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To understand, we must go back to the fundamental fact that everything is in a state of continuous change. Nothing has a permanent essence or core identity that either exists or doesn’t. Buddha taught that the self—but not just the self, everything—the coffin as well as the body in it, are ever changing, one moment always dying into the next. The person I was at age 10 is gone. The person I was at 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60: all are gone. The death of who I am now will not be a discontinuous event unrelated to all those previous passings. My being alive has been inseparable from all those other selves passing away.

"But what is the time of our life, more ordinarily? A long time? A short time? How long does your life feel?
We know that time is fleeting, and we feel the arrow of time in our aging, ailing bodies; but life can still feel long with its weight of years or because it has become wearisome or because it is so loaded with experience that is rich and consequential for us. How much we remember and the intensity of that remembering may also influence our perception of the length of our life."

The Samurai's Bushido ethics considered:

-"chivalry is uneconomical, it boasts of poverty"- indifference to wealth

-finance and business to be "low" compared to moral and intellectual vocations/development

-"wisdom" hindered by luxury

- "wisdom" and "character" preferred over accumulation of knowledge.

-indifference over profit and believing that the best services are invaluable and "beyond" quantifying.

Some do not understand that we must die,

But those who do settle their quarrels.

Siddhartha Gautama

"An endless life may well be a meaningless one, but the fact that we will die, perhaps imminently, gives urgency, even meaning, to our life."

"Life holds one great but commonplace mystery . . . time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.'

"life in every breath"

"The mother’s remarks point to the familiar sense of time seeming to speed up as we age. Again, being there for what is, being intimate with what presents, shifts our apprehension of time from an exclusive focus on how much time we have — or don’t have — to a greater intimacy with the timelessness of this moment, right here, right now"

"i do not presume to know the course of my life.  But I am grateful to have partaken in all this.  Even for a moment"

What is the “I” that each of us feels endures through the passage of time and change? The nature of the self and the nature of time are surely enmeshed, such that when we encounter our true nature and walk that awakening into the depths of our life, we find that our experience of time changes correspondingly. We no longer feel so confined in the cage of clock time, and, as we realize our intimacy with the whole of reality, we experience the moment as all encompassing: not less than the universe itself. Yet in the face of that immensity, we continue to make and to keep our appointments.

Why, when we are wholly unrestricted, do we observe these forms?

"

for when we realize who we truly are, the gap between past and present dissolves in the softest of avalanches, and there is no time barrier at all. This is the timeless intimacy evoked by Wumen Huikai in his commentary on the first case of The Gateless Barrier (as translated by Robert Aitken):

When you pass through the barrier of the gateless gate, you will not only interview Zhaozhou intimately, you will walk hand in hand with the ancestral teachers in the successive generations of our lineage — the hair of their eyebrows entangled with yours, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Won’t that be fulfilling?"

With this encounter, the old teachers live in us, as us; they are our true contemporaries, as we are theirs.

My first teacher, Robert Aitken, once said to me: “The Way is grounded in genuine experience and poetry.” In the light of his words, the poetic image of the beloved’s comb going through her hair “in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow” evokes the unfathomable experience of who we truly are: words heard or read so deeply, so intensely, that everything else vanishes. Such experiences are timeless, and they defy adequate description.

The Timeless Moment
Let us return to the notion of true contemporaries. There is the sense that our true contemporaries — no matter how distant in time they may be — come to life as poetry or music in this moment arising from unknowable depths. Our lives too, with our falling in and out of love, are eternity’s opportunity and its song. 

The deeper we live the Way, the more our conventional notions of time are nudged towards the edges of our experience. Time is inexorable, granted, and surely sickness, old age, and death bear down. And yet past, present, and future are increasingly gathered into this puckering of time we call “now,” which is no other than our true face and home. When we experience like this, we come into our own, and “our own,” beyond any ownership, is immeasurable.

Genuine realization transcends time and culture, and it is by its nature timeless. No need to throw away our watches though; punctuality is the courtesy of kings and queens. But within the flux there is a mystery.

Who are your true contemporaries?

how do we manifest our true and timeless nature?

As we mature in the Way, we come to live the timeless moment as our true face and being. Past and future are ever-changing expressions flitting over it. We lose ourselves as we become intimate with remembering and planning, in walking out in the spring sun. Everything is passing away, just as we ourselves are. Yet when we become intimate with the timelessness of where and when, we are in contact with the whole and are not other than it. In the same breath, we are very small, limited, and mortal. In this spirit we don’t regard each moment as an epiphany. Why should the moment be so privileged; why should we be so privileged? Rather we just attend to what is, to what needs doing — the ordinary miracle of that — and the rest looks after itself, or fails to

Vertical time is experienced in moments that seem absolute: a snail clinging to the piano’s back, the sight of my grandchild approaching, a drink of water. These moments cannot be further divided. Within vertical time there is no past or future. 

