Tonight I would like to meditate with you for a little time on the subject of time, of the principles involved in the realization of eternity. We look out into the world and we can see the evidences of chaos, the evidences of inharmonious patterns of self-activity, of destructive tendencies. And then bringing the observation nearer home, perhaps you can remember when there were certain chaotic patterns within yourselves, discords in bodyor mind or heart, divisions and uncertainties which resulted in patterns of discord, friction and misunderstanding in relationship to those round about you.
You have experienced something of the fact that when the human mind or heart yield to the Only Begotten Son of God, the Spirit of Love and Truth and Life, there is peace on earth, in the earth of the human body with all of its capacities. And as there is peace on earth in yourself, there begins to be the expression of God’s goodwill through you to others, there begins to be that which allows for harmony, understanding coordination with your fellows. But we have likewise recognized that the actual outworking of such an experience in life depends upon obedience to the One Law, Glory to God in the Highest, a love response to God which allows God’s Love to abide in you that you may abide under the Shadow of the Almighty. And so as the Christ expression of Being is born in you there is in you that which establishes the reality of Glory to God in the Highest and on earth—in the earth of your own bodies—peace physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and goodwill toward men, the reality of service, of that which blesses and builds according to the Will and Plan of God for the children of men. All of this is of vital importance to a basic understanding of the principles which we must bring to focalization in meditation upon our chosen subject for tonight.
We remember the word that is written, “For one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” No doubt you can all remember, each one according to your individual pattern of experience, a time, or perhaps many times in your own life when time passed swiftly, unnoticed, when by reason of your enjoyment of the circumstance, your centering of interest, your pleasure in the outworking, whatever it might be, that time as such lost its meaning to you. In looking back in memory you will recall that such moments were moments in which you were not aware of friction, discord, rebellious attitudes or disturbed emotions. Perhaps you can also remember a time, perhaps in the night time, when because of sore emotional distress you could not sleep and there were disturbed thoughts and attitudes, a lack of peace in the physical body, perhaps due to some illness, or a lack of peace in mind and heart, and time moved oh so slowly. It seemed that the dawn would never come.
Here we have briefly touched upon the two patterns of function and experience which introduce a sense of relatedness to the question of the timelessness of time. And it is obvious from your own experience, without regard to what I may say about the subject, that the discordant, chaotic pattern clauses one to be conscious of time. It causes one to be aware of time of the elements of time. But those patterns where there was peace, harmony, a pleasant circumstance, allowed what is called time to pass swiftly. Now we recall our text: “A thousand years with the Lord is as one day, and one day is as a thousand years.” Leaving the second part of the statement as being unnecessary to our immediate consideration we note that a thousand years with the Lord is as one day. A thousand years without the Lord would seem to be an eternity of hell. Some of you, having lived much less than a thousand years, have thought you had found a hell that would never end in any case. “Where one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day”—it is the second part of our statement in which we are interested instead of the first “A thousand years with the Lord is as one day.”
The Master said “For the elect's sale the time shall be shortened”—that the sense of the passing of time will be shortened. For the elect's sake those days shall be shortened—but without that shortening of time no flesh should be saved. According to the Master's word the outworking of the Divine Plan and Pattern has for its purpose the saving of the flesh. Except those days be shortened no flesh should be saved, but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened. What is the characteristic which distinguishes the elect? Who are they? What are they? They are those who have elected of themselves, chosen of their own wills, their own hearts and minds, to center in God, to be with the Lord on earth, not waiting until they die and leave the earth to be with the Lord.
We recognize that generally speaking human beings imagine that they cannot be with the Lord on earth, which is the same as saying that it is impossible for the Lord to be on earth And yet there are so many evidences of His Presence and the working of His Spirit. The Master's whole teaching, His whole example, was designed to reveal to man the way by which man can be with the Lord on earth. And those who choose to accept His invitation “Follow me” are the elect because they have elected to be with the Lord here on earth while they are in the flesh—for the purpose of salvation is to save the flesh. The outworking of the Divine Plan, the manifestation of Divine Power, has the purpose of saving the flesh of man, and that flesh is here on earth. We share the state of those who are living in the flesh. And so, if we are with the Lord, the timelessness of time begins to be a reality to us.
