The second movement of truth exposes our sense of boundaries and separateness as an illusion. We come to see that the cosmic existence is the real existence of the universe and the individual, even though sometimes we are not aware of it. Oneness is there all the time and sometimes we perceive it, sometimes not. When we realize the cosmic individuality, when we realize we are everything, we have conquered space. When we remain in the cosmic individuality, we realize after a while that the nature of that cosmic reality is eternity. It feels eternal in the sense that it has nothing to do with time. Cosmic reality includes all time, which makes it feel eternal, but, more precisely, it is altogether outside of time. Eternity is outside of time and perceives it. Now arises a freedom from time. We come to realize that the totality, what we call God or the cosmic individual, is not only a oneness of space but also a oneness of time. The cosmic amoeba is all time. So we have a four-dimensional space here. This is called Einsteinian space. The cosmic individual is neither in space nor in time. You are eternal presence, in the sense that you are now, in this very moment, all times, all places. Realizing the state of God, or the cosmic existence, is realizing that eternity. There is a sense that you are seeing time passing, but time passes within the totality, within God. In the totality, it is all now, and time and space pass within you.

It is interesting that presence or Being is experienced as a nowness, but that this nowness is not a moment of time. The nowness is more of a medium, more of the actual presence, the actual consciousness, the actual substance, of Being. When we realize it is everything that exists, we see that it includes all time. We see, in fact, that it is beyond time, and that time is merely a concept that exists within it. The second insight contained in the definition of Holy Work is that this presence exists as a succession of moments, each experienced as the now, the eternal presence or the presence of eternity. Eternity here does not mean “everlastingness,” since everlastingness is a relationship to time. Eternity is outside of time; it is infinity of presence. It is as though all time is concentrated in the now, not in terms of events, but in terms of feeling. So there is no concept of linear or measured time in the now. Therefore, to talk about unfoldment is to talk about reality experienced as successive moments of now, in which these moments are not disconnected but are always now. Another way of expressing this is that when you experience Being, it is pure nowness; you aren’t thinking about present, future, or past. When you remain in Being, you begin to realize that things change. But these changes do not mean a stopping of Being; they are, rather, a continuum of moments, each experienced as the now.

From the above considerations we see that even though true nature is fundamentally free from spatial and temporal extensions, it appears in manifestation as the experience of infinity and eternity, boundlessness and nowness. However, the mystical experience of boundlessness and infinity, and that of eternity and nowness, is not the most direct experience of true nature; rather, it is the experience of true nature from the perspective of the timespace grid of manifestation. This is why true nature is usually described as infinite expanse, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, endlessness, infinity, eternity, and so on. In the view of the Diamond Approach, true nature reveals these characteristics, and many others, by revealing itself as consisting of many dimensions, each illuminating some of these qualities. In other words, rather than viewing reality as true nature appearing in manifestation with such characteristics, we view true nature as manifesting itself with many dimensions.

You might be seeing why, for many of us, it is difficult to know this possibility because in our mind, in our consciousness, in our lives—and in most of history and philosophy—love and passionate desire have been considered two different, opposing tendencies or forces. We experience those two tendencies as being in opposition, in conflict—or, at best, in some kind of harmony or balance—but they are not usually experienced as one. They feel as though they are going in two different directions. But a long, long time ago, these two forces were not separate. At a time we cannot remember, they were one. And the interesting thing is that they are still one—but they are one in eternity. What does this mean: “one in eternity”? It means that the two are one in the timelessness of our true nature, in the depth of our spiritual nature. The two are inseparable, primordially inseparable. So we want to explore here what that actually means. We want to understand that not only can these two forces be harmonized so that they are no longer in conflict; they can be the same thing. They are the same thing—they are one force. And it is possible to have that kind of experience, that kind of recognition, because it is so: It is—they are—one.