"A Parenthesis in Eternity" by Joel S. Goldsmith

"A Parenthesis in Eternity" pdf file

Chapter 29 - Beyond Time and Space

As human beings we live in the past, the present, and the future. The past has been, and there is nothing more we can do about it; the future has not come, and there is nothing that a human being can do except wait to see what the future is going to do to him. On the spiritual path our whole attitude toward the past and the future is changed because we realize that we are building our future now. Whatever fills our consciousness this minute is the seed we are sowing, and it determines the type of fruitage we will have. If we are sowing to the flesh, we will reap a future of corruption; whereas, if we sow to the Spirit, we will reap in the future, life everlasting.

In the absolute sense there is no future: the future is only a continuation of the present; it is an extension in time and space of the present; and it is safe to say that our future will be this present, whatever this present is, extended into time and space.

Since life is consciousness, the seeds that we sow in our consciousness at any and every moment of the day will determine the nature of the crops that we will reap in that extension of the present which is called the future. There is no future separate and apart from this minute: the future is only this minute extending itself, and the nature of that future must be the nature of this minute extending itself. So, if we abide in the Word and let the Word abide in us now, we will reap richly, spiritually, divinely, and harmoniously.

Man is continually sowing the seeds of his own future. Each minute of his life he is building tomorrow, and next year, and the year following, and even ensuring that there will be these years to come. We build our life in consciousness by the nature of that which occupies our thoughts. As we live this minute, this minute extends itself forward into time and space, carrying with it the quality with which we have imbued this minute.

If constantly and consciously we are realizing that God is Spirit, and God is law, and therefore that law is spiritual, and if we are governed by spiritual law, that becomes the law, not only to this present moment, but this present moment goes on extending itself in time and space. All there is to time and space is our consciousness extending itself. If our consciousness ever stopped functioning, time and space would no longer exist for us.

Time plays no part in the functioning of God. There is only now in the spiritual kingdom, there is only this moment, this continuing moment. It is because of this continuing moment that everything that happens in the future will happen. If next month all the leaves on the trees in the park will have turned brown, yellow, or red, it is only because of the process going on in the tree this minute. When the leaves drop off the trees in the autumn, it is because of what took place in the tree prior to that time. What occurs this minute determines what conditions will be an hour from now, a day or a week from now. God is functioning this minute, and it is because of this minute that something occurs when it becomes "this minute" a minute from now.

Whatever activity of the Spirit is going on now determines the activity of the universe a second from now. God cannot inaugurate an action. God cannot make two times two four now, and if He wanted to do so, He could not make it five either. What two times two is has been determined from the beginning of time.

God is, and the only time God is, is now. God is "is-ing" now, and this "is-ing" continues as a continuity of the now. It is always now in God's kingdom: it is never fifteen minutes ago or fifteen minutes from now.

We are living a godless life every moment that we waste time living in the past. There is nothing God can do about the past because God is not there: God is here, and God is now. The place whereon we stand is holy ground—now. If anything is to take place in what we call the future, it has to be as a continuing of the presence of the God of now. The only way to bring ourselves under God's law is to give up both the past and the future and align ourselves with God through the realization of Omnipresence, Omniaction, Omnibeing, all here now.

This is living the life of the-place-whereon-I-stand-is-holy-ground. If at any time our lack of understanding of that has resulted in our being in prison, in a hospital, in sin, in disease, or in poverty, then the remedy is to begin this second where we are, get up-to-date with God, and realize Omnipresence.

We know nothing about tomorrow, nor can we have the faintest idea of what will take place tomorrow. If we think we know, we are limiting our tomorrow to what we know about yesterday and today; and if we do that, we are not leaving ourselves open for a God-experience.

God does not operate tomorrow. The tomorrow-operation of God is dependent on the now-operation of God because God is functioning only in this split second, and in every continuing split second. Even God cannot take a rosebud and in a few minutes turn it into a full-blown rose. God functions now. We, then, being a part of the functioning of the now, unfold in accordance with the nature of our being, but we cannot do this without God. We cannot get God to do it yesterday, and we cannot get God to do it tomorrow. The tomorrowness of God is due solely to the nowness of God. Now, God is God, and God is an eternal God, functioning eternally in the now, never in the past and never in the future. When we are living in the future, we are living as godless a life as if we were living in the past.

