The Eternal Now

 

I had prepared a lecture which I had entitled ‘The Torpor of the Lower Worlds’ but when the time came to deliver it I just couldn’t be bothered. I stood there at the podium, my audience looking up at me expectantly as my mind slowly but surely glazed over…

 

That’s just a joke of course, and a pretty stupid one at that! It’s a pretty dumb joke alright but never mind that. It’s a pretty dumb joke but there’s a grain of truth in it all the same. There’s a grain of truth in it and I shall come back to that grain in due course, so I shall. You can be sure of that. People often ask me what authority I have to be giving lectures on the Lower Worlds and I suppose they have a point there. I suppose they do.

 

When asked what the best way to perform a task was an expert once said ‘Start at the beginning, work your way up to the middle, and then proceed until you get to the end…’ I like that story – you can apply it practically anything of course. It’s a universal formula. I like to apply it whenever difficulties come along in my life. Just to give one example, when I wake up in the morning I might be wondering how on earth I’m going to get through the day that is to come, and then I remember this formula and I’m reassured. I’m reassured because I know that it works every time!

 

I’m watching the people go by on the street. There’s a ceaseless flow of them – so many people and they’re all going somewhere. Each and every one of them is both going somewhere and coming from somewhere. That’s a funny thing isn’t it? If I had an expert sitting right here next to me then they could tell me exactly where each person was coming from and where each one was going. They’d have all the information at their fingertips. Wouldn’t that be something!

 

I’m not really bothered about that however – it is the aesthetics of the situation that I am concerned with really. The ceaseless hypnotic flow of pedestrians always makes me think of a river. The river keeps on flowing and it’s not really going anywhere or coming from anywhere. The individual people are of course but it’s not the individual people that I’m concerned with here but the aesthetics of the situation. The flow exists in the Eternal Now and I think it’s important to remember that. Not that we ever do of course. Not that we ever do…

 

I’m starting to feel a touch of torpor myself now that I notice at. I don’t know if it’s the pull of the Lower Worlds or if it’s just some kind of ordinary everyday fatigue. It’s hard to tell really, isn’t it? Who’s to say, who’s to say? Perhaps an expert could tell me. Where are the bloody experts when you need them, right? They’re always mouthing off about how expert they are, in that damn superior way of theirs. You’d get sick of them really, wouldn’t you? I know they’re important and stuff but all the same you have to admit that there’s something awfully infuriating about them. Those bloody rotten old experts, right?

 

You can get lost in the Eternal Now if you’re not careful. That’s the thing about it. It’s all very great and everything but you can very easily get lost in it. You can very easily get completely lost in it and then where would you be? That’s worth giving some serious consideration to in my book. The Eternal Now is all very fine but you want to keep your wits about you and remember not to get pulled in completely. You have to pull yourself out of it before the hypnotic pull gets too much. You mustn’t give in to it. You’d lose all your future in one go if you did. You’d lose your past too…

 

It’s the same when you take a whole load of LSD of course. It’s all very fine and you’re having a super-great time with all the great visuals and all those interlocking interweaving energy patterns that you see everywhere, not to mention all the revelatory insights and all that kind of stuff but if you’re not careful you can lose your ego in a flash. You can lose your ego and where would you be then? It’s worth thinking about you know. What exactly would you do if you lost your ego? Where would you go and what would you do when you got there? What kind of plans for the future would you have? How would you achieve your goals if you didn’t have a ‘you’? It’s worth thinking about.

 

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to engage yourself in playing complicated ego games. The more complicated the better, in fact. I’m a bit of an ‘expert’ myself in that field, you could say, so I think it’s fair to say that I know what I’m talking about here. The best advice is to completely immerse yourself in the old ‘heavy ego games’, as  good old Timmy Leary used to call them. Work as hard at it as you can. Play those old ego games for all you’re worth and I think you’ll find that this helps. It’s just a suggestion, I don’t want to sound too prescriptive about it, obviously. I don’t want to come across as a ‘know it all’! It’s whatever works for you really isn’t it? Far be it for me to tell you what to do…

 

 

 

 

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