We become absorbed so easily in such trivia, in time-wasting. We even play cards to ‘kill time’ when the universe is frantically beckoning us to open the window and go outside. Our conditioned mind distracts us persistently with a circular unstoppable dialogue which is speculative, judgmental of others, envious, and all manner of negative and distorted views. One of our great talents as a species is our phenomenal memory and our consequent susceptibility to influence which strongly links us together as one energy. Why then do we surround ourselves with trivia and games, with pornography and gambling, frittering away our precious life?

We are utterly impressionable, our unconscious mind a vast storehouse of every instance of our short human life. Our individual identity comprises that storehouse of experience and accumulated knowledge, combined with our genetic inheritance and spirituality.

Everyone around us is ‘killing time.’ It seems that they are killing time until they die, or until the next rite of passage, and the next, and the next. Completing their innings, their social requirements, filling their quota, frittering precious human life away playing chess, completing puzzles, and using frantic thumbs to gather as many red balloons to put in a net on their mobile phone as possible.

Time is a man-made concept and so we have the power and the right to kill it in any way we like. Every human is capable of such aimlessness and potential murder under the control of the conditioned mind. In fact, many of us reserve the power to destroy willfully what we build just as children do. We even destroy what nature has created so arrogant are we.

A Christian story tells that the origin of this phrase ‘killing time’ comes from an American organization (C.L.I.T. – the Cult of the Literal Interpretation of Time) which reacted to the rigid Biblical literalism of New England Protestantism in the 18th century. Their belief was that Time had a literal, physical, tangible body and that he was older or roughly the same age as God the Almighty, and a friend of his. Animosity grew between them when God created the Garden of Eden and Time wanted to seduce Eve instead of Adam. He befriended all the humans in the garden who surprisingly decided they needed the presence of Time to get them through their lives until their deaths. So, members of C.L.I.T., regarding themselves as direct descendants of Adam, wanted literally to kill Time. To achieve this, they lived mindfully, making each moment of their day count, each mundane activity a glorious absorbing event, so that they could murder the tyrant Time.

Mindfulness is the key to living beyond human limitations imposed by the limited conditioned mind. When we have realized that opening our awareness by silencing the conditioned mind transforms our borrowed body into a living temple, we can move through the river of energy marveling at every turn. We can stay fully alive during every instance of our fleshy lives. Then, consciously breathing borrowed breath from the universe in concert with all our species before we close our eyes to sleep, even our dreams will be mindful.