Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1068

1068. As we have seen here, "past" and "future" can exist only as "imaginary" phenomena in the "now". Realistic, practical experience in all its forms is the absolutely only thing that can constitute the "present" or the "now". This in turn means that the "present" covers the whole of the living being's consciousness or sphere of thought. So "past", "future" and "present" exist only as the living being's collected "experience of life". No direct experience can exist or come into existence without the "past", the "future" or the "present". But since these three phenomena are the same as what we call "time" (it will be remembered that no other form of time exists), and the living being's collected experience of life can consist only of these three phenomena, this being's "experience of life" and "time" will be identical. "Time" absolutely does not exist outside this experience. Since "experience" is the same as "life", "time" and "life" are the same phenomenon. So no existing phenomenon that is accessible to experience or sensory perception can exist without being a locality in the above-mentioned three subdivisions of "time" or the "now": the "past", the "present" or the "future". This holds true, as previously mentioned, for everything without exception. Any form of space, weight, size, movement, any created thing, whether it be a house, a machine, a piece of clothing, indeed, whether it be an organism, a fellow being, a human being, an animal, a plant or a mineral and so on, is in reality merely a "concept of time". The moment that such a thing is not a "concept of time", it does not exist within any experience whatsoever. In order to be experienced, every thing must be identical with "time". This in turn means that everything that exists as consciousness, thought or experience of life, or everything that is accessible to sensory perception, is in its highest appearance merely "time" made manifest, which, in the form of the "past", the "present" and "future", is the same as the "now". Everything that is not "time", and cannot therefore be the "now" either, is inaccessible to direct sensory perception.