QA113 QUESTION: Regarding one’s failure to really live in the Now, you use the expression, “More and more often you will be exposed to such periods of depression, anxiety, uncertainty and disharmony, and it will become more difficult to find the real inner causes.”

ANSWER: Why of course, my friends, how could it be otherwise? Because you are then in an extended chain reaction. Let me give you perhaps the following example. Let’s say you have a great big house with one room you do not use – you just use it as a storeroom. Now, you may push everything into it helter skelter. First there are only a few objects in it. It may not then take a great deal of effort to put order in it.

But if that room is filled to the brim because you have been lazy and did not want to go through the comparatively lesser trouble of sorting things and putting them right away in their right place, you will then have a much more difficult time sorting out and putting an order into this room.

Now, it is very similar with the time at your disposal. If you have a problematic area and at the first slightest sign of feeling a little bit disturbed about this, when your mood drops just a little bit in that scale, you heed it and instantly ask yourself “Now what is it? What do I really feel? Why am I just a little bit disturbed about this?” – rather than putting it away into the storeroom of your unconscious mind, you will then instantly be able to see what is behind it.

If, before it has a chance to accumulate and cause vicious circles and chain reactions, you air it out, that means you have utilized that bad or negative experience, which was due to your disturbance. But if you let it ride, letting it go on and on and pushing it away, it festers underground. It then creates – as you very well know from this work of self-exploration – negative patterns, with their vicious circles and chain reactions.

The more this vicious circle goes on, it snowballs and becomes a whole interwoven knot that becomes very difficult to disentangle. Each time this snowball is enlarged, the mood drops deeper down in that scale, making it more difficult to put an order into it. It takes greater effort to disentangle all these various currents, interactions and misconceptions that have made you use your energy currents in a wrong and destructive way.

This is a great deal of effort. And just because it is so much effort, you shy away even more from it and let it accumulate even more. And therefore the more it accumulates, the greater bite it becomes, the harder these times become.

This is why the utilization of these times when you feel disturbed is of the utmost importance, because then you do have the material so much closer at hand. This is why man on this Earth sphere is so foolish because he believes the bad times are such a hardship. It is the only way to safeguard himself forever from ever coming again into misery, because without these hard times that shake him up and bring out what is hidden, he has no way of establishing and safeguarding his future harmony. He can only establish it by these areas that do touch him.

If he heeds the little signs, all the better. Then he does not have to accumulate. But unfortunately man most of the time waits – usually for incarnations and incarnations and incarnations – to look at himself in truth. He prefers to say he is haunted by bad luck, or is a prey to the malice of others. He does not want to see what it is in him.

QUESTION: When time is spent in thought about the past or planning for the future, does this conflict with the desired end of always living in the present?

ANSWER: Oh no, my friend, this is a complete misunderstanding. You see, always it depends how. Everything depends on the how and never on what; I have said that over and over again. You can think about the past in a constructive way so as to understand yourself and your present problems, which then will enable you to resolve them so that you can live in the Now.

Or you can think about the past in a destructive way, by running around in circles and holding on to something that is past that you do not want to let go. Or by blaming fate or others for something unpleasant that has happened to you in the past. Or by resenting that the past is no longer the present. This is the destructive preoccupation with the past. But there is also the constructive one.

The same applies to the future. You may, on one hand, have a very healthy, relaxed way of not being irresponsible about your own future, but in a flexible way without undue preoccupation about it. Or you may, on the other hand, live in the future in the way I described, which is a much more subtle process of never quite living in the Now, always expecting something from the future so that the future never becomes the Now. And when it does, the disillusionment is great. This is another destructive way.

You can only experience happiness in the Now if you do not run from the unwelcome moments of the present, whether this be fear, doubt, your self-dislike for one reason or another, resentments or whatever it may be – loneliness. Anything that is disturbing, you run from. And therefore you cannot possibly experience the positive, constructive, beautiful moments of the Now.

To the degree you will face what goes on in your feelings now, at this moment, and be in that, live in that – to that degree you will know perfectly well in what way thinking about the past or the future is constructive and does not prevent you from living in the Now.

QUESTION: Living in the Now seems to be prevented by worries, and yet worries prevent living in the Now. So it seems to be an absolute circle that goes round and round.

ANSWER: Well, not necessarily. If you face your worries, then they will not prevent you from living in the Now. Not at all! No more than faced fear will prevent you from living in the Now. Nothing that exists in you – good or bad, positive or negative, constructive or destructive – will prevent you from living in the Now, provided it is really faced and met with.

If you have a worry and you think, “My goodness, if I face this worry, I will not live in the Now,” then you run from it. But if you say, “I am worried about such and such, regardless of how irrational this may seem to me, regardless of how contradictory such feelings may be to my conscious thoughts. This is what I feel. I feel I am this worried at this moment,” instantly you will relax and you will live in the Now with that worry. Even though it worries you, it will be a much less disturbing worry and that will then give you the possibility to understand the worry and go on from there.

Your misunderstanding lies in the fact that you think you should not have a worry – be it because it prevents you from living in the Now, or you do not want to have a worry or because it may contradict any other concept you have or desire you have. But in that very attitude lies the not living in the Now. Not because you have the worry.

All human beings want to be first, without your problems, and then you think you can perhaps live this great faraway spiritual truth of living in the Now. It does not work that way. It can never work that way. If you think and imagine it this way, it is again just an evasion of that which you do not want to face and live. But if you face it, if you live it, if you are it, then you enter it and dissolve it by that.

