time

Time is an illusion of the mind -- only love remains

He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding--passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.

Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.

September 2003 (Vol. XVI, No. 8)

BLESSINGS, dear friends! Welcome to a new season ... a time for letting go like the falling leaves of authumn ... a time to simplify, to pause in the silence of deep prayer and ask for guidance: i.e., "How would You have me best use the days of this season to Serve in your Dream for our world?" Then, listen for a word, Divine Hints that may surprise you ... and, trust, trust that you will live into the answer to your request as you hold the question in your heart.

William James The Letters of William James

I am done with great things
And big things, great institutions
And big success, and I am for those
Tiny invisible molecular moral
Forces that work from individual
To individual, creeping through
The crannies of the world like
So many rootlets, or like the
Capillary oozing of water,
Yet which, if you give them Time
Will rend the hardest monuments
Of our pride.

David Whyte Crossing the Unknown Sea

Our relationship to time has become corrupted because we allow ourselves very little experience of the TIMEless. We speak continuously of SAVING time, but time in it richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. We speak of STEALING time as if it no longer belonged to us We speak of NEEDING time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to MAKE time for ourselves as if it were in our power to o so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present. 

Bonnie Thurston To Everything a Season

We nee to "slow down to a human tempo" and experience time as it was meant to be experienced. We already live in "the fullness of time," and we must give ourselves a chance to realize that we have what we seek. Our hearts and flesh cry out for the living God, Who IS here, right now, among us if we but receive that Divine Presence. The call to take time to be holy is a call to integrate prayer and life, for they are, in fact, one. The call is to live as if all time were Holy time. So, I rejoice to announce to you, it is!

Harvey Arden Dreamkeepers
Sitting here talking — that's happening NOW, so I'm totally absorbed in it. Right here, this is the most important conversation in the world because it's happening HERE and NOW! Was I getting a glimpse of an accessible philosophy here? Something I could actually use to hone the dulled edges of my own soul? To learn to celebrate the present moment, the NOWNESS and HERENESS of life? NOW, the most sacred, the most precious moment of all.
Cynthia Bourgeault Mystical Hope

The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. All the great religious traditions insist upon this simple but difficult truth. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.

Ann Ree Colton

Time is a regulating providence, giving us the chance to make our world at one with the World of God.

Rumi

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.

Robert J. Hope From the Center

They are not long
These days to be
But a taste of eternity.
In each hour,
There is the power
Of a Now
That stretches timeless
In Its core
And knows eternity
Be not more.
 

John Donohue Anam Cara

The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.

David Cooper God is a Verb

When we accept each moment as a new opportunity for fulfilling our purpose, we are always present, always succeeding, always changing the world for the better. And we are always HERE ... NOW.

Robert A. Johnson Balancing Heaven and Earth
I stood there dumbfounded by the vast silence. . . And, for one of the many times in my life, thinking, "Robert, what in the name of heaven have you gotten yourself into?" For the first few days, time weighed very heavy on my hands. I found myself constantly looking at my watch. I was suppose to look for fires fifteen minutes out of every hour and phone in a weather report each day at noon, but otherwise I could do as I wished. By the third day, however, something changed. Time was no longer an entity that pressured me. Time became like the flow of a river, and gradually I came into accord with the rest of nature. I was never again bored or lonely that summer. . . Living in the wilderness frees us from the tyranny of time and reveals how different existence was for our ancestors.
Patricia Hart Clifford

To open to the sense, to become really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain for a time in what T. S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world" — the present. The only true reality is the present.

Louis Cox, Fran Cox A Conscious Life

It's a curious paradox in this life that change is a constant, dependable, and unchanging fact. But when we try to control the moment by denying what is so, we have lost the moment to the past or the future. Trying to alter the moment steals it from us. If we want fruitful change in our lives, we have to move through each moment, experiencing its wholeness, savoring what it has to offer, noticing where we are stuck, and in the process maintain an intimate contact with our deepest sense of self.

Anonymous

In the Silence we touch Eternity and Love.

Akshara Noor

Heaven bestows, yet wemust receive.
For what has happened, I give thanks.
For what is happening, I send praise.
For what is to happen, I have faith.

Marion Woodman Bone

The field of space and time is invisible, but in that space and time is the conscious awareness of the mind of the universe. Within it are mystical experience an high loving. The cosmos is being created in its entirety every eco-second. We are working with God in a process of coevolution.

S. Wendy Becket Meditations of Silence

Silence is making-friends-with-time. It does not fight it or waste it; it refuses to run after it. Silence floats free of time, letting the pattern of the moments unfold at its own pace... In silence we break the hold time has on us, and accept in practice that our true home is in eternity.

Silence is making-friends-with-time

Silence is making-friends-with-time. It does not fight it or waste it; it refuses to run after it. Silence floats free of time, letting the pattern of the moments unfold at its own pace... In silence we break the hold time has on us, and accept in practice that our true home is in eternity.

Trying to control the moment

It's a curious paradox in this life that change is a constant, dependable, and unchanging fact. But when we try to control the moment by denying what is so, we have lost the moment to the past or the future. Trying to alter the moment steals it from us. If we want fruitful change in our lives, we have to move through each moment, experiencing its wholeness, savoring what it has to offer, noticing where we are stuck, and in the process maintain an intimate contact with our deepest sense of self.

All time is Holy time

We nee to "slow down to a human tempo" and experience time as it was meant to be experienced. We already live in "the fullness of time," and we must give ourselves a chance to realize that we have what we seek. Our hearts and flesh cry out for the living God, Who IS here, right now, among us if we but receive that Divine Presence. The call to take time to be holy is a call to integrate prayer and life, for they are, in fact, one. The call is to live as if all time were Holy time. So, I rejoice to announce to you, it is!

Living in the wilderness frees us from the tyranny of time

I stood there dumbfounded by the vast silence. . . And, for one of the many times in my life, thinking, "Robert, what in the name of heaven have you gotten yourself into?" For the first few days, time weighed very heavy on my hands. I found myself constantly looking at my watch. I was suppose to look for fires fifteen minutes out of every hour and phone in a weather report each day at noon, but otherwise I could do as I wished. By the third day, however, something changed. Time was no longer an entity that pressured me. Time became like the flow of a river, and gradually I came into accord with the rest of nature. I was never again bored or lonely that summer. . . Living in the wilderness frees us from the tyranny of time and reveals how different existence was for our ancestors.

I am done with great things and big things

I am done with great things
And big things, great institutions
And big success, and I am for those
Tiny invisible molecular moral
Forces that work from individual
To individual, creeping through
The crannies of the world like
So many rootlets, or like the
Capillary oozing of water,
Yet which, if you give them Time
Will rend the hardest monuments
Of our pride.

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