If we are leading the mystical life, however, we will have a period of thanksgiving when we retire at night, thanking God for the way He has managed this universe the past twenty-four hours, and giving Him a little pat on the back because the sun and the moon came up on time, the rain came in due season, and the sunshine; the tides came in and the tides went out on time. He deserves a little credit for such accuracy and balance, and with that as a basis, we can look forward with confidence to tomorrow. Undoubtedly, tomorrow He will take care of all this, too, so that tonight we can go to sleep and trust it to Him.

And when we wake up in the morning, we will not again attempt to take over all the responsibility for this universe but we will remember, "God, You did all right last night without my help. I think I'll trust You with today."

The mystic does not sit around worrying about what is going to happen to the world: the mystic beholds life and watches God at work. If he wants to see the sun rise, he gets up early, but then realizes that he is watching an activity of the Principle that governs this universe.

As we become beholders and watch each hour unfold to see what God does with it, we overcome the egotistic belief that this is our world and that we are responsible for it. We do not fear "man, whose breath is in his nostrils," man who has forged the weapons of this world; but we awaken in the morning with the same confidence with which we went to sleep at night, leaving this world in His care. And we leave the day in His care, too, and learn to stand a little bit to the right of ourselves, watching how beautifully God runs this universe, and how He provides in advance for every need. This is a glorious universe when we behold God at work, God in action.

This is being a witness. A witness is not an active participant: a witness is one who bears witness, who sees and beholds. That is what we are: God's witnesses. At first this principle is difficult to practice. It takes time to become accustomed to trusting God with our days with the same degree of confidence that we trust our nights to Him. Some of us would not trust Him with the night, except that we are too tired to stay awake!

Those of us who do sit up much of the night meditating and communing are not doing so for the purpose of helping God. We meditate because we like to behold God at work even in the middle of the night, and He does as many miraculous things then as He does in the day.

"Now is the day of salvation." Now is the only time, and now is the perfect time. Now I am. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." When? Not tomorrow, not when we are dead—now! Now do we live and move and have our being in Christ-consciousness.

All life is predicated on now. As long as we are living on the human level of life, the law of as-ye-sow-so-shall-ye-reap will operate in our experience; and that means that as we sow now, so will we reap. The nature of our sowing determines the nature of our reaping, but the reaping in the future cannot be any more harmonious than the sowing that we do in the now. The spiritual fruitage of tomorrow is the product of the spiritual sowing of now, and if we do not sow spiritually now, there will be no spiritual fruitage later. All karma can be erased in any moment because the results of karma can last only while the seeds of karma are operating. As soon as a person moves out of that material consciousness where he sowed materially, there is no more material reaping because he is not there: he has "died."

In the moment that we "die" to the past, we are reborn in this nowness, and in our rebirth in the Spirit, we carry with us nothing of the past, not any more than the butterfly carries with it anything of the worm. After the worm has spun its cocoon and has had a long period of quiet, separate and apart from the outside world, it dies, and the butterfly is bom, but that butterfly has no remembrance of its worm-state.

Any moment in which we have the conscious realization of the presence of God, we have "died" to our materialism. The birth of the Christ has taken place. Twenty times a day it can take place in meditation, and each time it does, some part of the human past that has continued to intrude is wiped out.

It is necessary to have periods in which we consciously live as though we were looking right down a long straight line of now, seeing nothing of the past, being unconcerned about the future, and living now in conscious oneness with the Father.

When in our silence this oneness has been confirmed in us, God is working with us, and we can go ahead. If we are called upon to make plans for next week or next year, we can make them, or even for ten years ahead, if after our meditation we are given any plans. Such planning does not make this an act of the future: it makes it an act of the present extending itself forward.

When it is said that we do not make plans for the future, that is true in one sense, but not in another. For example, when an awareness comes that there should be class and lecture work in various parts of the world, this idea is presenting itself to me in some given present moment. Although this involves the future, the idea came in the present, and the carrying out of it can be considered a continuation of the present, and I can then go ahead with plans of a human nature which include the necessary arrangements. In that sense we do plan for the future, but these plans are only the product of God working with us now, and revealing to us that there should be a class here or there at a particular time. As soon as that conviction comes, then we make all the plans, but that is not human planning: that is merely taking the human footsteps following the divine plan that has been revealed to us.