Whenever we speak of eternity it is something so obscure, something so vague to the human mind. It is something which most people have no consciousness of holding in relationship to themselves. To what degree do you have a consciousness of true relatedness to eternity? You have a consciousness of relatedness to the passage of time as human beings think of it, a consciousness of the years that you have lived, that are passing now. And so often we hear something about how old a person is—the expression that one feels old, or is getting old, or something of the sort, with the passage of a few short years. The consciousness of the passing of time is much with fallen man. But what consciousness of relatedness to eternity do we have? If a thousand years are as one day there is no subjection to the passing of time. Time as we think of it in the first place is simply a means of measuring the movement of certain celestial bodies—the earth in its movement around the sun or the moon in its movement around the earth, the sun in its movement through the cosmos in relationship to the vast universe of which we are a part. The sense of time as such comes with the feeling that time is passing one by.
Perhaps a simple illustration may be helpful. If you stood beside a railroad track and a streamliner came by you would be very conscious of its speed, of the fact that it was passing you by. In its passage along the track it would give you a sense of great speed, not in yourself but in the train. If you were, on the other hand, riding in that train, you might, as you looked out the window, have a sense of speed but you would share a consciousness of movement in the train. The train would not be passing you by. It is the difference between being out of attunement, or out of eternity, in the sense of the things that are eternal, or being in eternity. Actually, of course, we are in eternity whether we know it or not. But the consciousness of being in eternity is important, of movement with eternity, of being in the train, not of having the train of time passing us by. What is essential to this consciousness?
We have noted that chaotic conditions, discordant feelings, a lack of peace in body and mind and heart, prevents the consciousness of being in eternity and establishes a consciousness of being separate from that which is eternal. In such a state one tends to have thoughts of death or of the things that lead to death. But when one has an awareness of the eternal, one’s consciousness is filled with thoughts of life, vibrant life, and the joy of living that life. When the Spirit of God is allowed to come into heart and mind because the human being obeys the Law and becomes centered in God, peace fills the earth of one's own being and there is goodwill toward men. So often human beings feel that it is difficult to have goodwill toward men. They feel that they are justified in having resentments, ill attitudes of various kinds toward others. Such attitudes establish a sense of separateness from others, but the working of God’s Love under the One Law provides a sense of relatedness with others.
All of this points to a central basic truth: when we are with the Lord in the true sense we are, vibrationally at least, with those who have relatedness to us whether they are present in person or not. And there begins to be a sense of wholeness, and with that wholeness there comes a wholesomeness. Unless there is a consciousness of relatedness to that which is eternal within yourself, you cannot have a sense of wholeness. If the consciousness, then, the sensing of one's own being, is centered in lack, in limitation, in those things which detract from wholeness, there is perhaps unconsciously the rejection of the eternal which would be the starting point for wholeness. We cannot deny the Lord, we cannot betray our trust, and refuse to let God's Will have any meaning in us and have this sense of wholeness. Anything that rejects the eternal reality of the Divine in relationship to yourself is denying the Lord.
“One day with the Lord.” One day with the Lord—it could be a moment or it could be a thousand years, because one would lose the sense of the passage of time because one would be in the eternal, in the movement of time itself. Time would not be passing one by—one would be in it. But only as that wholeness begins to be a reality can one begin to experience in any real sense this consciousness of relatedness to eternity. It is right and proper that we should use the division of day and night, of moments, of hours, of weeks, for convenience sake in relationship to the organization of our coordination. We have noted that that which excludes a consciousness of eternity or relatedness to eternity is always in some manner chaotic, discordant. We look to the heavens and we see the movement of the stars in their appointed courses, we do not have a sense of something chaotic but of something utterly magnificent, in order, in timing, in relatedness.
The organization of our relatedness is essential to coordination, essential to that which permits us to have the reality of peace and the development of a sense of wholeness. So often the Master said, “Thy faith hath made thee every whit whole.” Very often the human being did not allow that wholeness to be a continued reality—he reverted from it. But he had to so yield to the Master’s Will, to a centering, to a faith in God, that at least for that moment, sharing something with our Lord and King, the individual was in reality completely whole. Generally speaking the individual lost his polarity, tended to go his own self-active way. And was not whole very long. He was whole in the complete sense for only a few moments. But he had to allow himself be drawn to that point of centering which allowed true wholeness in order to experience the type of healing in body and mind and heart which was made manifest in the Master’s ministry. “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”
When there is wholeness there is the consciousness of relatedness to God, the consciousness of relatedness to God's Power, a welcoming of the working of God's Will—not resisting it but welcoming it. And until that wholeness means more to us individually and collectively than anything else we cannot say that we have accepted Divine centering. It is something upon which we merely meditate occasionally, something which we try to work out in some fashion. It is not real. The starting point for wholeness is centering in the Center of the Whole, the beginning of the coordination with the whole. But as long as human beings try to establish that coordination with respect to the parts of humanity which are not as yet related correctly, which are discordant, he cannot know this process of rebirth or illumination. We look out into the world and see the discordant factors, and if we try to work out some means of establishing a pattern of harmonious relatedness with all of these individuals round about we find that it simply cannot be done. When you try to please one human being, you displease some other human being. Someone is always ready to take exception to anything you do whether it is good, bad or indifferent.
