The usual picture has the past as the solid part. It happened, it is fixed, and it built the present out of its consequences. The future is empty and will be filled by whatever the present sends into it, and the present is the thin moving line where one becomes the other.
That picture makes the now the least substantial of the three, which is odd given that it is the only one anybody has ever been in. This material inverts it, and the inversion carries a practical rule about how to phrase anything you say to yourself. The rule is a single grammatical instruction and it is stated without exception. So the question is worth asking plainly. Which part of time is actually real?
The route in is a personal one, and it is unusually candid for a technical book. Like everyone else, he had his own sturm und drang about God and existence, and always believed that if he could get past that internal conflict he might be able to realise Ein Sof.1
What he arrived at is that existence revolves around the still centre of the Life/Death Principle. Then the method, which is the striking part. He personified Death as a Mother archetype, and through an intimate communication with that personified principle was led to comprehend a Model of the Universe — the blueprint Kabbalists call the Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life.1
And the Tree is described as a tool rather than as a revelation. With it he was able to face basic issues of existence, of which the first named is the question of Time.1 Everything that follows on this page comes out of that route rather than out of a text.
Before time gets analysed, the Tree gets read as a birth. What matters is grasping the Ternary of Time in order to understand what is happening within the womb of the Great Mother — the eternal process of genesis, the Ladder of Descending and Ascending Stages which begins in the Hidden Origin, unfolds through the whole cosmos, and returns into the Infinite No-Thing.2
Then the gap on the Tree gets reassigned. The Abyss separating the three lofty sefirot from the rest can in one sense be viewed as the womb of the Shechinah, the Great Mother — and the seven Sefirot below it are the creation of all that was, is and ever will be, constantly emanating out of that Dark Womb in the Now.2
And the three above the Abyss get the other half of the pair. The three Supernal Sefirot might then be considered the Male Seed of the Great Emanator, suggested by the Upper Triangle or the Hebrew letter Alef — the Life-Death principle of all that is and all that is not.2 That region is placed outside time altogether, on the grounds that even time must issue from the womb of the Great Mother.
Now the claim the page is named for, and it arrives as a correction to an expectation. Following the reasoning so far, we might consider the Past and the Future to be united in the Present — two things joining in a third, exactly as the earlier law of threes would predict.3
That is the reading being refused. There is a hidden truth here, and it is that it is the Present which determines the Past and the Future. Literally, the Present emanates both.3 Not joins them, and not stands between them.
Emanation is the word used everywhere else in this system for how the higher produces the lower, so the choice is deliberate rather than loose. The past is not the cause standing behind the now. The now is upstream of it. What you take to be the fixed record is something the present is producing while you look at it.
The three then get mapped onto the roles from the law of threes, and the assignment is not the obvious one. The Past is Passive, the Future is Active, and the Present is Neutral.3 Three words, and two of them go the opposite way to intuition.
Most people would call the future the empty one and the past the one with force in it, and this reverses that. The future is the active element initiating the process, the past is the receptive element taking the flow, and the present is the neutral term produced by their meeting — which is also the term that, in this system, generates the other two.
Which is a genuinely strange arrangement, and it is left standing rather than smoothed. The neutral member of a trio is normally what results from the other two. Here it results from them and produces them, and no line anywhere resolves that.
The same three-part shape is then run on a different pair. By analogy, understand the binary of Man and Nature, the union of which results in the Archetype — which neutralises the binary and creates the Ternary of Life.3 The pattern is being offered as portable rather than as a fact about time alone.
The mechanics are stated in one sentence and they run in two directions at once. The Highest Principle also divides into active and passive elements, and as the Highest diversifies Itself, so man and nature unify themselves in the Highest Principle.3 One movement down into difference, one movement up into union, and both happening together.
Then the placement, which is the usable part. The Archetype is always between Man and Nature.3 Not above them, and not inside either. It is in the gap, which is where every neutral term in this system sits.
The last move takes all of it into a rule about wording, and it turns on what the word Present is taken to mean. The term does not only refer to an object at a certain moment in time. It refers also to the reality of something which is not an object at all — a State of Awareness in the process of emanation, or birthing.4
So the now is not a slot that things occupy. It is an activity, and specifically the activity of producing. That is what lets it stand upstream of the other two tenses rather than between them.
