The Ground of All Time
On Eternity, the Eternal Now and the Peace of Our Being (The Nature of Consciousness #36)
A belief so fundamental it rarely surfaces as a belief: that experience takes place within time, moving from a remembered past through the present into an anticipated future. The conviction is so pervasive that we have built almost everything upon it – our planning, our relationships, our sense of who we are and where we are going. Yet a simple exploration of experience reveals that neither past nor future has ever been directly experienced. Only now is ever experienced. And now, it turns out, is not a moment in time at all.
This week we enter Chapter 16, ‘The Memory of Our Eternity’, exploring pages 151 through to the section break on page 155.* The investigation turns to time itself – subjecting our ordinary model to the scrutiny of direct experience, and discovering that what we call ‘now’ is not a fleeting point on a timeline but the eternal, dimensionless reality of consciousness, in which nothing has ever begun and nothing will ever end.
(*The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Vertical Dimension of Being
All experience, with the exception of the awareness of being, reaches us through the mediating activity of mind, through thought and perception. This is why experience appears to unfold in time and space. Time and space are not inherent in reality itself; they are the form in which reality appears when it passes through these faculties. Thought spreads reality out in time, and perception spreads it out in space. The individual mind is both the instrument of this refraction and, simultaneously, the entity that finds itself localised within it. From the perspective of the individual, everything, the self and all its experience, exists in time and space, with the present moment appearing as a point along a line extending indefinitely in both directions.
