“You only live once…
sometimes less.”

J. R. R. Tolkien

Salvador Dali -The  Persistence of Time

Symbols and Color

• Background Position: All celestial events have courses of ongoing progression that are measured. As a Physical Plane or “World Truth” the movements of galaxies, stars, and planets are shown in the cycles of this image.
• Border Color: Tan – like the Good Red Road of Life in Native American Mythology
• Hour Glass: Time is always moving and we have a finite amount.
• Spiral Nautilus Shell: Soul Age Set
• Wasting Time: It is possible to miss opportunities.
• No Time: Reminding us of the need to focus energy.

Implication of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

Time measures change, but in the present there is only NOW. The paradox of time is signified by this clock which shows each moment as unique. Just because they all say “now” each still appears in a different position on the face, reminding us that we move through time. A continuous present is called Eternal, not forever. Eternal is the absence of time where Forever is time without end. Imagine being suspended where you have no memory, because each moment is totally unconnected. What would life be in a continual state of discovery? Life on the Physical Plane depends on Time. It measures our progress, stretches our imagination, and orders possibilities. This card begins the Cycles – Soul Age Set, since every bit of experience accumulates. As the Universe expands, those events marks stages of development. Every person proceeds according to this cosmic plan. A plan condensed into Earth’s stages. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to
dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. Ecclesiastes 3:1-22

Card messages in the Illuminated position:

+Episode

+Eternal, now, period, season, presence, attention, existence

1. ‘Time flies when you are having fun.’ But it seems to crawl when you are doing something you resist. Get into whatever you are doing knowing that it is part of the time of your life. Find a way to enjoy it!
2. Time is of the essence. Pay attention to how it unfolds.
3. Best to live in the present moment for future will be here in no time. Use today to shape tomorrow.
4. Live in the Now. Can you understand that nothing you do is wrong! God is the only judge!
5. Let your time be filled by experience rather than expectation. Life is something to be present with not planned for, outlined or compared with requirements. These are all helpful for a project, but not for a living person in the midst of events.
6. The Time-Space continuum suggests that how far you travel you must pass time doing it. You might not be able to control the length but you can decide your attitude to the journey. Is it exhilarating, boring, or excruciating? That’s up to you!
7. Are you scheduling well, or at all? It is so vital to make certain to plan for self-time. No kidding. It is too easy to get caught up in should’s and obligations we forget the one to ourselves. Make it a priority.
8. There a three parts of reality: Past, Present and Future. You can only life one at a time. But if you remember the past, make changes in the present, you will most likely arrive at the future you were working towards: or better!
9. Time is of the essence. Use it precisely.
10. Learn from the past. Live in the present. Make plans and build for the future. All together!
11. Carpe Diem: seize the day! Pay attention and take whatever time you need to respond effectively.
12. Timing is everything! You’ve got to learn how to spot your openings. 
13. When plans change and the time you scheduled to do something else is freed up, consider it a moment of found time.
14. Nature, history, geology, astronomy, represent change and transition in ever increasing scales of time. Stretch out your project time line, if you can, and allow the universe to deliver things in their proper time.

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

Anticipating time is the future, living in the Now is the present, and remembering experience is to recall the past. Each occupies a frame of reference which we cast into an episode with which we say “seemed to last forever” or “was gone in an instant.” Our experience of a period’s duration is directly related to what we are to learn from it. Essence can easily trick Ego into staying fixated on a moment, so that a person finally pays attention. Yet, Ego can do its level best to thwart that event by using distraction, frustration, and resistance to prevent any incoming information it feels it does not want or cannot control. The three aspects of time give us options as to where to place our attention.

