Eternity

 

The future already exists. It exists as a thing unto itself, which already is what it is and won’t be changed by my desire. From the perspective of eternity, it is conceptually in the past and has already taken place, because eternity dictates that all of time is a single thing with its elements inseparable from one another. This whole relationship is like a human body in the sense that one cannot separate the organs and remove one without all the others ceasing to operate.

This changes everything, and casts some light on Jeanne de Salzmann’s comment that the only thing I can change is my attitude. Making peace with things as they are is the equivalent of making peace with things as they will be and making peace with what took place in the past.

From this perspective, perhaps we can understand that knowing the future is in a certain sense unimportant. One could know the future; but it’s our attitude towards it that we need to know. Our attitude — our inclination — leads us backwards towards the past or forwards into the future from where we are now, and determines the nature of both memory and desire. If we wish to have healthy memory and desire now, we do so by knowing our attitude towards the past and the future. This is another way of phrasing Gurdjieff’s adage to use the present to repair the past and prepare the future.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.