Time is not what it seems

You will have heard it by now. Somebody in a circle, or in a book, or across a table has said that time is an illusion, and the phrase has the weight of this material behind it. You have also read enough of the transcripts to know that no sentence in them says it.

That absence is where this essay starts, and it is worth being exact about it, because the distance between the popular sentence and the corpus is the whole usable finding here. Across the hundred and six sessions there is no sentence in which the material tells you time is an illusion, and none that begins by denying that it is. What there is, twice, is the claim that there is no time/space. Both instances are narrow, and one of them, a few words later, produces a plural.

What the corpus actually says

The strongest form of the simultaneity claim is one the material volunteered late, in answer to a question about what the densities permit. It is also the sentence that contains the problem.

Each mind/body/spirit or mind/body/spirit complex has an existence simultaneous with that of creation. It is not dependent upon any physical vehicle. However, in order to evolve, change, learn, and manifest the Creator the physical vehicles appropriate to each density are necessary.

Read the whole of it. Your existence is simultaneous with that of creation, and it does not depend upon a physical vehicle. And then, in the same passage, that growing, changing, learning and manifesting the Creator each call for a body built for the density doing the growing. So the sequence of lives is not an illusion in the first half of the sentence and a necessity in the second. Both, in one breath, without a join offered between them. The material does not appear to notice that it has just described a thing which is already simultaneous with everything and which nonetheless requires a queue.

Now the two narrow claims. Asked how an entity moves from one planet to the next, the material says that beingness and the Creator are one thing, that there is no time/space distortion, and that what is left to do is to think one’s way to the right place among what it calls an infinite array of time/spaces. An array. Not a single time, and not a river running one way. Asked to estimate how many would understand a call, the material says there is no time/space in call, and then reports in the same answer that people who had not been calling at all may, after real damage, arrive at the answer at very nearly the moment the late callers do. Nearly.

So the corpus’s own best version of this is not that time disappears. It is that the material moves confidently between at least two frames, names them space/time and time/space, and never once states how they stand to one another. The difference between the two is not a synonym. In the first, the spatial orientation of material gives a tangible framework for the illusion. In the second, the inequity falls on time itself, which leaves entities and their experiences without the fixity they have in the first. The same answer puts a great deal of time in the second as well, spent reviewing and re-reviewing what a prior incarnation left unbalanced, so it is not a timeless place either. It is another place, with its own waiting in it. And each side is described as its own kind of stillness, an entity in the metaphysical frame sitting somewhat immovably, much as you sit somewhat immovably in time.

Figure 01

Three registers called time, and the relation not supplied

What the claim is for

What follows is our reading, and it is ours rather than the material’s.

The simultaneity language is not philosophy of time. It is not offered as a picture of how the universe is built for its own sake, and in this corpus it almost never arrives alone. It arrives attached to an operation, and the operation is something the querent does.

The clearest case is the one the material offered when a questioner asked, in as many words, for the illusion of time and space to be explained. The answer is that the search for this group was conducted in time/space, because in that frame a person may be seen as a vibratory complex and a group as a harmonic within one. And then, in the same answer, that the comparison was run across a long stretch of years by your own measure. Both halves are load-bearing. The work was done somewhere that is not the somewhere you are in, and it took a long time by your clock. Ra is describing a method and telling the questioner what it cost in years.

That is what the claim is for. It takes away the reason to wait. Not the patience, which is something else, but the excuse: the notion that a life is a queue and that the item you are working on sits at the back of it.

What it costs

Here is the part that should make you careful, and we are not going to soften it because our own reading is favourable to the claim.

If the configuration is already complete, then the felt order of before and after and now is part of what is under examination rather than part of the furniture. You feel that your work has taken years. On this account that feeling is a description of the vehicle, in the way that a fish does not experience water. And if that holds, then patience stops being a virtue you are practising and becomes a symptom you are reporting. A reader who accepts the claim has to give up a real amount of comfort in exchange for the removal of an excuse, and those are not the same size of thing.

There is a cost in the other direction too, and it is easier to forget. In the one place where the material concedes outright that duration has effects, it concedes it about itself.

Do not concern yourselves overly with this in the space/time nexus present, but do not allow these distortions to remain over a long period or the contact will be gradually impaired.

Left alone for a long period, something does degrade. The material says so about its own contact and it says it plainly, without hedging. Whatever else is unresolved here, this is not a claim that sequence is imaginary. It is a claim that a long period is a real condition with a real cost.

Where the material is most nearly right

If you want this claim at its strongest and most usable, do not take it from the cosmology. Take it from the exercise, which comes in the answer where the material names what this density is for. There the unit of work is not a lifetime but a moment. The moment contains love, and that is the lesson and the goal of the illusion. The exercise is to seek that love consciously, in awareness of the distortions, and the first such seeking is called the cornerstone, upon which the remainder of the life-experience rests.

Notice what is absent from that instruction. It says nothing about the shape of time, nothing about whether the whole of it is already complete, and nothing about how many moments there are. It names a unit, gives the unit a content, and makes the first act a choice. This is the most nearly right the material gets on time, and it gets there by declining the metaphysics entirely.

And when the material is pressed for a moment in its own time, it hedges three times in three sentences.

This is an approximation. We have stated we have difficulty with your time/space. This is an appropriate probable/possible time/space nexus for harvest. Those who are not in incarnation at this time will be included in the harvest.

A corpus that will state a cosmology in the plain indicative, session after session, arrives at three hedges the moment the question is a time. It is not being modest. It is describing the shape of the thing, and the shape is that this is a variable the source says it has difficulty with.

What we do with it

In this community we do not resolve it, and that is a decision rather than an evasion. It would be easy to write a paragraph claiming that time is a feature of the mind and that the material agrees, and the paragraph would be worth nothing, because it would agree with everybody and settle nothing. It would also be easy to write the opposite paragraph, insisting that the corpus plainly asserts sequence and that the mystical reading is a modern import. We have read that argument seriously and we do not think it wins, because the simultaneity language is really there, in Ra’s own words, volunteered without being asked for.

So the honest position is the uncomfortable one. This material contains a claim about time that it does not finish stating, and a reader who wants the finished version will have to supply it themselves. We would rather you left with a question you can hold than with a resolution we manufactured. And we are not going to pretend the question is neutral. The moment is the unit, the first seeking is the cornerstone, and a long period left alone costs you something. Take those three and act on them. Leave the shape of time open, and read the transcripts closely enough to catch the material on the occasions when it says more than it has said here.