Livets Bog, vol. 4
"Temporal" analyses as illusion
1076. After the orientation about the "living being" we have provided here it is no longer difficult for the highly developed researcher to understand how the cosmic analyses are to be used so as to be in contact with the laws of life. We now know that the "living being" is irrefutably a unit consisting of "time" and "eternity", which in turn are the same as the "changeable" and the "unchangeable" respectively, these being phenomena that we know to constitute the organism (the experience of life, consciousness) and the I respectively. With the term the "living being" we can therefore express neither the I nor the "organism", neither "time" nor "eternity", neither the "unchangeable" nor the "changeable", but only the unit formed by the inseparability of these two phenomena. Since this unit becomes accessible to sensory perception solely by virtue of the "changeable", nothing about the "living being" that we sense directly will be "eternal", but merely "temporary". Indeed, it is undergoing transformation as we look at it. This naturally does not always mean that the transformation takes place so quickly that we can see it, but it is irrefutably present to a greater or lesser extent. But when a thing thus transforms itself, it reveals "movement". But at the moment of experience or in the "now", "movement" can in turn manifest itself in only one direction. It cannot run contrary to itself. It cannot be bound in a direction towards the east and the west or upwards and downwards at the same time, just as a being cannot develop obesity and become slim or appear controlled and uncontrolled at the same time. Since "movement" (manifestation) in the "now" or at the moment of experience can thus be bound in only one direction, this direction becomes the analysis of the "living being". But since the being still constitutes the "changeable" or is subject to transformation, this analysis can hold true only in the very moment of experience or the "now"; in the next "now" the transformation has proceeded further and, in this new "now", the analysis of the being becomes something other than it was in the first "now", and so on continuously. All such analyses are therefore to be expressed as merely "temporal" or "temporary". Since the "living being" is an "eternal" being, such a "temporary" analysis cannot express this eternal existence, since it expresses the "living being" only in the "now" or the moment of experience in which it was sensed or experienced. If we therefore use this analysis as a criterion or expression for the being's eternal existence, we are guilty of a great misunderstanding. If we thus say that this eternal existence is, for example, "beautiful", it would not be this eternal existence at all that is "beautiful", but the part of this existence that appears in the "now" or at the moment of experience. This analysis cannot possibly express anything else, apart from the fact that an "eternal existence" cannot have any analysis other than that it is "something that is". By defining "eternal existence" as "beautiful" we have thus abandoned "time" and sided only with "eternity", which in itself, when separated from "time", cannot constitute any "living being" at all. But a "living being" that does not exist cannot have an existence that is "beautiful" or in any other way express any form of analysis. Here, and only here, does the temporal analysis that it is "beautiful" become an illusion. The same is of course true of all other "temporal" analyses or solutions in terms of weights and measure applied to the "eternal" aspect of the "living being", which as previously mentioned can absolutely only equal "X", and not any kind of "living being".