I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
Time is a symptom of the adverse effects of separation. It witnesses unto a mind that believes it is irretrievably yoked to a body.
Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was. Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost (T-13.VII.9:7-8).
Have not lost and, also, could not lose.
When we let go of the future, we also let go of the past. When we intentionally decide to let God choose the future for us, we effectively step out of time altogether. The holy instant is a moment of perfect communication because it liberates experience from past conditioning and future anxiety and worry (T-15.IV.6:5). Not for nothing did Jesus ask his early followers who amongst them could add a hair to their head through fretting about tomorrow.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own (Matthew 6:34).
A Course in Miracles emphasizes that it is time that makes worry and anxiety even possible. Undo time, and worry and anxiety are naturally undone.
Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time? Yet that is what time is for; to learn just that and nothing more (T-15.I.1:1-2).
This is a call to live only in the present moment, in which one’s cares are given to God, and one’s service to their brothers and sisters is maximized accordingly. In the world, it is folly to stop planning for the future by reflecting on the past. But A Course in Miracles urges a new way of relating to time, one that upends our the world’s conception of time as a linear progression and its reliance on time as a means of organizing our living.
This is a psychological statement! There is no expectation that we will not, say, agree to meet at 2 p.m. for coffee. Or that if our dentist says come in on Wednesday, we just waltz in on Saturday.
Rather, it is a way of relating to those appointments and, by extension, to time. It is a way of saying that true value does not arise as an effect of time but rather of a commitment to what A Course in Miracles here calls “good.”
. . . what God gives can only be for good. And I accept but what He gives as what belongs to me (W-pII.214.1:4-5).
This is an implicit reference to our capacity for service – to focus on the well-being of our brothers and sisters, seeking always a way of living that liberates them from fear and worry, guilt and anger. When we make the other’s happiness our objective, our happiness manifests with surprising ease. It’s like all along we thought happiness and peace were something to be gained. In fact, they are gifts that we receive BY giving them.
If we are honest, we know what peace looks like. We know what love looks like. We are scared of it, maybe. Maybe we still think we can find a way to be happy in the world without God.
But sooner or later, we all reach that juncture (often in utter desperation, as a kind of spiritual bottom) where we have no options or resources left and so we come open-handed, open-hearted and open-minded unto God and say, “you do it. I cannot.” As the course says, to be “born again” means simply to “let time go in order to look without condemnation upon the present” (T-13.VI.3:5).
When that is our prayer, and when our prayer is honest and sincere, then past and present lose their stranglehold on us, both in terms of being haunted by memories and in terms of the conditioning that seems to drive us to seek more than we need, often at the expense of others. We stop caring about the future because we are no longer afraid of the past. We know there is another way, and we are following it.
When we are free of both the future and the past, then we are also free of our identity with and as a body. Time is a construct of the body; the world that we project reflects the body’s interests. When our thinking shifts to align with God, Who is Love, and as forgiveness replaces self-interest and illusion, then we naturally realize our identity in and as Creation itself. We are no longer separate from our Creator. And our happiness becomes boundless.
