Tuesday, August 3, 2021
3:10 a.m. And so we come to the nub of it, the two faces of time. As you say, what is the difference between life experienced as one long moment, and that same life expressed in length of years? I get that by tying “time” to “spirit,” you are going to explain some things.
Hopefully, we will. That’s our intent. Time is the one single greatest clue to your lives in 3D as they relate to life per se. Not everybody will be able to follow up on the clue, but there it is.
You lead, I’ll follow. Maybe between us we can strike the proper sparks.
Only, remember, this discussion continues our sketching the relation between spirt and soul, spirit and the mind, and spirit and the physical world. Spirit and time is to be seen in connection with those other relationships. Each aspect sheds light upon the others.
It can be hard to hold it all in mind at the same time.
Of course. But at least remember that it is desirable to do so.
We repeat, “be here, now” is the key to many things. It is when you function fully in the living-present moment that you are as free as a soul ever gets. Every other moment of time is the result of past choice and the determiner of conditions for future choice, but they can not provide the energy to overcome the inertia of “what is”; only the present moment can do that. And this is because the definer of the living-present moment is the active presence of spirit.
Isn’t spirit always present in our lives? Haven’t you said that spirit is the animator?
A little careful delineation necessary here. Slide-switches?
Maximum focus, maximum receptivity, maximum clarity of comprehension and expression. Go ahead.
Look at your life in the most commonsensical way, and what do you see? A long record, accumulated moment by moment. The record is the past, and is alive only within your mind. At most it continues to exist as the conditions around you that you are living in.
We have long since showed that this common-sense view cannot be an accurate view of things. It is a way of framing your life experience that makes it all make sense; that isn’t the same thing as being a way of framing it that is the way things really are.
Let’s look closely at the nature of time and the spirit, looking at them as if they were two aspects of the same thing, or were the same thing seen in two different frameworks. We think that will put things in a different light.
If time has two aspects, let’s postulate that the difference involves one’s experience of spirit. So, on the one hand, 75 years. On the other hand, one long continuous/discontinuous moment. What can this mean? What can it say about your life?
Well, didn’t you already say – what is only common sense – that one is perspective and the other is immediate?
To be sure, but what does that mean?
The living present is the only thing we experience as “now.”
Again, common sense, common experience. But so what?
I’m struggling, here. Can’t you just give it to us?
If it could be given, it would have been given successfully long ago. It must be grasped.
We must make the leap, I got it.
We have given you the key, but it is up to you to take the leap, like the spark jumping the gap. If you look at the two ways you experience time –
Oh! I get it! (Maybe.) We don’t experience time in two ways. We experience it in one way, and we remember, or foresee, every other moment.
You’re getting closer.
The present moment is real in a way remembered moments or anticipated moments are not.
And how can that be?
Other than the idea of the present becoming the future as the old present slides into the past? It has to have something to do with our mind.
It has everything to do with your – our! – mind. And so, with the spirit.
You say “and so” as a way of saying, “and it follows” – but I don’t yet follow.
How well does a computer process data when it has no electric current running through it? The machinery is unaltered; the stored data remains; the processing instructions are unimpaired. Why isn’t it working? When you turn it back on, everything that was saved is still there, available for interaction according to whatever rules govern it, but without the current, it is there, but as far as the user is concerned, might as well not be there.
But our minds are not computers, and spirit is not electricity.
You must understand, any age can use as metaphor only what it has experienced in the senses, or can imagine experiencing. Computers as metaphors, electricity as a metaphor, are recent developments, unavailable 200 years ago. That doesn’t make them snapshots, it makes them modern flashbulbs. Concentrate on what is illuminated, not so much on what provides the light.
If the present moment is distinguished by the presence of spirit, where was spirit other times?
No, think about what you just said. Concentrate.
I suppose I’m really asking, how can spirit be absent anywhen?
It can’t. So why can it feel absent?
That was my question to you.
You can still do this. Concentrate.
I get a metaphor I have gotten before. Twenty years ago and more, come to think of it: the record and the needle. You were comparing the non-3D to the 3D, and one such comparison was that you were the LP record, with all the information on it, and we in 3D with our focused intention were the needle, selecting what would be played.
Now adapt that metaphor. Instead of describing 3D and non-3D, can you make it describe the living-present moment and all other moments?
Only if spirit itself is the needle, and soul the record.
What’s so wrong with that as an analogy to be pursued?
Well, it doesn’t quite make sense, for one thing.
Then adjust it, looking at the basic idea in various ways, searching for the “Click!” of recognition. Twist the cardboard box, Wilbur.
I can sort of see spirit as needle, but soul isn’t the record, it is whatever is recorded on the record.
Better. So the record itself is – ?
Everything. All time-space. Spirit – the present living moment – is one position on the record, a continuously moving position, but one limited in extent.
Now you’re getting somewhere. Spirit as the needle, all reality (non-3D no less than 3D, by the way) as the record, and anyone’s life as experienced, as the record’s content. Hold that thought.
Yesterday was flow; today was more of a struggle.
Righteous persistence brings reward. Call today’s “Spirit and time,” perhaps.
Till next time, then, and thanks as always.