And the instruction follows directly. When we use our Will to establish a certain mindset, or use suggestion to achieve certain aims, we should always use Present terms like I am and never I will be.4 The future tense is not weaker encouragement. In this system it names the one part of time that is being emanated rather than doing the emanating, so a sentence in it is addressed to the wrong place.
You want to phrase something you say to yourself so that it does something. Two words decide it.
Start by putting every statement in the present, because that is the whole instruction. I am calm rather than I will be calm. I am someone who finishes things rather than I am going to start finishing things. The rule is stated without exception and without softening.
Then check what the sentence is doing to the past rather than to the future. If the Present emanates the Past, then a change in what you are now reaches backwards into what the earlier material means, which is something people experience constantly and rarely name. A decision taken this month can turn ten wasted years into an apprenticeship, and nothing about those years has changed except what they now lead to.
Then look for the third thing in the gap rather than inside either party. The Archetype is always between Man and Nature, never in one of them. So when two things in your life will not reconcile, the instruction is to attend to the space between them, because the resolving term is not hiding inside either.
And treat a flat stretch as a location rather than a fault. The seven lower spheres are described as constantly emanating out of a Dark Womb in the Now, so the productive place in this system is a dark one and always was. That is a considerably more useful thing to be told than that you should feel differently about it.
The Tree reading here is offered explicitly as one option rather than as doctrine — could in one sense be viewed as, might then be considered — and that hedging is worth keeping, because reassigning the Abyss as a womb is a substantial move.
Its origin is stated with unusual honesty, and this is the rare case where the personal route matters to the evidence. The model was reached through an intimate communication with a personified Death, described as a Mother archetype. Nothing is claimed to have been derived from a text. Nothing hides that either, which is worth more than a fabricated citation would have been.
Tension left open. The Present is called Neutral, which in this system is the term produced by the meeting of an active and a passive element. It is also said to emanate the Past and the Future. Those two cannot both be the plain sense of the word, and nothing here reconciles them.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The central claim originates in a personal visionary communication and is presented as such. 🚩 This subject requires more careful study is stated in the original about the Man/Nature analogy, and no further study follows in this section. 🚩 The Archetype is used without definition.
The law of threes and the ternary of time do not sit together as cleanly as the presentation implies. In the law, the neutral is what results when an active element reaches a passive one — the third that did not exist until the two met. Here the neutral term is the Present, and the Present is what makes the other two.
Reading it as a loop is the obvious repair, and there is some warrant for it. The Highest diversifies itself downward while man and nature unify upward, both at once, which is exactly the shape a loop has. On that reading the Present is produced by the meeting of past and future and produces them in turn, forever.
But nothing states it, and the two readings are simply set side by side. What is offered instead is the practical rule about I am, which follows only from the emanating half. So the section ends by using one reading and never withdrawing the other, and a practitioner is left holding both.
Visualization as Nervous System Training — behavioral-mechanics.
The training literature makes a claim that hands this page a mechanism it does not have. Perception is something the brain makes rather than something it records — look at a tree and what reaches you is a reconstruction assembled behind your face out of two slightly different pictures. So the brain can be taught to make pictures on command, and a picture made well enough fires the same wiring as the real thing. Sit in the dark, rehearse a strike clearly enough, and the body lays down the reflex as though the arm had moved. (That source is flagged in the vault as popular and single-sourced, and the claim should be carried at that weight.)
Now the tense rule has something to stand on besides cosmology. A nervous system can only rehearse a present state, because rehearsal is doing the thing in miniature and there is no way to do a thing in the future tense. I will be calm names a state you are not in and gives the machinery nothing to fire on. I am calm supplies a present condition, which is the only kind that can be practised.
Which locates the real variable, and it is not the tense. The sentence works when it produces something a nervous system can act on, and the present tense is how you get there rather than the thing itself. I am calm, said as a proposition, is a claim about the world that a person can immediately check and fail. Said as a picture — the chair, the hands still, the breath already slower — it is a rehearsal.
And that names the failure mode neither states alone. A present-tense sentence about something visibly untrue invites the check, and the check wins every time. So the rule needs a companion the tradition never supplies: assert the present state you can currently produce, not the one you want, because the first can be practised and the second can only be contradicted.
Sharpest implication. If the Present emanates the Past, then the past is not finished and is not evidence. It is being produced right now by what you are, which means the fixed part of your life is the part most immediately available to change — and the only way to change it is to change something in the present.
Generative questions.