commentary by maurice nicoll
Eternity is vertical to Time
—and this is the direction of Self-Remembering—the feeling of oneself
now. Every now is eternal. To remember oneself the feeling of now
must enter—I here now—I myself now—I distinct from past or future—
the newness of myself—I now. And if the act is successful you will know
for yourself that Eternity is always in now and can be experienced as
a different taste from Time. Notice that I do not speak any longer
of the present moment registered by the senses, but of now, of this
internal experience that Self-Remembering can actually give. Real 'I'
is in Eternity—not in Time. Self-Remembering is out of Time and
Personality. It is not surprising that Self-Remembering can give a
feeling utterly different from that given by our relation to hurrying,
anxious Time. Essence, being eternal, has not the feelings of Person-
ality which are of Time only. To think from Time gives no real feeling
of oneself, or rather it gives a wrong feeling—our usual feeling of
ourselves. This is our usual sense of ourselves. We can notice how
incomplete it is. Why do people act as they do? Because they do not
feel themselves rightly. We know already that the Work teaches that
we were created as an experiment—as self-developing organisms—and
therefore we can understand why we feel incomplete and why a man,
moulded only by life—that is, having only his acquired Personality
active—must always feel incomplete, unfinished, and so internally
helpless. It is not the force of life which lies in Time that can make
Personality passive—how could it, when it is the force that made it?
Only another force coming from a different direction can make
Personality passive and feed Essence—the eternal part of us. One can
then begin to see that all esoteric teaching must have the quality of
Eternity about it, and being so can develop Essence, which is eternal.
Through all Time, through all the ages, esoteric teaching remains the
same. It always says the same things. It always teaches the same
things. It is above Time and change. It is Eternity in Time—and so
it speaks always of eternal life.
To return: the 4th dimension of Time contains all one's life. We
experience it moment by moment. It runs very fast and is only halted
by the feeling of now. Our life lying extended in this dimension,
inaccessible to our senses, is all there—in this invisible dimension. For
this reason everything we do now affects the past as well as the future
of our life. One act of non-identifying now influences your past as well
as your future. Your relation to people in the past will change, by work
on yourself now. Not only will you change your own past, but possibly
theirs. This is very difficult to grasp so I come back to the beginning of
this paper where it was said that to change our Being and to increase
consciousness we need new ideas beyond those given by the senses. It
was said in so many words that as long as our thinking is based only on
the evidence of the senses, the mind cannot think differently and new
connections cannot be opened. You will say that the past is dead, over,
finished—just because your senses do not register it. If they did, you
would think differently, but as they do not, you will say that the idea
of the past life actually existing is nonsense. That is what it is. It is
"nonsense", for the external senses do not register it, since they can
only register the moment of Time called the present. The higher
dimensions are not realities of the external senses, but of the internal
senses. For instance, my whole life can be internally seen in a certain
state of consciousness. Why? Because it is there. Where? In Time.
And my future? It is also there, in the dimension that we experience
as Time through which we are moving. Then I am pre-destined ? Yes
and No, because there are many parallel lines of Time like telegraph
wires and one can be on one or another according to one's inner state.
If you enjoy your negative emotions you will follow one line, and the
lowest. To rise in a vertical movement one rises and follows another
parallel line by non-identifying and by Self-Remembering—in short,
by the Work, which enters Time at right angles and so is always
vertically above you, whatever line you follow, and never in the future,
for the future is in horizontal Time. One might speak of one's vertical
future, however, as distinct from one's horizontal future. If Being
develops, the direction is vertical. One will see one's life differently.
Higher Being is above lower Being. At this moment you can go with
'I's below you or above you. You can spoil something silently in
yourself or not. You can say something to yourself or not. It will all
remain in the Time-Body, but on different levels, according to its
quality. All the life is there—in the Time-Body. But by work now,
things can be changed in the past and the Time-Body connected in a
different way—as one might loop up bits of a long, flexible string and
lengthen others. When we feel that all the past is there and living in
the dimension of living Time, our sense of ourselves alters. Indeed, it
alters very much, by our realizing first that passing Time cancels
nothing and secondly that one can change things in the past now—not
by useless sad regret, but by active work on ourselves. We are not
connected with a dead past but with a living past. Every act of work
vibrates through the whole Time-Body and alters things in it. I can
act now on my past. I can change now my behaviour thirty years ago.
Later on, we will speak of recurrence, of re-entering our lives once
more and finding perhaps that some things have been changed, so that
we begin to awaken earlier.
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