Through the Looking Glass: an exploration of time
As I was waking up, I was dreaming. I was reading a book, many books, they were difficult to read, but full of wisdom, I loved them. I was the small girl, but I could read them and understand all the wisdom, the paradigms of consciousness, I understood it all. This knowledge seemed to be a “steadying force” that was being explained by many people, and there was a strong knowing that it was there, behind everything. In fact, it was there always, it was laid out in many ways, and even if I hadn’t read the books, the knowledge just was, as it is, underlying everything. It was already all there.
And then, as dreams go, I was the adult, who remembered that she had already read this, somewhere, sometime.
When I awoke I felt as if this whole lifetime, is already all there. For everyone – it is already there. Everyone is complete and the manifestation is complete.
Falling back into this line of thought in a waking meditative state, I again saw it. As I traced over what seemed to be “the pages”, with a small jeweler’s magnifying glass, I began to see the details. How wondrous, the green trees and the earth in such diversity; the people in this awareness space of the magnifying glass each had their own identifiable personalities and vibrations. I kept going over and over this small space, finding out more things, interacting with the people. And they are interacting with me. I was curious and intensely interested .
Somewhere in that small space of what I was perceiving as time, as the magnifying glass moved across, I become that time. I am that vision in the magnifying glass. I am no longer the watcher, guiding the glass over the manifestation to see what I could see. I have become entangled with the beings and I am working through this paradigm which is this place in time. There are lots of problems, one day leads to the next. I think I understand, I think I am helping or I think I am improving and getting ahead of this game. More and more and more, it never stops… I search for the Utopia, the way out – the greater meaning or the solution to problems.
During this experience in time, I have the nagging feeling that I have done all this before, or it is fate? But it can’t be fate because I am making choices. I am choosing good and bad, purifying myself, striving to understand and to become an enlightened spiritual being. It can’t be fate, because if it were all laid out wouldn’t that eliminate the choices?
But those choices… do they appear to be choices? Or are they just me, running my awareness, my “jeweler’s magnifying glass”, over the already complete manifestation, and the only choice I am making is which part of it I want to see?
Every experience I have there, in that moving space of awareness which has become time, has infinite possibilities; every being is infinite and complete and part of the whole manifestation.
I become the watcher looking through the glass again and I see it as a dream, but the flavor of it remains on my soul, the taste on my lips of something I have forgotten, some bit of understanding remains, I can’t remember how I know it, I try to trace my thoughts back and get lost ….
I wanted to share this with you, so that you would know that everything is okay, you are not lost; you are part of a whole that is already complete.
It’s not about the “things, the personality and the experiences” – we are awareness beings without these attributes. We are all Space and Time and our curiosity which pushes us to see or experience the manifestation is the movement.
The above article bears no authority above its own appeal to the reader. It is posted here with a quote from the Secret Doctrine in the hopes that the reader may through “individual, self devised effort” find his/her own way, should he/she wish to do so, to gently lift the veil of the normal state of consciousness, the “ring past not” of what we call the present, into realization of the limitless duration of the “ever-present”.
TIME AND UNIVERSAL MIND. – Secret Doctrine – Stanza I, 2. (a)
(a) Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but “lies asleep.” The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change — or the same — for the billionth part of a second; and the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of “time” known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past. In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth. It is these “sum-totals” that exist from eternity in the “future,” and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the “past.” No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean. Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past — present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves, as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that “duration” in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.