You cannot have a centering on the basis of pleasing people and ever know peace or fulfilment. And if one takes the attitude that the important thing then is to please oneself, matters only go from bad to worse. Until we recognize that these parts which are human beings out here, which have not yet come into the pattern of correct correlation, cannot find that wholeness until they come to Center, one can surely with ease comprehend his own necessity—and that it is only in establishing a correct pattern of relatedness with Center that one can know wholeness. The pattern of human relationships is so mixed up. It disregards so completely the nature of human beings that actually, if by some arbitrary imposition of Divine Power which would simply shift people around into their proper relatedness one to another without regard to human will or desire or purpose, direction of response—if somehow Divine Power were simply imposed suddenly today—almost every human relationship would be dissolved, because almost without exception the pattern of human relatedness completely disregards the Divine Pattern. Of course God is not going to impose His Will in any such fashion. I am not suggesting this you know. I only wish to emphasize the basic fact that until human beings begin to let themselves be governed according to the Divine Plan, the Divine realities of centering, they cannot have wholeness.
In the first steps of the outworking pattern of wholeness there will be limited factors present always. We cannot expect anything else. But gradually the essential adjustments will be worked out—gradually human beings begin to realize that if anyone will stay centered there will, sooner or later, be a correct outworking in the pattern of Divine relatedness. Human beings have imposed their own human wills, determinations and desires without regard to the true pattern of relatedness in the Divine Design. If the individual is not in the Divine Design how can he have a sense of wholeness? How can he know the reality of God’s Will? I wish to emphasize somehow the fact that human beings have disregarded the pattern of wholeness, of correct relatedness. Not being themselves centered, they could not maintain that polarity which would allow the coming together of the parts of the whole which should have relatedness—and out of all of this there is discord, inharmony and friction. Only God's love can begin to correct these ill conditions. Only as we love God in obedience to the One Law can we begin to let God's love correct these conditions within ourselves.
The point is that we have chaos until we come to Center and as long as there is chaos, our consciousness has a sense of relatedness to the passing of time, not to our being in the Divine Design, in the framework of the eternal. We could, looking out into the cosmos consider the stars to be the Body of God in the absolute, ultimate sense, the visible Body of God, the cells in their appointed places in this vast Body. And we have a part, a relationship, to this realm of form. Instead of being cells in that larger sense, we would be minute particles, perhaps a part of an atom—each one—not as much as an atom in the Body of God, but a part of an atom. Nevertheless we have a part and a place in the realm of form, and that Divine Design, the whole, makes possible the reality of eternity.
If we are separating ourselves from that centering, that Body of Being, we cannot hope to have true peace, we cannot enjoy the blessedness of life, we cannot know what it is to have our souls restored to a pattern in the Divine design where we are a part of the movement of time, where our own cycles of movement are as sure and certain as the rising and the setting of the sun, where we have as much reason to understand and know continuity of being as the stars in the heavens—not something that is going to pass sway. We look at the stars and feel how they have been there for untold thousands of years—and they will be. We are supposed to be a part of that, not of something that comes for a moment and then is gone, not having time pass us by—but a part of the very Body in which time operates. But we cannot have that sense of wholeness until we begin to have a true consciousness of centering in the whole, of being a part of the whole. And if anyone would begin to know himself in relationship to the whole, as a part of the whole, he must begin at Center. He cannot possibly find relatedness in this realm of chaotic relationships.
