IX stands as a testimony that certain basic immediate memory functions still continue to encode and record, even in the absence of self, at least in some parts and connections of the hippocampus. but off in either direction a yawning gap opens out where the edges of that old time frame briefly vanished into perpetuity.
What impression remains when all these other dimensions of subjective time dissolve? Various languages substitute mere abstractions for these two openings out into a vacancy. Words such as beginingless past and endless future are not quite accurate. At least, not if you read "-less" to mean that the experiant was really noticing the fact that "time" had actually been subtracted at that very moment. No, that fact is not appreciated until later.
In English, the flavor of the experience points (imperfectly) above and beyond all words and time constraints, toward
E T E R N I T Y.
Zen-Brain Reflections
James H. Austin
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