“Eternal means timeless — no time. The human mind cannot understand that. The human mind can understand time and can deny time. What is timeless is beyond our comprehension.”
"The Illusion of Rewards", p. 43
Awareness (1992)
Context: Do you know what eternal life is? You think it's everlasting life. But your own theologians will tell you that that is crazy, because everlasting is still within time. It is time perduring forever. Eternal means timeless — no time. The human mind cannot understand that. The human mind can understand time and can deny time. What is timeless is beyond our comprehension. Yet the mystics tell us that eternity is right now. How's that for good news? It is right now. People are so distressed when I tell them to forget their past. They're crazy! Just drop it! When you hear "Repent for your past," realize it's a great religious distraction from waking up. Wake up! That's what repent means. Not "weep for your sins.": Wake up! understand, stop all the crying. Understand! Wake up!
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Anthony de Mello 135
Indian writer 1931–1987Related quotes

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1939)

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Organic and Inorganic
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”

Her response when asked about her sense of rhythm in songwriting, as quoted in Life and Lies of an Icon (1995) by Richard Witts.

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”
Source: Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone, Julie V. Iovine (1993) Home. p. 43.