Essay 9: THE TYRANNY OF TIME

“The Chinese sage whom they revere, is the one who kept himself always at the age of sixteen years by never letting his mortal mind speak.” (Esoteric Philosophy page 27:4)

In today’s modern world, it seems that we are more attuned and sensitized to time than ever before. For many of us, old sayings about time such as “time waits for no man,” “I’m running late” and “I don’t have the time” rule our everyday lives and activities. We manipulate time constantly but seem bound to it at every turn. Mechanisms such as daylight savings time, national and global time zones, as well as our personal scheduling and rescheduling of events and appointments give testimony to our mortal mind’s fixation on the element of time. Some of man’s most beautiful, intricate, and accurate creations are devices that measure and manage time for us.

For those of us looking to the attainment of higher consciousness, one of the greatest stumbling blocks in that effort, both personally and as a race, is our ideas and beliefs about time. In Reality, time is what would be true if Eternal Now were not All. As we are willing and able to release our attachments to the “shadow reality” of time, we are welcomed into a more expansive realm of Changeless, Immovable Mind. There we picture “the impossible life” where miracles become commonplace, agelessness has a place in us, and we replicate and individualize the Nature of Jesus Christ by “laying down our lives and taking them up again” at will.

In each of the Kingdoms of Consciousness, we have a different and unique relationship with the illusion of time. In Kingdom 1, time works against us, because our perception of the world is usually one of victimhood where “everything is against me.” At this level, we are slaves to time.

In Kingdom 2, we learn to be the masters of time and use it to do our will. At this level, time begins to demonstrate its lack of Substance and Origin because it often expands and contracts, depending upon our needs. The limitation of this consciousness is in the fact that, while we demonstrate a certain mastery of time, we still identify with it.

Upon entry into Kingdom 3, time begins to become, for lack of a better term, a bit “fuzzy around the edges” as we look toward our Mystic Body. All our lower bodies have some bondage to time, because those bodies were born after the world was made. It is said that “time casts a long shadow” but that is all it is, a mere shadow. Our Mystic Body, steadfast, true, and eternally awaiting our recognition of It, was created before the world was made and knows nothing of time. Only the Eternal Now expresses Itself in the Immortal Mind, our Original I AM.

Living in the Eternal Now first requires that we recognize It as Truth. It also requires that we are obedient to Its activity in us, an obedience born of trust. This is the activity of Jesus Christ. Jesus was able to manifest a ministry of many lifetimes in a mere three years, a ministry that changed the world and continues to change it because His consciousness was not bound by time. The accomplishments that we call “miracles” were manifestations that, for mortal mind, “take time” but were performed effortlessly and immediately in the Immortal Mind that possessed Jesus. When they “had no wine” at the wedding feast in Cana, the wedding could have been postponed and scheduled for another time while wine was found, purchased, and transported to the site. Jesus accomplished the same outcome because the timelessness of Eternal Now came to earth through him and we call it a “miracle.” Plans could have been made and time taken to gather enough food to feed the 5000, but Jesus was easily able to exhibit Immortal Mind in the world by multiplying the loaves and fishes. He operated free from the bondage of time or conditions, showing forth the very essence of Christ Consciousness. Free from the hypnosis of time, Immortal Mind comes to earth through us all, and “a new Heaven and a new earth” are revealed.

Time cannot exist, nor could it ever exist, in Mind that has never moved, has never changed, or has ever identified with anything, but is the unshakeable Cause of All. Time is simply a shadow context in which mortal mind thinks.

How do we begin to live free of the tyranny we call time? We do so by recognizing and forgiving the “faces” of time that we see all around us. When that veil is lifted, we join with and announce our own Jesus Christ Self and can say with authority “Behold, I have overcome the world.”