Wh
at then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Saint Augustine of Hippo is a North African theologian born on 13 November 354, with Sun in Scorpio, Moon in Aries and Ascendant in Gemini (8.1.3). His mother (Saint Monica) was a faithful Catholic and his father was a Pagan. His early career was in rethoric and philosophy, while his religious path embraced Manicheism and then Pagan Neoplatonism. He related with a concubine (from whom he had a son) for more than a decade, and then he had to abandon her in order to comply with a society marriage arranged by his mother. Yet he had to wait two years for his finacée to come of age, and in the meantime he established a provisional rapport with another woman. It was during this period that Augustine uttered his famous prayer, “Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet.” At the age of 32 he underwent a profound personal crisis and decided to convert to Christianity, abandoning his career and any idea of marriage, to the dismay of his mother, and devoting himself totally to religion and celibacy. His most known work is his autobiographical Confessions.
The final part of this writing deals with the nature of third dimensional time. According to Augustine time exists only in the manifested third dimensional universe, with God abiding outside of time in what he defined as “the eternal present”. Augustine also appeared to be familiar with third and fourth dimensional shamanic techniques aimed at accessing fields of collective memory in order to manipulate third dimensional reality. On one hand (Ascendant in Gemini) he was an overt and clever supporter of consensus reality on the other (Sun in Scorpio) he seemed to secretly cultivate an operative awareness of the bardo zones.
Augustine argued that the present is simply the point of demarcation between past and future, with the soul extending into past and future through the power of attention. Awareness anticipates the future and is capable of holding the past. Augustine called time the distention of the soul, distentio animi. Augustine was also a major advocate of linear time as opposed to cyclical, which was then the dominant view.
Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Franco Santoro