Worrying about the past, being concerned or having a guilt complex about it, is a waste of time because there is no God in the past, and if God is not in the past, we might as well remove ourselves from it, too. Moreover, there is no need for undue concern about the future, except insofar as plans for the future are the natural result of ideas that are given to us in the present as to what to do about the future.

As this principle of nowness is grasped, every moment of life becomes a vital and important one. No yesterdays can ever be important after we have learned this lesson. Even if we achieved some great tiling yesterday, we cannot rest back satisfied with that accomplishment because we are not going to achieve anything in the future except as a product of what we do today. It is today that we are building our future. The past is past, and there is nothing we can do about it. But there is a great deal we can do about the immediate present which governs all that we call the future.

A spiritual realization now produces harmony that can make itself evident tomorrow or next year; it can set in motion forces that may bring about tangible effects a year from now. The realized truth of this instant is preparing the way for our next incarnation and determining at what level it will be. If we are satisfied with whatever we have achieved during our years here, if we are not concerned with anything beyond this lifetime, or if we are convinced that we live only for this earth-span, there is no need to pay attention to any of this.

If, however, our study of spiritual wisdom, our meditation, and our contemplation have convinced us that life did not begin at birth and that it will not end at what is called death, we must of necessity be as much concerned for our life a hundred years from now as we are for our life next year. It is for this reason that we have to come consciously to a realization of the nowness of life because we cannot even mold next year, except on the basis of what we are molding in this moment of conscious awareness.

Life is a continuing experience; consciousness is a continuing experience; and what we are conscious of now determines the nature, state, and degree of our consciousness in all the tomorrows of which we may ever dream. We never live in any time other than now; we have never lived other than at this moment. Every moment of our life has been a "this moment." We cannot live behind it, and we cannot live ahead of it: we must live out from it. When we realize that the depths of our consciousness and the heights of our spiritual attainment are the measure of our peace as we rest and sleep tonight and the measure of our health and harmony tomorrow, then ours is the responsibility for living every single moment in the consciousness of now, and the consciousness of that now determines all the future "nows."

The harmony of this month is the product of the depth of our spiritual vision of last year, of our hours, days, weeks, and months of study, meditation, and preparation. Every moment of last year went into whatever degree of harmony we are experiencing this year. So it will be unto eternity—not only throughout this lifetime, but throughout all the lifetimes to come.

It was only because the Master had demonstrated life to be eternal and immortal that he was visible to his disciples after the Crucifixion. His life after the Crucifixion was the product of every moment of his life on earth. Whatever he had attained on earth he carried with him. The great lesson of the Resurrection, as far as we are concerned, is that it demonstrated that life goes on beyond the grave.

The question is: What is the nature of that life beyond the grave? To the world, this is a serious problem, and one for which it has no answer. No one is certain what form life will take on the next plane of experience, whether it will be lived on Cloud Nine, or whether it will alternate between heaven and hell. Although the world as a whole has not yet arrived at any understanding of that, mysticism reveals that our life after the transition will be the result of our life before the transition, and that every bit of spiritual awareness that we embody on earth is the degree of spiritual awareness with which we will begin our new experience.

A high school graduate with an A and B record needs no fortuneteller to predict what his scholastic achievement in college will be. It is very likely to be of a high order because the knowledge and study habits gained in his high school years will serve as the foundation upon which to build greater achievements. So it is that the degree of our attained spiritual awareness is the degree that carries over with us this year, next year, the year after, and eventually beyond the point of transition.

We can accept and prove this only if we can realize that, because of our study and meditation in the preceding years, we at this moment exist at a certain degree of realized consciousness. Because of our willingness to give up some of our material pleasures and profits for the development of our Soul — keeping our thought stayed on God and dwelling in the secret place of the most High — there has been at least some measure of unfoldment of our consciousness. And that unfoldment is responsible for whatever degree of harmony, peace, happiness, satisfaction, and abundance we are now expressing and enjoying. By the grace of God we have given ourselves to the attainment of further spiritual light, and we are now in a state of consciousness showing forth some spiritual fruitage.

So it will always be. The health, the success, and the fruitage that will come to us this year or the year after can be measured by the degree of our attention to our spiritual development. How foolish it would be to feel that all wc are doing is making life a little more comfortable for ten, twenty, or thirty years, that all this ends at the grave, smack up against a tombstone. But that is what we will bring to ourselves if we accept that in our thought.

