Time
December 16, 1999
Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
Everyday existence seems totally embedded in time and space and thus subject to good and evil. The work of Christian Science is to push beyond this screen to find timeless Being (or God) and live the objects of sense from that position: effectively re-enacting the Christ Jesus miracle individually.
Time is a vast subject and we could cover only a few of its aspects in light of Christian Science.
The roots of the word "time" refer to division, a fact reflected in its original sense as a fixed period. In the 14th Century it came also to mean a more abstract ongoing continuum. These two definitions hinted at the infinite embracing the finite, a kind of divine/human coincidence enabling us to handle time with the assurance of Science.
We were thus emboldened to seek what might lie behind time in the realm of the divine. Storytellers refer to mythic time or Great Time — a timeless state in which people suspending disbelief find themselves. Yoga attempts to slow time. Again hints of something grander.
In Christian Science, time is unreal, but only when we are talking of the reality behind the human belief. Members of the group felt that time ideally should be seen as a useful tool and convenience for setting appointments but never as a cause of anything. Thus beliefs about time healing something or aging someone are true only at the level of dualistic human belief. As students of Christian Science, we want the eternal Now.
The Dalai Lama in an interview in Parabola for Spring 1990 maintains there is no present or now. The future moves directly into the past . Notions of now are pure fantasy — a fact that need not worry a Scientist, since real or unreal such fantasies still refer to the non dualistic divine: in this case perhaps, the Presence! One might even say, let us live our yearning for a non existent now by reflecting fully this Presence.
Members referred briefly to demonstrations of timelessness. Two had seen startling reductions in normal travel times by understanding clearly that time and space are simply beliefs about eternity and infinity. Another member who is a painter never dates his paintings because he wants to focus clearly on the eternal Source of the works.
We then talked of undoing beliefs associated with astrology, so called biological clocks and a new area of medicine, chronobiology (certain diseases arise and their cures prove most effective at fixed hours during the day and night). Whether these are academics of the right or wrong sort we wasted no time speculating. They are but fantasies about the Truth — the ever-presence of perfection. Let this inform opinion and results.
A couple of members are obsessed by the clock. While everyone present acknowledged the love expressed in keeping appointments and being on time, these members apparently had progressed beyond such niceties of behavior into something designed perhaps to disguise and bind pain or some such. We did not have time to work on it at the meeting, but will continue assessing and working in upcoming weeks. One underlying truth to assist might be that timeless being is also Principle. One member saw his problem as relating to abandonment issues, but knows intellectually that he cannot be abandoned in Science.
We worked on so called stages of life: for instance, youth, maturity and old age. All have their good and bad points, as might b expected for belief-level functioning. But this dreamscape needs piercing with Science. Attributes like beauty, agility, enthusiasm, power, wisdom and experience should not be left in matter and assigned to age groupings. They need their proper sourcing in God so that full divine humanhood is the fact and appearance of all. Even one desiring to ramble through life as a kind of amusement park devoted to the stages of life could benefit from this treatment, as he is assured of appropriate stops at all the rides and games along the way, and thereby lives a "full life".
One member expounded his theory that the timelessness of Genesis I is analogous to that of childhood while that reflected in the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 is a fully integrated divine/human sense, "having seen it all", deciding firmly for the eternity of God.
We also discussed the statements, "It's his time to go," and, "His work is done," in relation to a member's friend, said to be dying. At the fantasy level of human life, perhaps so — who can say? But man, lived by God, can go nowhere and his work (which is really His work) is never done.
A member brought up instantaneous Christian Science healing of illness or any problem. He read us a quote from Doris Henty's book, Addresses and Other Writings on Christian Science: "That which appears to human sense as healing is actually the revelation of your Christ-withinness, the perfection which you already are." A practitioner had helped him during the week with a severe cold by keeping him focused on present perfection rather than his physical state. When he got into the divine Now of perfection, he was healed.
We decided to look at Christmas Spirit for next week. Some of us were not feeling it and wondered what it is, if anything, and whether it's worth having.
Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.
TIME. Mortal measurements; limits, in which are summed up all human acts, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, knowledge; matter; error; that which begins before, and continues after, what is termed death, until the mortal disappears and spiritual perfection appears.
People with mental work before them have no time for gossip about false law or testimony. To reconstruct timid justice and place the fact above the falsehood, is the work of time.
The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God's will must be universally done.
The age has not wholly outlived the sense of ghostly beliefs. It still holds them more or less. Time has not yet reached eternity, immortality, complete reality. All the real is eternal. Perfection underlies reality. Without perfection, nothing is wholly real. All things will continue to disappear, until perfection appears and reality is reached. We must give up the spectral at all points.
"Now," cried the apostle, "is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation,"—meaning, not that now men must prepare for a future-world salvation, or safety, but that now is the time in which to experience that salvation in spirit and in life. Now is the time for so-called material pains and material pleasures to pass away, for both are unreal, because impossible in Science. To break this earthly spell, mortals must get the true idea and divine Principle of all that really exists and governs the universe harmoniously.
The time for the reappearing of the divine healing is throughout all time; and whosoever layeth his earthly all on the altar of divine Science, drinketh of Christ's cup now, and is endued with the spirit and power of Christian healing.
Principle and its idea, man, are coexistent and eternal. The numerals of infinity, called seven days, can never be reckoned according to the calendar of time. These days will appear as mortality disappears, and they will reveal eternity, newness of Life, in which all sense of error forever disappears and thought accepts the divine infinite calculus.
Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.
Beholding the infinite tasks of truth, we pause,—wait on God. Then we push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory.