Michel Jackson – timeless or Timeless?

I was a little surprised to hear Michel Jackson, ‘out of the blue’, in the coffee shop this evening. I flipped open my laptop and started working, enjoying MJ songs which used to be my favorite during my early teens. Just as I was in a dreamy reminiscence, I got the news that MJ was dead. As the sudden death of Michel Jackson was, I was a tad bit shaken. Later, in the ‘calm of the day’, I wondered why I was a little ‘shaken’ by the news. I realized that the cause for my being shaken had much to do with my being jolted back into the ‘real’ from my world of the teenage dreams.

Listening to the songs at the coffee shop, a part of my self had drifted back to the realm of my dreamy early teen-hood. Back then, MJ was synonymous with timelessness. He was then, to me, a true timeless legend. I thought I would never grow out of my enthrallment for him. The reason for my ‘shaken’ disposition, on hearing the news, was that I was jolted back from that illusion of timelessness into the ‘real’ world – a world where there were no ‘truly’ timeless legends. It suddenly struck me that though, in a sense a man’s creation may be timeless, man himself cannot in the same sense, be timeless.

I remembered MJ being made fun of in a comedy show, recently, about his attempted return back to glory through a series of his last concerts. I cannot help speculating that MJ somehow knew that his time was near and that this last series of concerts was his attempt to make himself transcend into the realm of the timeless. Perhaps his yearning wasn’t so different from that of Alexander the Great who wanted to get drowned in a river to preserve his aura of a being that was timeless. So much of human endeavor is a striving to transcend into a timelessness permanence, from the tower of Babble to the Egyptian pyramids to Roman Empire to ideals of Declaration of Independence of the American Empire.

Perhaps MJ did not prove to be timeless as he would have wanted himself to be, but he has indeed transcended into the realm of the Timeless, though in a different sense. The moot point here being that there are at least two types of timelessness. As I was jolted back from my reminiscence at the coffee shop, I guess, it was my intuitive consciousness of the difference between these two types of timelessness that caused me to be shaken and gloomy.

One form of timelessness is the human striving for a timelessness permanence (of earthly life) that drives all of human endeavor whether it is to preserve ones gene pool hopefully through eternity or it is to build a home for oneself hopefully to transcend the limit of time at least in the context of one’s life span.

The other form of timelessness is the ‘real’ Timelessness (of heaven) that permeates and pervades all time. The apparent striving for timelessness that fuels human toils perhaps is unreal in as much as it is a shadow of the ‘real’ Timelessness. Continuing on this reasoning, it implies that so much of human effort is just as unreal, as much as it attempts to achieve the unreal form of earthly timelessness as against the ‘real’ form of heavenly Timelessness. Perhaps the difference between the wise and the foolish is the difference between the real and the unreal – the difference between the endeavors that strive for the (earthly) timeless and the endeavors that transcend into the (heavenly) Timeless. As I am jolted back into reality, shaken and gloomy, I question if I am being wise or being foolish – if in my strivings, I am pursing timelessness or Timelessness?

Would time give the answer? Can time answer the question of timelessness? If there is an answer it has to be with someone who is beyond time. If there is One who is beyond time, it ought to be the Creator of time. Perhaps, MJ has got his answer to the quest for the timeless in the Timeless world he is in now. Well, I am not shaken or gloomy anymore. Perhaps time does give the answer, when one has transcended into Timeless and met the ‘truly’ Timeless and has seen reality, not as through a ‘veil’ but in the very ‘being’ of the ‘truly’ Timeless One that always IS.