Card messages in the Shadow position:

– Duration

–Increments, chronology, languish,

1. Make your time count for something.
2. You’ve got all the time in the world. How are you going to spend it?
3. Stop wasting your time! While you are killing time, it is doing to same to you in return.
4. Have you felt over committed of your time? Clear you calendar for at least the rest of the day. Shy of that, take a moment to get back into your body.
5. If you are impatient with time, you might hurry right past a golden opportunity. If you are spending time well, you will be reaping extras that you could not have predicted. Focus as much on the journey as touching base on the destination.
6. “It is common to hear people say repeatedly say “I’ll be with you real quick.” Or in “just a sec(ond).” It makes us wonder how hurried they must feel? But also, how distortedly unrealistic their assessment of time is because, it always takes longer than they say it should. Take a breath! One thing at a time.
7. The Chief Feature of Impatience (Card 34) is the most wrapped up in, and warped by, time. Yes both. While they want you to hurry-up they are equally as likely to delay or postpone because they have mis-estimated how long/short something actually takes to complete. Thus Impatient people never feel there is enough time but they sure want you to move faster.
8. Sometimes the ramifications of the past come to roost in the present. What looked like a win or loss then could reverse itself. Don’t be too quick to think of anything as ‘final’, time has a way of changing perspective.
9. “Time flies when you are having fun.” But it seems to crawl when you are doing something you resist. Dive headlong into whatever you are doing because it is part of the time of your life. Find a way to enjoy it, or at least learn from it.
10. If you want to prepare for the future, start now. Multiple presents compete for, and make, the future.
11. Best to live in the present moment for future will be here in no time. Use today to shape tomorrow.
12. Create continuity as much as possible.  Following a course of action that is timely and measured insures that there is no interruption in the flow of things.
13. Tempus Fugit is a Latin phrase which means “time flies” or “times a wasting”. In either case, it is best to use time since it is a commodity that is easy to escape.
14. Take whatever time you need to respond appropriately. Impatience is your nemesis. (Card 27)
15. “And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot: And thereby hangs a tale. (2.7.27) – As You Like It – William Shakespeare – Part of how we experience time is just about how we hold it: as a curse or a gift.
16. Why would anybody want to “kill time”? If you are not occupying your time, you are not utilizing your life. Choose something, even contemplation or play beat boredom.

Quotes signifying this pole

• “Time (and tide) wait for no man.” – Most often attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer
• “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
• “Failure to plan is a plan to fail.” – Popular aphorism about ignoring your future trajectory. 
• “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” Edmund Burke in Revolution in France
• Tempus Fugit is a Latin phrase which means “time flies” or “times a wasting”. In either case, it is best to use time since it is a commodity that is easy to escape.

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

Is time an illusion? If so, it is a very persistent one! At the very least, it is an intellectual concept facilitating our ordering and comparison of events.  The metrics of time as measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, millennia, etc. in their own right share a dimension of human perception we call a moment.

The Michael Teaching (MT) shares with many of the “new age” or spiritual teachings that time does not exist per’se, in absolute. Yet it is the way your order your lives and notice how processes act upon you: like again and decay. Einstein mathematical General Theory of Relativity suggests that time is relative to gravity. Without time our existence here on earth would lack a sense of progress. Only with the idea of advancement do we have language available to us to sort and contrast the multiplicity of inputs we receive from our environment.

Being young or feeling old each are references to the passing of stages in our lives and perceptual reactions to those states.

The most strident points about time that the Mt asserts are twofold: 1) Living from the hurts of the past robs you of the attention and focus in the present and thus most likely causes you to transfer patterns from previous times or wounds, into the current moment. In both cases, you miss an opportunity for a new meaning or a new experience. However, learning from

Cultural Meaning

For the scientist, time is the fourth dimension. As real and usable as its other spatial compatriots of height, width, and depth.

Session, event, period, season, career, aging, lifetime, are all subjective measures of time. They exist because we frame a set of experiences with common factors within their borders. It is a Other psychological ordering of events that allow us a series of events and progression which assist us in understanding distance as well as space.

Sociologist George Santayana famously prognosticated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Another variation is “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” In both cases he speaks about the carryover (of lack thereof) of lessons experiencing in a previous time, or by previous persons, whose conditions are present once again. Even without the warnings of a philosopher we are struck by the connection to the recurrence of patterns in human life: individually and globally. Only knowledge accrued from them and used to consider the present can or will prevent similar mistakes being engaged in.