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Castaneda: Tales of Power:
"It doesn't matter what one reveals or what one keeps to oneself," he said. "Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. If we have enough of it, one word uttered to us might be sufficient to change the course of our lives. But if we don't have enough personal power, the most magnificent piece of wisdom can be revealed to us and that revelation won't make a damn bit of difference."
He then lowered his voice as if he were disclosing a confidential matter to me.
"I'm going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge anyone can voice," he said. "Let me see what you can do with it.
"Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity, if you so desire?"
After a long pause, during which he urged me with a subtle movement of his eyes to make a statement, I said that I did not understand what he was talking about.
"There! Eternity is there!" he said, pointing to the horizon.
Then he pointed to the zenith. "Or there, or perhaps we can say that eternity is like this." He extended both arms to point to the east and west.
We looked at each other. His eyes held a question.
"What do you say to that?" he asked, coaxing me to ponder upon his words.
I did not know what to say.
"Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any of the directions I have pointed to?" he went on. "Do you know that one moment can be eternity? This is not a riddle; it's a fact, but only if you mount that moment and use it to take the totality of yourself forever in any direction."
Tolle: A New Earth:
The twofold reality of the universe, which consists of things and space – thingness and nothingness – is also your own. A sane, balanced, and fruitful human life is a dance between the two dimensions that make up reality: form and space. Most people are so identified with the dimension of form, with sense perceptions, thoughts, and emotion, that the vital hidden half is missing from their lives. Their identification with form keeps them trapped in ego.
What you see, hear, feel, touch, or think about is only one half of reality, so to speak. It is form. In the teaching of Jesus, it is simply called “the world,” and the other dimension is “the kingdom of heaven or eternal life.”
Just as space enables all things to exist and just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are. We could say “God” if the word had not been so misused. I prefer to call it Being. Being is prior to existence.
Existence is form, content, “what happens.” Existence is the foreground of life; Being is the background, as it were. The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny. Eternity is the living reality of who you are.
Kipper: The first quote by CC regarding eternity has always eluded me. Tolle's explanations of Being and Essence seems to shed some light on the subject.
What's eternity to you? What's your interpretation of either of these quotes?
Is eternity this Being, this Essence of living reality, this Presence of Now that scoops us away on the Wings of Intent at a moments notice as don Juan mentions?
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