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thenietzscheanwife · 6 days
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Life Above Time
"Your Essence is prior to your body through which it makes contact with the world.
We are not conscious in this present moment of the senses. It is too small and too quick to be properly conscious in. Our consciousness, working above sense, is a mingled confused thing, composed of past, present and anticipated future. By memory and by imagination we tend to live behind or in front of the present moment and cannot crowd ourselves into it. So we are never really in the external world as registered by the senses.
Real ‘I’ is in Eternity – not in Time. Self-Remembering is out of Time and Personality. It is not surprising that Self-Remembering can give a feeling utterly different from that given by our relation to hurrying, anxious Time. Essence, being eternal, has not the feelings of Personality which are of Time only.
It is not the force of life which lies in Time that can make Personality passive – how could it, when it is the force that made it? Only another force coming from a different direction can make Personality passive and feed Essence – the eternal part of us. One can then begin to see that all esoteric teaching must have the quality of Eternity about it, and being so can develop Essence, which is eternal.
The 4th dimension of Time contains all one’s life. We experience it moment by moment. It runs very fast and is only halted by the feeling of now. Our life lying extended in this dimension, inaccessible to our senses, is all there – in this invisible dimension.
The higher dimensions are not realities of the external senses, but of the internal senses.
To rise in a vertical movement one rises and follows another parallel line by non-identifying and by Self-Remembering – in short, by the Work, which enters Time at right angles and so is always vertically above you, whatever line you follow, and never in the future, for the future is in horizontal Time. One might speak of one’s vertical future, however, as distinct from one’s horizontal future. If Being develops, the direction is vertical. One will see one’s life differently. Higher Being is above lower Being.
In order to understand aright what is above us, we have to get rid of Time in our thoughts. We have to get away from Time altogether in order to reach a level of ourselves that is above us. Time and space prevent us from reaching a possible and actually existing higher level of ourselves. A man must be re-born out of Time and Space – for his mind, if awakened, can understand and reach to a higher dimensional world in which there is no Time and all is – not was.
That is why we have to start with the realization that all our life lies living in the invisible 4th Dimension and that the past is living. The past is – not was – and so can be changed. I can change my past by working on myself now. You can change the past as well as the future now if you remember yourself and cease identifying with a typical path that you usually follow.
We are not connected with a dead past but with a living past. Every act of work vibrates through the whole Time-Body and alters things in it.
Essence is not of passing Time. It is not a temporal thing. In remembering oneself one does not remember the Personality but something prior to it that lies in the direction of Essence and can only be reached through it.
To remember oneself in the Personality would be to strengthen it – to say “This is I” to it instead of “This is not I”. If you say ‘I’ to the wrong thing you increase its power over you. You do not then separate from it. Life makes us identify with the Personality. It naturally makes us identify with what it has itself created in us. The Work is to make us cease to identify with what life has created in us and is now doing to us.
The purest, subtlest, most luminous and total feeling of ‘I’ lies behind the multiple feeling of Personality and its uproar of ambitions, anxiety, violence and negativeness. Into this feeling of ‘I’ of which I speak the feeling of Eternity enters every moment of Time, but in a direction we can never find as long as we are identified wholly with the Personality. While the Personality is wholly active, the direction is closed. Personality directs us to Time – to passing Time – that is, Life.
Diagrammatically, the dimension of Eternity enters the dimension of Time at right angles. As the feeling of Time increases by self observation and we begin to take time-photographs of ourselves – that is, studies of ‘I’s over long periods – the hypnotism of the present moment registered by the senses becomes lessened. The “present” is no longer confined to the instant – but broadens gradually into all one’s life, as consciousness expands.
We begin, in fact, to understand living Time – that is, we begin to understand that our lives lie in the invisible dimension of Time and are not confined to the snapshots of Time that our senses register.
There are two kinds of influences that can reach us at any particular moment. One comes from the horizontal line, the line representing Time. These are the influences of the past that enter at every moment into our lives and also the influences coming from the future – that is, the future represented in the line of Time we are moving along. But there are also other influences. When a person remembers themselves they lift themself in the vertical line upwards and taste for a moment a new state.
The “Kingdom of Heaven” is above an individual, not in the future of Time, but now. It is a state, reached internally, and so is said to be “within you”.
We live and move in Time but we have our Being in this vertical line which descends from the highest to the lowest. But ordinarily we think that our origin lies in the horizontal line in Time – namely, the past – and we do not understand that our origin is also vertical to this line.
Thought is independent of the senses, which only work in the present moment of time and, in fact, make the present moment of time.
The three higher Dimensions form Time, Recurrence and Eternity.
We live in living Time, and each of our lives is fixed in some part of living Time, and this part is our time. If we do not change anything in ourselves everything will be the same again. If Essence remains unchanged it is born again into the same part of Time and once more attracts to itself the same life and surrounds itself with the same Personality.
Nothing is the same in time. Time is change. Everything changes in time. And everything in time changes between the opposites. It is now one way and now the opposite way. Everything in time is governed by the opposites and swings between them.
Time can and should be accompanied by a method of selection, of choosing and discarding, of giving attention to and withdrawing attention from the incidents or events or situations that inevitably attend its apparent passage through our limited consciousness.
The Work is not in Space nor even in Time. It is in something that we do not understand, which is neither space nor time, place nor moment, for which a word was invented long ago, a word that is always completely misunderstood, called Eternity."
Excerpted from “Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: Vol. 3” by Maurice Nicoll (1947).
See also:
"Time above Space".
"Living Time and the Integration of the Life".
"The Aeon".
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thenietzscheanwife · 6 days
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The Fable of Leda by Eugenio Cajés (1604)
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thenietzscheanwife · 6 days
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thenietzscheanwife · 6 days
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thenietzscheanwife · 10 days
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Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red
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thenietzscheanwife · 20 days
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jesse ball, from “how to set a fire and why”
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thenietzscheanwife · 26 days
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venus in furs, leopold von sader-masoch. p.29
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thenietzscheanwife · 27 days
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𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐳𝐞𝐧 𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐥, 𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐜𝐡 & 𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐲, 𝐩.𝟏𝟑
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thenietzscheanwife · 27 days
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thenietzscheanwife · 28 days
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thenietzscheanwife · 28 days
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Dark Prince
— by Betty Jiang
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thenietzscheanwife · 1 month
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Portrait of Jennie (1948) // dir. William Dieterle
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thenietzscheanwife · 1 month
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Strawberry vendor in Gaza, Palestine, January, 2019 @Aya Isleem
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thenietzscheanwife · 1 month
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Danaë by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (18th Century)
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thenietzscheanwife · 2 months
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“You begin to adore a god that nobody else bows down to. A very powerful and very fragile god, very threatening and very threatened.”
— Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata; Love of the Wolf.
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thenietzscheanwife · 4 months
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Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935) - A Dealer in Artefacts, Paris, 1887
Oil on panel (40.6 x 28.3 cm)
❝ LE DEALER
Si vous marchez dehors, à cette heure et en ce lieu, c’est que vous désirez quelque chose que vous n’avez pas, et cette chose, moi, je peux vous la fournir ; car si je suis à cette place depuis plus longtemps que vous et pour plus longtemps que vous, et que même cette heure qui est celle des rapports sauvages entre les hommes et les animaux ne m’en chasse pas, c’est que j’ai ce qu’il faut pour satisfaire le désir qui passe devant moi, et c’est comme un poids dont il faut que je me débarrasse sur quiconque, homme ou animal, qui passe devant moi. ❞
Bernard-Marie Koltès, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1987)
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thenietzscheanwife · 5 months
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Frank O'Hara, from “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)”, The Collected Poems
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