QUESTION: I think we have the wrong conception that living in the Now has to be something beautiful.

ANSWER: Right.

QUESTION: Instead of taking living in the Now with my worry.

ANSWER: Exactly. What you are Now – you are now worried, in fear, doubt – all this is in you!

QUESTION: Why does it never seem to be about Now; they’re always about the past or the future. They’re not about the Now.

ANSWER: But for you, you suffer from this worry – be it about the past, be it about the future – now. Your worry at this moment may be a worry about something that happened twenty years ago or will happen twenty years from now. But you worry about it now. That is you now. Is it not?

QUESTION: Yes. Yes.

ANSWER: If you want to run from it, then you cannot live in the Now. And you’re quite right, my friend, when you just expressed the same thing I said before in different words. You want to have happiness and then you think you can’t live in the Now; as you put it, you imagine living in the Now means blissfulness.

But you always want already blissfulness while unblissfulness is still in you, which you do not acknowledge. Live that unblissfulness and it will be much less unpleasant, if you really enter it without evasion and without struggle.

QUESTION: Doesn’t shifting to living in the Now require considerable ability to focus one’s attention?

ANSWER: Ability for what? For facing the truth – what you feel at this particular instant?

QUESTION: No, just focusing one’s attention on the Now?

ANSWER: You will be able to focus your attention on “Now and you are one.” Your Now is you. What you feel at this instant is Now, for you. Someone else’s Now is a different Now because he has different feelings. But your Now is what you feel at this moment. Five minutes hence, you may feel something different, therefore your Now will be different. Not because five minutes of the solar time have elapsed, but because your feelings are different. And there you have the difference between the two times.

The more real time is you – what you feel, what you think, what you are, what you experience at this moment – and it does not require any special ability. It only requires the truthfulness to face yourself at this instant. “I feel thus and thus,” and perhaps then the next step, “Why? Because of so and so.” And perhaps also in saying, “I do not want to face myself now because it is unpleasant” – that is also a Now, a truth, and therefore it is your Now. I’m talking generally, do you understand?

You have a misconception to believe a person has to be a genius, endowed with special intellectual knowledge, gifts or talents, to live in the Now. Or he has to be particularly spiritually evolved. This is not true my friends. The spiritual evolvement is a product of that, if it is a genuine spiritual evolvement. That is where it comes from – by no other special gift or stunts.

Because that ability is in you and it is an actual fact, much easier to summon than your elaborate efforts of evading the Now. It takes an infinitely greater ability to do that, but you all have trained yourselves to do it – painstakingly for hundreds and hundreds of your time years. But actually it is a much more difficult procedure.

QA113 QUESTION: There is solar time and there seems to be a subjective time in which we live when we dream and we are remembering past happenings. Could you explain if there is a different quality of time?

ANSWER: When you are in sleep or in your dream you are in a different time dimension. You experience a different time dimension. You experience the relativity of time and not its fixed nature as it manifests in this dimension. The very solar time, as you put it, is the fixedness of this time dimension – its outer objective quality rather than its subjective quality in another dimension where it is static, fixed, segmented.

QUESTION: Now, let’s assume that if there were no human beings on Earth, there would still be time as an astronomical factor, wouldn’t there?

ANSWER: Yes, because you see this universe, your Earth, is a product of mind of all these beings that live in this sphere, in this stage of development. Now, let us say, before human beings populated this Earth – and Earth with its time already existed – these souls who fitted into this dimension were prepared to come. This time dimension and this Earth, this universal sphere, would not exist if these beings in this particular state of development would not exist.

Now, let us suppose for argument sake, the entire Earth sphere would be wiped out, either by a happening or by the natural cause of evolution. No more would come.

Then in the latter case gradually this Earth sphere with its particular time dimension will dissolve, gradually as a process of decomposition; as the physical body decomposes, so is the Earth parallel to that, provided no further souls need to enter this development because they have already reached the next stage.

In the other case, if this humanity would be wiped out, but still all these souls have to go through this stage of development – which this particular dimension of time is a result of – then this solar time dimension would remain until new Earth conditions are prepared for the new souls to enter.

So if time is a product of mind, it means to be more specific of the mind of this overall particular development. When this particular development no more exists, this time dimension will decompose itself as the physical matter would decompose itself. Does that answer you?

QUESTION: Does that mean that this Earth sphere has been created for the experience of these souls in the Holocaust?

ANSWER: Yes, but let me put it a little bit differently. To be more correct, accurate, one cannot say it has been created. It is a creation of, it is a direct result of, it is an effect of. In other words, it is interconnected; it is again a link of cause and effect. Matter is an effect of the cause of this particular development, and so is mind, and so is the time element, and so is this Earth sphere. And the same cause and effect relationship exists in other spheres and dimensions.

It is the overall development of these souls – while one may be a little more and the other a little less – that create certain effects which manifest in matter and in the vibration of the universe, the sphere, or whatever you wish to call it, in their time dimension.

QA121 QUESTION: Could you possibly tell us what makes it possible for you, in a different dimension of timelessness, to make it possible for you to be here at a particular time and place of our convenience?

ANSWER: This different dimension of timelessness exists in every human being, in your psyche, in everyone else’s psyche. Therefore, it is not a question of moving from one geographical spot to another, at one appointed hour to another, because all this does not exist in the world of the psyche. The world of the psyche again does not exist on another planet. It is right here, within yourself.

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