Śākyamuni Buddha has neither beginning nor end and has overcome birth, aging, sickness, and death upon his enlightenment. He has risen above life and death and thus, his own life had no birth or death. The Buddha has also gone beyond [or outside of the bounds of] linear time. The ability to recall his own previous existences is indicative of this capacity. To exist without the limits of time and space indicates that the Buddha’s life is everywhere and nowhere; essentially, his life is the entire universe. To understand these ideas, one needs to abandon the notion of time as a linear concept, and enlarge one’s thinking to conceive of time as a multi-dimensional concept, almost layered in nature. The Buddha often speaks of time as if past, present, and future existed simultaneously in different realms as well as in different world systems.