“Horizontal time” on the other hand involves a past that is remembered and a future that is imagined, expected, and perhaps hoped for. Horizontal time is linear, unfolding in measured sequence from past to present to future, or — if you prefer — the reverse: from future to present to past. Horizontal time corresponds to our mundane, conventional notion of time; it is the time by which we live, or the cage in which we live and die.
If we extend the imagery of “horizontal” and “vertical” to Zen, each or any moment of horizontal time is, potentially, the timeless moment of vertical time: the same timeless moment that doesn’t come marked as past, present, or future, that doesn’t come and go at all.

With the maturing of the Way comes the realization that time is a concept we use in order to be able to describe change in a changing world. However, the deeper we live the Way, the more the concept of time — including its passage and measurement — vanishes off the margins of our experience, and the moment, in its vastness, emerges as our true face and being. Yet, perforce, we live by measured time; we live by the clock.
In social and professional terms, we have little or no choice about this.

How, in a life dominated by the clock, can you manifest your true and timeless nature?

http://verticaltimeyoga.com/Z Background/wheelofverticalt.html

Kathy’s experience speaks so clearly and movingly for itself that I am reluctant to comment. All that I would venture to say is that when past and present are intimate to each other, as in Kathy’s experience, this has nothing to do with memory. The time of her past experience is simply not other than her time of right now.

What is your experience of intimacy across time?

excellent wisdom:

One Moment Is Enough for All Time
Although our character develops incrementally, sometimes our fate is decided in an instant. Falling in love can be like this, artistic inspiration and religious conversion, likewise.

Our character develops from the myriad small decisions we make in our lives on a daily, even hourly basis, yet there are decisive moments that illuminate who we are and what we may become. The small decisions that develop character are usually forgotten; the single instant of illumination, rarely. Such moments feel timeless because they gather a past and future of their own into themselves, drawing together the fragmentary impressions and straggling associations of life and giving them significance, as well as karmic potency.

Isn’t any moment up for this?

The infinite substance of the night,” “this now vertiginous silence,” the sound of the crickets drained of time, and the protagonist who feels “dead” are all intimations of emptiness. The phrase “a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word ‘eternity’” speaks for a timelessness beyond words and concepts. The notion of eternity in play here is not that of infinite temporal duration, but of timelessness.

Within that timeless moment — “that pure presentation of homogenous objects — the night in serenity, a limpid little wall, the provincial scent of honeysuckle, the elemental earth” — the past is not other than the present; the present is precisely the past. In this, they are like a single mirror reflecting itself.

Inseparability and difference — like emptiness and form, absolute and relative, essential and contingent — are the polarities of the Zen Way, which is beyond polarities; they include each other and at the same time are no other than each other. This is ensured by the vastness of this moment that readily embraces past, present, and future, and where duration and sequence have no purchase.

GENUINE REALIZATION is not limited by the time barrier, or indeed by barriers of culture. Our true self, normally buried under daily fears, concerns, and preoccupations, is set free when the sequence and order of linear time is transcended, and we experience the past as intimate with the present. 

within the labyrinthine plot of Remembrance of Things Past are occasions when the linear sequence gives way to moments bienheureux (fortunate moments). These “fortunate moments” convey a liberation from passing time and its destructive power; they represent an experience of intimacy across time: an intimacy that collapses time, such that the past supplants the present or hovers within the present — or the past is the present. (Proust employs these diverse clusterings of past and present variously in the assorted “fortunate moments.”) With his experience of such moments, Proust’s protagonist Marcel is, momentarily at least, freed from the order of time. With them his true and genuine self — unconfined by chronometric time — is set free

Any moment may be “fortunate,” even the mundane moment of tasting a little cake (une petite madeleine) dipped in lime tea, which — without Marcel wishing or willing it — grants him an experience of timelessness as it resurrects his childhood. Marcel’s experiences of the timeless typically arrive when he is least expecting them, when he is feeling about as far from transcendence as it is possible to feel.

And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent on the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but 

individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. This new sensation having had on me the effect which love had of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Where could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon it and define it?

We’re never privy to the source of this precious essence. But it overturns everything. The intellect tries to close on it, but it’s beyond meaning and definition. Once we are touched by it, we are shaken up and transformed in our depths. And indeed, as Proust has his protagonist express it: “this essence was not in me, it was myself.” This is our true self — customarily buried under daily fears, concerns, and self-preoccupation — which is set free when past and present are intimate to each other.