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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] skidding motorcar may not strike the oncoming truck nor turn over. The falling plane may plummet into a pond instead of crashing on a ledge of barren rock and all be saved excepting from the wetting. Not until all such calamities happen in the electric Now are they of true import. Even the fact of Death itself is utterly meaningless until the Now is producing the effects from it. What we call our Fears, therefore, are mere pranks of Imagination, or the stunt of snatching at things that are merely retrospection call them plain Memories and setting them up as lions in our paths ahead for the imbecilic purpose of tormenting ourselves with bugaboos. Fears! SOONER or later someone is going to write a great classic on the complete fallacy of Fear, by looking at it and beholding it for what it is. Maybe I ll do it myself. Anyhow, this is not the appropriate place for it. Actually I want to put salt on the bird s tail of Eternity if such a term take sense. Fancy salting a bird s rudder-assembly! What would it possibly accomplish? ... No matter. Eternity, when we really come to look at it devoid of its aerial properties and sodium chloride designations, is the Now going on without interruptions of any arrestive character. Inasmuch as we can never escape the electric Now in consciousness, so can we never escape the only presentation of Eternity there is. It is this current minute because it always has endured and always will endure. Besides, it is the only presentation in all the Omniverse that holds unassailable Reality to us. Memories are not reality but only its images set up as milestones marking the Past. Anticipations are not reality but only mental pictures to make tomorrow enticing, granting we reach it ... when, of course, it won t be tomorrow. Today is the day you Beyond Grandeur William D. Pelley 59 worried about yesterday. Tomorrow actually never comes. Imagination at bet is purely hypothesis. All the time we can digest or assimilate in the recorded Omniverse is just this current electric moment all else is mere process of mentality or reactions of spirit, trimming the Present from Future or Past. Some of us decorate those Futures with such ugly or horrific trimmings that we put ourselves as of the Now in bed. Just spirit conjuring up a million terrors that, like our tomorrows, are flimsiest fancies. Do you ask what about Perspicacity, the sagacity that comes from correctly analyzed memory-values Wisdom Itself? We ll consider it further in our chapter on Experience. We are still holding some sodium chloride with Eternity s tail unblemished. What I m striving to bring to you in a dish of new savor is the incontrovertible certainty that something that has happened can never arise in precisely the same manner to hurt you afresh; what lies ahead can have no effect on you until it turns into the Now. There are no sidereal areas that need the slightest vigilance. Behold, this Vital Twinkling is all the Eternity you can ever really know, because everything else, backward or forward is sheer intellectual imagery. This is a truly stupendous thought when you specifically come to encompass it and make it part of your intellect and ideology. The good clergyman gets up in his pulpit and tearfully exercises you with the demand, Where will you spend Eternity? He s first sold himself on a gigantic hypothesis that there is an Eternity which there isn t because you can never reach it and never can he. Why should either of you enter into such intellectual anguish about something you can never realize? Even in the mythical hypothesis you could only live the Vital Twinkling of the Electric Now. That is all there would be to it, no matter what your spiritual or paraphysical status was. And conversely, all that truly registers about the Eternity that is beyond you, is what you have dragged through from a whole lot of Nows when things occurred whose effects still reflect in your memory ensemble. If you had lived as many solar years as there are light-miles between the solar system and Coma-Virgo, it wouldn t mean a thing if you hadn t brought through a single recollection of any incident in them ... they have ceased to exist. So does the celebrated eternity of orthodoxy not exist because it hasn t yet produced an experience in a single Electric Now, and can t inflict a single one on you until you reach it. You just keep on realizing a whole lot of Nows and wait for the last one to arrive ... which it never does. But even if you anticipated it for millions of years, again it wouldn t truly mean anything until you actually reached it and knew it. And when you reached it and came to know it, you wouldn t know anything, so again why stew about it? What we truly do, as I m going to show you further along, in inviting ourselves into beliefs in this or that endless paradise, is to live them vicariously in the current Now and do all the enjoying or all the suffering we can never know from them in such dissembling. All such a waste of good mental effort! If we ever truly got into the type of Beyond Grandeur William D. Pelley 60 Paradise the good Man of the Cloth depicts to us, we might not like it a little bit . . and there would be no escaping it, and it might turn that instant from heaven into hell because it so imprisoned us beyond the chance of changing our minds. But we never stop to think of that because we haven t been conditioned to think of that. Talk about Gate of the Faith! There is no such gate, because you can t have a gate that admits you into any area where you already are. Or can you? You are in the Now, and you ll always be in the Now, and you never can be elsewhere than in the Now, and you never can be elsewhere than in the Now without being unable to recognize anything, not even your sense of self. What a devil of a predicament! But does it make unsound sense when you stop to dwell on it sensibly? You have absolutely nothing to worry about, or be concerned about, beyond your predicament in this electric instant, because I say again, this electric instant and its features are all that you can be sure of, the phenomenon of experience being what it is. ALL RIGHT, granted we can look backward and forward from the Now and see recollections of experiences in the eternal Nows that have always been, and borrowings in picture-images from them to trim the Nows ahead, suppose we start considering all the factors entering into this Now that are unqualifiedly determinable by ourselves and none other. What sort of creature is knowing this Vital Twinkling of this instant and how did it become the thing that you discover it? Wouldn t that be the true sweep of life, ... the surge and the roll and the eternal sea-comber of it? Of course I m talking about Character. You are a conscious meaning self-aware and circumstance-aware unit of cosmic intellect, serving Purpose or Aim in Itself, and living in the only Eternity that has the slightest significance, the never-ending Now. How did you come by your own peculiar demarcation from all other capsules of cosmic intellect serving Purpose or Aim in Itself? Isn t it obvious that as Form called up to serve Purpose or Aim in Itself, remember acted on you, or you reacted to Form, always in the Vital Twinkling of this electric instant, you felt an inborn urge to express yourself or not express yourself, advantageously or disadvantageously as you decided the circumstances promised as being guides to still further or future conduct? And as you permitted Form or Situation composed of Form in some sort of function to thus influence or mold your estimates of what future conduct held for you, you came to be imbued with that strange catalog of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |