October 1966
We gather close. We are able to read thee in your thoughts. It is the keeper of the stone. We take you into the garden of love. And there above us is the all glowing sun. And here is the sundial. I lift you up and I place you upon the sundial. Thou art covering it up and yet, the sun still shines. The sundial is only an instrument.
Although you have overcome time, as it were, in this world, it will still go on. Although there is nothing now to register the so-called time, there will still be morning, afternoon, and night, for those who do not understand. And in the same way, although you recognise in your heart, true immortality, everlasting life and love, deep in your innermost being, in the centre where God himself abides, the sun which shines in your heart. There is this great peace, this all-knowing, it does not alter the fact the body physical must abide in a place, on a vibration, in time, for a time, must...
Here there may be an Earthquake, here a hurricane. Here poverty and pain. Here riches, plenty, and comfort. Here hate and deceit. Here loving kindness. Here cruelty and here compassion. All these things going on around you, and yet, even as I place you upon the sundial, even as you sit there and gaze upon the sun itself, even this will not stop time upon the Earth. And yet, you know and recognise only the sun itself. The sundial is only a register.
And so it is child, you keep your inner eye, upon the sun, the very centre in your own being which is God and love. All the other things will be going on around you. You will see and know that this is so. And in the very centre where thine own.... there is peace.
The daily frustrations, the petty cares, physical pain, tiredness, the depression, are all these things going on in time….
The sundial, here, is a precise and unusually technical image: it doesn't create time, it only registers it. Standing on the dial and blocking its shadow doesn't stop time — the sun still moves, morning still becomes afternoon and night, for anyone still reading by the shadow alone. The transcript uses this to distinguish two very different centres of attention: the sun itself — constant, unmoving, the actual source — and the dial, which only marks passage and change. Keeping the inner eye on the sun, not the dial, is the whole instruction here: recognising the changeless centre, "which is God and love," while fully accepting that the dial — the body, the Earth, circumstance — keeps registering earthquakes and hurricanes, poverty and plenty, hate and kindness, exactly as before.
What's notable is what this transcript doesn't promise: it doesn't say the daily frustrations, physical pain, tiredness, or depression will stop. The peace offered is located specifically "in the very centre," not in the elimination of what happens around it — the sundial keeps registering time, the storms keep arriving, and the peace holds anyway, because it was never dependent on the weather in the first place.
This is essentially Boethius's Wheel of Fortune again, met a few transcripts back — the distinction between what genuinely rises and falls and cannot be trusted, and what remains beneath and beyond it — but rendered here in a sharper, almost mechanical image: not a wheel that turns, but an instrument that only measures, standing beside a sun that was never turning at all.