THE PERCEPTION OF TIME

What is time?

It has many perceptions. It is a commodity to be traded, a currency which can be used to buy any other thing. You may invest this currency in becoming very skilled at some pursuit.

Time is currency

When you are giving time to something, you are also giving it attention. The converse is also true. When you are giving attention to something, you are also giving it time. The two ideas, time and attention, are intertwined, inseparable. That means they are the same thing, or both part of a larger whole.

Time is attention

Time is also perception. It is your current preferred way of perceiving reality, in a stream that is endlessly long and one inch wide. You experience reality as a ticker tape machine experiences the tape. Sometimes, time seems to speed up, slow down, or is forgotten altogether. Which of your experiences with time tell the truth of what time is?

Time is perception

It is also your conditioning. It is a group-think illusion that must be taught. You have to be taught to observe it and to rule your day by a clock. Otherwise, like a child, you would endlessly indulge your pleasure in living in the moment.

Time is conditioning

Past, present and future: these are only how you choose to experience what you choose to experience.

We do not choose to use the concept of time anymore since you have gone beyond it and don’t need it.

It is an unhappy concept, which makes it easy for you to believe that the things you desire are hiding from you in the folds of time, somewhere in the past or the future.

This is a self-defeating belief, that is all. Now you have realized that everything you want to see manifest is already within you. If it were not, how would you know to desire it? How would you know to believe you did not have it? Time is a construct loved by humans, but spiritually without meaning.

Everything you love, everything you desire, is already within you. Let it be manifest. It is not for you to imagine how this will come to pass. Do not allow your mind to go there. As yet, you have but a human imagination. It cannot render what is your heart’s desire. Trust. This is all.

Everything you desire is already within you

AGREE TO CHANGE

Teacher, you must agree to change. The more you agree to change beforehand, the more you are enabling yourself to teach.

Who would not want this?

You must agree to change because your own ideas are not worth going to bat for. If you would be a teacher, by all means be a teacher of the truth; why be anything less? You can embody this message of possibility and change, in any walk of life. This is the only lesson you would teach now. Goodness, possibility, change. The way you teach is by example. It does not require your words, what you might deem to be a powerful, persuasive, or emotional speech.

Intent is everything

Intent is the power of a thousand suns harnessed to your chariot, carrying you far above all travails you ever thought you knew. Intent is the calm knowing that comes from within, chasing away your stress symptoms like heavenly balm, replacing them, making them nothing.

If you are to be a teacher, be a teacher of God. Be willing to be changed. This increases your effectiveness. Things will seem to happen by and of themselves, fabricated out of the nothingness, the primordial soup of infinite possibilities, summoned by your imagination, your focus, your attention.

Let go your preconceived ideas; they were based on insufficient knowledge. You obviously know more now than you did then. No judgment born out of anything less than complete and perfect knowledge can be valid.

Your past judgment is now found invalid. Declare it to be so, summon it and dismiss it, no more useful now than a rusty padlock or a blown out tire.

If your past judgments are declared null and void because you didn’t have all the facts, then wouldn’t your present judgments appear laughably uninformed and naïve to a future you?

Be innocent of judgment

A QUOTE OF NEVILLE

Neville Goddard

“If you see this from above, everything here is like, well, something that is dead. You can’t change it from above, strangely enough. I have tried to, change it from above. Look at the body, it’s on the bed, and it looks like something like a carcass, that’s dead. Well you know exactly the wisdom is from above, if you could only do with it now, while you’re there, with the clarity of vision. But you can’t do it. You’ve got to come down, and occupy it. And then you forget. This is the world of the dead.”

When Neville starts speaking directly from Spirit, without his prepared speech getting in the way, his words become poetic; they have meter and rhyme.

“Look at the body. It’s on the bed

and it looks like something like a carcass, that’s dead”

How we recoil from that image of death!

The body on the bed seems like the ultimate defeat to us. You can’t escape it. Dusty death is the lord of all.

This drives paroxysms of revulsion, depression, and fear within us.

Of course. This makes perfect sense. As long as you believe you are a body, you will experience revulsion, depression, and fear at the idea of death.

In fact, here is the test of how much you identify with the body, your fear of pain and death. The more fear you have, the more you identify with the body, and its owner and animator, the ego. When you fear bad outcomes for the body, it is because you believe that you are a body.

I am not a body. I am free. I hear the Voice God has given me, and it is only this my mind obeys

A Course in Miracles, Lesson 199

Workbook for Students

What if

I could imagine that I am disembodied, a consciousness who is observing, from above, this dead world below, this dead body laid out on a table. Now of course I can observe a certain toxicity which led to failures, shutdowns, miscommunications, shoddiness and poverty of spirit. Just sin, and sin means only “missing the mark”. I can observe plenty of missing the mark.

