8. . . and TIME

"Can someone really change the past?" Arthur asked.

"Of course," replied Merlin. "You mortals are in the habit of believing that the past creates the present and the present the future. This is just an arbitrary point of view."

"Imagine for a moment your own version of a perfect future," continued Merlin. "See yourself in that future with everything you could wish for fulfilled at this very moment. Can you see yourself there?" Arthur nodded, because he had suddenly had a vision of Camelot in all its glory.

"Very good. Now take the memory of that future and bring it here into the present. Let it influence how you will behave from this moment on. Whenever competing impulses come up from your past, discard those memories and act instead on your future memories. Shed the burden of the past, and let your vision of the future guide you. Do you see what happened?"

"I'm not sure," replied Arthur.

"You're living backward in time, just as a wizard does. Living tomorrow's dream today is always open to you. Who says you must live only in the past? By living forward in time, mortals are always weighed down by the burden of memory; they allow the past to create the present. The wizard chooses to let the future create the present -- that is what living backward in time really means."

"And you have changed the past, then, by no longer letting it influence your actions in the present," said Arthur.

"Exactly. But that is hardly the end of it. The past can be changed much more profoundly. When you learn that time is being invented in your own consciousness, you will see that there is no past. There is only the eternal now, ever renewing itself. Now is the only time that really exists. The past is memory, the future is potential. So change the past completely by seeing it as unreal, a phantom of the mind."

"Mind you don't drop that potato in the ashes," Merlin cautioned. Of course the boy already had. Because Merlin lived backward in time, his warnings inevitably came too late, after some minor disaster had already occurred. Arthur brushed the soot off the potato and replaced it on its skewer, made from the green wood of a linden tree.

"Never mind," Merlin said. "That one can be yours."