John 17:5 Meaning Now

Before the world was, before the thought of separation dreamed a universe of bodies and time, the mind rested in its Source and shared its glory completely. That glory was never lost; it was only forgotten under the belief that a self had been made apart from God.

To ask for it again is to ask for nothing new, only for the remembrance of what has always been. The world is what the mind sees when it forgets, and the glory is what it is when it remembers. Letting the dream fall away, it finds itself exactly where it began, held in the Love that time never touched.

World: the ego's dream of separation given the appearance of time and place, the forgetting that hides the mind's changeless glory.

Before the world was, no clock ran and no separate person needed defending. This glory is not a reward earned in time. The word names the shining of a life that existed in oneness with its source before any form appeared.

Each of us carries a faint memory of that home, felt as a longing the world never quite fills. The prayer asks to be returned to it, glorified with the Father's own self rather than with anything acquired. When a person sinks beneath the story of their years, they touch that timeless being. The glory was never made. It was only forgotten, and now it is remembered.

The glory asked for here is no reward earned late in the story but a return to what was already yours before any story started. Before the world was, awareness simply was, whole and unclothed, with no circumstance wrapped around it.

That original state is the birthright a man forgets while he is busy being a name, a body, a set of troubles. To be glorified with the Father's own self is to sink back into pure being and know it as your own, the same being you had before a single condition existed. Nothing is added in this. Something is uncovered. The self that stands under all your experience is the very self that was there at the start, and remembering it is the whole of the return.