Since only eternity is real, why not use the illusion of time constructively?
You might remember that underneath are the Everlasting Arms. These comments have no context; there is no related material surrounding them. They stand alone, and as you can see, are quite brief. Yet they grow on you. The more I think about them, the more I see in them. Further, they are significant in a historical sense. They are the very first reference to the idea of reality versus illusion, the notion that eternity is real and time is an illusion. (The lines “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists” were actually dictated later.) This contrast between reality and illusion, of course, would become the philosophical backbone of the Course. Before this point, the closest references we had were two mentions of “lower-order reality,” which referred to the physical level. Yet obviously, even a lower-order reality still has reality. For good reason, then, these references were changed by the editors to the “bodily level.” The above passage, however, foreshadows so much more t
