Time-Body

In the Work, a time-body is the living recording of all thought, experience and events – past, present and future – in the life of a being. Every entity in the cosmos has a time-body. In a very real sense, the “issues are in the tissues,” both in the physical body and the body of the Universe.

The characteristics and experiences of our ancestors are literally encoded in our time-body, through DNA, acculturation, modeled behaviors and even stories that have been passed down to us.

There are scales of time-bodies represented in the Universe. In its collective sense, it’s another term for field of collective consciousness. As individuals, we are a part of – both influenced by and influencing – collective time-bodies; for example the time-body of the United States.

The concept of time-body has great meaning for human beings, as self-developing organisms.

“[T]he 4th dimension of time contains all one’s life. We experience it moment by moment. It runs very fast and is only halted by the feeling of now. Our life lying extended in this dimension, inaccessible to our senses, is all there – in this invisible dimension. For this reason everything we do now affects the past as well as the future of our life. One act of non-identifying now influences your past as well as your future. Your relation to people in the past will change, by work on yourself now. Not only will you change your own past, but possibly theirs.”

– Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, “Time-Body,” Sept. 28, 1946, Vol. 3, pp. 945-6

“[I]f you look at ourselves, an understanding of the past makes it more possible to be aware in the moment. … Remember the future depends on understanding the past. When you see yourself in an event over and over again, when you see how it has been, this alters things. Keep some vision of recurring events. Remember that tomorrow will be like today because today is like yesterday, unless something changes.”

– Beryl Pogson, The Very Next Thing: A Guide to Real Conscience, p. 35.

“The ‘long body’ is all one’s consciousness seen as one: how one’s life would appear to a higher power, on a higher level of being. What will be left at the end will be our relation to events, how we have taken our lives. This is our thread. After we come into the Work, we recognize and separate from events so the thread becomes different. A being at the highest level of consciousness, that of Real I, can be aware of the whole life as a solid. Can you now see how important it is to raise our level of consciousness? As long as we are in life, in the events, in time, we are confused and we do not know what to do. It is only when the consciousness is raised that our lives can be seen as a whole. It is only Real I in us that can see our lives as a whole. But we don’t have contact with Real I until the door to the higher centers is opened. The only thing we can do, then, is to ask for a vision from this higher level.”

– Beryl Pogson, The Work Life, p. 207

Related Work ideas: Memory, Recurrence, Events, Time