Time is Breath.
The morning glory which blooms for an hour/ Differs not at heart from the giant pine,/ Which lives for a thousand years.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Past and future veil God from our sight;/ Burn up both of them with fire. How long/ Will thou be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?/ So long as a reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets,/ Nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
There is only the moment, and yet the moment is always giving way to the next, so that there is not even Now, there is Nothing. True, true. There is Nothing, if that is the way to understand how much there is.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes to us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.
Nature, immune as to a sacrifice of straw dogs,/ Faces the passing of human generations./ The universe, like a bellows,/ Is always emptying, always full:/ The more it yields, the more it/ holds.
For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than the infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of “having no time,” of a world which hurries by so rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it. But through “awakening to the instant” one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For instance, some of the later creations were designed with two or more temporal dimensions, and the lives of the creatures were temporal sequences in one or other dimension of the temporal “area” or “volume.” These beings experienced their cosmos in a very odd manner. Living for a brief period along one dimension, each perceived at every moment of its life a simultaneous vista which, though of course fragmentary and obscure, was actually a view of a whole unique “transverse” cosmical evolution in the other dimension . . . In other creations a creature was given only one life, but this was a “zig-zag” line, alternating from one temporal dimension to another according to the quality of the choices that the creature made. Strong or moral choices led in one temporal direction, weak or immoral choices in another. In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.
translucent time is closing up its moments/ and ripens inwards, throwing out its roots,/ it grows within me, occupies me wholly,/ its foliage flings me out deliriously,/ my thoughts are just its evanescent birds,/ its quicksilver circulating through my veins,/ tree of mind, fruits the flavor of time,/ oh life that may be lived and that now lived,/ time turning forward with a deep sea roar/ and falling back without a sideways glance,/ that which has been was not but is now being/ and silently flows onward, onward to/ another moment that evaporates . . .
You are not stuck in time like a fly in a closed bottle, whose wings are therefore useless. You cannot trust your physical senses to give you a true picture of reality. They are lovely liars, with such a fantastic tale to tell that you believe it without question.