Now, now, now are we the children of God, not yesterday or tomorrow, only now! Now, "I and my Father are one," and this now that we are living is a continuing experience because whatever we are now we are infinitely and eternally, and if we are one with the Father now, and if all that the Father has is ours now, we have only to live in this now.

According to the clock, it may have been ten minutes ago when we first began considering this whole subject of "now," but are we living ten minutes ago, or are we living now? And is not that now of ten minutes ago the continuing now unto this moment, and are we not higher in consciousness now than we were ten minutes ago? Ten minutes of now-living in the Spirit must bring forth a deeper, richer consciousness, and yet, if that living in the consciousness had not been started in the now of ten minutes ago, where would we be now, ten minutes later? We would be back where we were ten minutes ago, but we are not. We have more truth, more awareness, more conscious alertness, and that only because we started with what we had in the house ten minutes ago, and we have built on that.

What have we built on? Now! Now! The conscious remembrance of what we are now, of who we are now, the conscious remembrance of the nature of life, and of law, and of Spirit now.

It is this realization of the nature of consciousness, the realization that consciousness is conscious only now, that helps us in every department of our life. As we look out at the trees in the park or in our garden, we can see that they are living now. They cannot live yesterday, and if there is to be a tomorrow for them, there has to be a continuing now. There will be no tomorrow for those trees uniess it is that of a continuing now. So there is no after-life for anything or anyone except as that after-life is a continuation of now.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38, 39

Neither life nor death can separate us from the consciousness of living now, and that is the only moment we should want to live. Now is a continuing experience beyond the confines of the flesh. Life is expressing Itself now. That takes away the words "I," "you," "he," and "she" and enables us to move out of finiteness and mortality into Infinity and Eternality. When we use these personal pronouns, whether consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously, our thought goes back to the space between the cradle and the grave, to birth days and death days. We are attached to that appearance — that finite appearance—but if we live in the realization that just as Consciousness is expressing Itself, so Life is expressing and living Itself, we have gone beyond the finite form, and are in Infinity and Eternality.

As long as we are thinking of our life, our body, and our affairs, and how to change or improve them, we are in the parenthesis, in finiteness and in limitation. But the moment we can see the whole circle, we are not confining Life to the parenthesis. We may be witnessing It at the point of this particular parenthesis, but at least we are witnessing the Life that has no beginning and will have no ending, and we are thereby erasing the parenthesis.

No spiritual truth is true about life as lived in the parenthesis, so we have to go beyond the parenthesis and realize that Consciousness is now revealing Itself as form. If we think of form as the Life, however, we are in the parenthesis, but if we see form as Life expressing Itself, It must go on and on forever even if It has to create new forms every hour.

If you and I believe that we are expressing love, we are holding ourselves inside the parenthesis. If, on the other hand, we see that Love is expressing Itself, Life is manifesting and forming Itself, and Consciousness is unfolding and disclosing Itself in infinite form and variety, we are lifted out of the parenthesis and moved into Eternity. Eternity never ends. Eternity has no past; Eternity has no future; Eternity is a continuous now.

Through meditation we can reach back into that Eternity because in meditation we are opening ourselves to Infinity, watching for It to express Itself, watching for Consciousness to appear as form, whatever the form may be at the moment. When we are in meditation, we are inside of the parenthesis but reaching outside, reaching way back into Consciousness so that there may be more of Consciousness, more of Life, Love, and Truth expressed in what appears to be the parenthesis, but which is rapidly breaking the bounds of the parenthesis. We are sitting in what appears to be finiteness, reaching back into Infinity and Eternity. That Eternity is always functioning now, it is always now that we are reaching back into Eternity, and this makes for a continuity of now.

As we gain the true concept of what now means and as we live in this now, then all of a sudden we awaken to realize that what we have been trying to do is to live three lives at one time — past, present, and future. We have been thinking of the good of the past and thinking of getting more good in the present and the future. All this has proved to be merely a way of separating ourselves from Cod. But now is the only time when we are the sons of God; now is the only time when I is with us, and that I will never leave us, nor forsake us. I is the bread of life now.

It all comes back to nowness, living in the now, and not trying to hug to ourselves the tatters of what we wore yesterday. If we can give up our yesterdays and our tomorrows for a spiritual experience that we can have in meditation now, and then continue living in the realization that the grace of God is functioning now, we become the leaven, until all of human consciousness begins a process of being lifted out of the parenthesis.

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