I look down at the body which was my life, and of course see all the blindness, all the mistakes that caused me pain, as just an unnecessary, crying waste of time. Unnecessary misery. And, from above, I vow and declare to hew to the clarity I now have, to have no other will than His, and no other desire than to do good.

Let me have no other desire

than to do good

IMAGINATION AUTHORS ALL

More and more, reality seems fluid, shifting and the stuff of imagination. I mean that literally: the stuff, the fabric, the raw material, the realization, the birthing of it.

That trip we just did to California, now it is over: was it real, or stuff of the imagination? Yes, it happened as surely as I know how to judge anything happened. But it was created in the imagination first, and then issued forth into the medium of what we might call reality, which is whatever you can apprehend with your five physical senses. What begins as an idea, held to with constant focus, is borne outwards like a drop of darkest indigo ink, issuing endlessly, billowing.

The author of all of your experiences is your imagination. If it is unfocused, scattered, and shifting, so will your experience be unfocused, scattered, and shifting. You will try hard to make meaning out of the seemingly random things that happen to you. This is as futile as gathering up water to make it into the wave it issued from.

You dismiss your imagination as though it were a useless plaything. “Oh, that’s only imaginary”‘, you say.

Nothing exists but that someone imagined it first

If you disrespect it, think it worthless and not suited to the real world, of course you cannot be using it as it was intended to be used.

Imagination is more important than knowledge

Think of it as the most precious, powerful tool you could be given. There is none other. Your imagination has the capacity to determine your entire existence, your feelings, your moods, your circumstances, all those things that you currently think determine you, that you are the victim of, and that you allow to rule your life.

Remember Who you are. Everything you see around you is your own creation. Everything you see around you: the table, the rug, every person around you, every situation, everything was thought first.

Thought precedes all

Be conscious of where you place attention. This is a precious resource. Experience indeed is the product of imagination. The sooner you realize this, and begin using this powerful tool in a focused, directed way, the better it is for everyone.

For without Him was not made anything that was made that was made

John 1:3

ONLY YOUR SELF

$A fractal, a fantastic shape produced by mathematics. This one looks like a ghostly green figure is beconing to the viewer, against a dark background. The feeling is serene.$

You say you want to be in love, you say you want a soulmate, you say you want a fulfilling relationship. But it is only yourself that you must be in love with.

Only your self

Why?

For many reasons. First of all, your entire world and experience, everything that you think of as reality, is only the mirror of what is within you. If reality seems random, frightening and uncontrollable, it is because something within you is afraid and wants control. The more control it wants, the more is it afraid.

Not a way to live, friends.

It is only yourself you need to love because it is the Self who is loved, when you love. The Self revels and rejoices in all ways and paths to love. When you choose attributes you yearn for and lay them upon the altar of your heart, with all the sanctity afforded by your love and intense gratitude, who but the Self is then invited in? And is this not the entire purpose of your existence here, to choose His love and care over all?

A beautiful pink water lily opening its petals upward to the sun.

Who but the Self?

It is only your self you need to love because everything in the outer is but a reflection of what is inner. If you desire love in the outer, as all do, then create the love you desire in your inner space. Use your outpicturings and intentions. You alone are in control of these.

It is really only your self you need to love because when you have been transformed by the attributes you have taken into your experience, you will radiate out strength, goodness, calm, compassion, and all else you have chosen. As like attracts like, other beings and entities with the same attributes will swim into your waters. Those without will seem to slide away.

As above, so below

As within, so without

As the universe, so the soul

Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet

OBSTACLES MELT

As the sun is to ice and water, so is the sun of your clear and focused intention to any obstacles.

Anything presenting now as an obstacle is only a projection of mind. It is something you have decided to notice. In the physical world, you see only those objects that stop light. If objects do not stop light, you do not see them.

Similarly with obstacles. You see them because they stop light, because you have decided to give them the light of your attention.

Why focus on an obstacle if you do not want it to be there? Do you want what appear to be obstacles? Maybe you do, since you see them. But if you knew you had chosen them yourself, wouldn’t you choose again?

Obstacles are illusions

Ben Sutter

It is just as easy to focus on what you want. It is all your choice where to focus attention.

The Romans had their Lares and Penates, gods and guardians of the household, to whom they prayed and made offerings every morning.

You are in charge of deciding your own household gods. Choose your own Lares and Penates. Build your mosaic. Visit the altar in the field of your heart. Do it now. This is your sun. Visit it often.

Before the power of your own sun, continually fed, continually visited, continually loved and celebrated by you, no obstacle can stand. Can you see how foolish it would be for the sun to faint and grow weary with self doubt? Does the sun see an ice crystal as any kind of obstacle?

No indeed; the sun has nothing to do but be effulgent.

And so let it be with any of your perceived obstacles. Let them melt and evaporate before the sun of your firm feeling-states.

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