He must come to Center, that which is already a coordinated focalization in the whole. Our LORD and KING Who came to earth to reveal the things of God to man and make it possible for man to know the wholeness of being, that which man has so far rejected. Our LORD and KING provides us with a centering point in relationship to the whole. And until we accept that and find our correct pattern of relationship to Him and keep it, we cannot know our correct relationships with others. Until the pattern of our personal relatedness to our LORD and KING is the most sacred thing on earth to us, until no human being can disturb that, until we reach a point where it is so sacred to us that we would not let what anyone says or does or thinks destroy it, we do not have a consciousness of relatedness to Center.
If some one else, no matter who it may be, has the power to disturb your consciousness of relatedness to our LORD and KING so that you do not hold that sacred above all things else, you are accepting subjection to the chaotic patterns of non-relatedness and you will not be conscious of being a part of the whole, in the whole, and you will feel that time is passing you by. You will not be a part of the Body in which time operates. What is the most sacred thing to you? If it is your relationship to Center so that nobody can disturb that, then you are beginning to have a relatedness to the whole because you have relatedness to Center, and others will begin to have some consciousness of relatedness to you as they begin to have consciousness of relatedness to Center.
What is it that has permitted my life and my ministry to be a blessing to you and to others? This one thing. You began to sense, one way or another, that I had a consciousness of relatedness to Center, something which to me was absolutely sacred, something which I would not allow anyone to violate, something that no one could destroy. And plenty of people attempted it in all kinds of ways. But that stability of relatedness to Center, no matter how you sensed it, was that which drew you, and held you until you could begin to have a consciousness of relatedness to Center. And the moment you allow an actual outworking of that consciousness of relatednessto Center you begin to be whole. It cannot be any other way. You begin to be actually whole, and all things begin to work together to perfection in and through and for you because you love and serve the Lord.
“With the Lord a thousand years is as one day.” When we are with the Lord, centered, when we are letting His Love and Truth and Life have meaning in us, we are no longer subject to a sense of the passing of time; we are a part of that which is timeless, within which time is operating merely as a means of measuring the movement of the earth around the sun. Time no longer passing us by; we are a part of the Body of God, a part of the whole, and therefore we are made whole, and the movement of the cycles of the bodily functions of God no longer gives us a sense of being passed by, a sense of time—we are in eternity.
There may be time, yes but there will be a timelessness in time. As it is written, “And time shall be no more,” in the sense of time passing us by; in the sense of ability to measure the movement of the earth around the sun there will always be time, day and night, but time shall be no more. Why? Because we come to a point where we have a complete consciousness of relatedness to the whole, a complete centering, and we are whole, and being made whole, we begin to know the wholesomeness of being, the reality of God's love, the reality of the Divine design, of the control factors. And we are a part of that. We share it. We are already in it but do not know it, and we do things contrary to that. The movement in the Body of God is something that we are not going to stop when we are not conscious of our part in the whole, of having relatedness to Center. We are always trying to do something which would destroy God if we were successful. We cannot destroy God, so the self-active human being simply destroys himself. The timelessness of time, the consciousness of sharing in eternity—that is our privilege and opportunity if we will let it be so. When we begin to be in love with the Lord of Love, when we begin to yield to the Spirit of His Presence, when we begin to know that Center is the only thing that counts in reality, we can begin to ignore those things which would distract and destroy, we can begin to let God's Power work through us within the scope of our focalization of responsibility.
We can refuse to be a part of the chaotic world. We can refuse to be a part of that which denies the LORD and crucifies the expression of His Spirit on earth. We can begin to be a part of the Body of God, and keep that Body sacred, recognize its sacred, holy reality in the flesh here on earth. And that begins to allow wholeness and wholesomeness. We begin to live in the Kingdom knowing the Power of God and the Glory of Being a part of God now and forever.
We consider ourselves to be adult human beings. We look at the sky tonight and we see that the stars are obscured by the mist. There have been times when during the day we looked at the sky and could not see the sun because the mist and the clouds intervened in the range of our vision. The moment it is a cloudy day and you cannot see the sun you do not become hysterical and say, “The sun is gone. It will never shine again.” And though it is a bit cloudy and we cannot see the stars so clearly tonight—they are obscured or invisible—you do not become hysterical and start reacting and say, “The stars are gone. We will never see them again.” We know it is a matter of a little mist. They are there. The stars are there as surely as when we could see them clearly. If this be true of the stars or of the sun how much more true it is of God? Suppose there is a little mist within the range of your vision. Suppose there is something that does not allow you to see the stars clearly—the stars of Divine Reality. Do you become hysterical and say, “God is gone. The Divine things are no longer with us.” Why not be mature all the way?
