Down on the Corner of Time and Space

Writing and reading are two of the best of human activities.  It's very rewarding to use words to create ideas - to make a bridge of meaning - to connect minds.  The greater the gap to be bridged, the greater the reward.  


Words are perhaps our handiest tool of all; they’re the keys to rapid human development.  Yet words fall short, by great magnitude, when we try to grasp ideas that tease our imaginations from somewhere beyond time and space.  For example, the idea of infinity can only be partly understood in anyone's mind.  

For such amorphous ideas, words change from handy tools into obstacles.  Words enable intellectual understanding, but - pure experience - unencumbered with narration, is the key to moving beyond knowledge to knowing.  Knowledge is the spoken or written artifact of knowing, which is awareness. The realm beyond words, which is without form and time is a singular place that is no place; an event of divine comprehension where descriptive qualities fall away like loosened veils.  Words can only point toward it.

(If you haven’t yet heard or read the words of Eckhart Tolle, you would do well to sample his talks on your computer.  He masterfully uses words to reveal new meaning in the ancient teachings of the world’s great religions.  He can pare away the troublesome trappings of dogma and is able to find current context for understanding difficult-to-grasp ideas in ways that resonate deeply.)  

When words are clearly understood only as pointers to experience, and are followed with devotion to what lies beyond them, a timeless, formless, limitless realization can be achieved.  It is not so much like a destination arrival as it is like a merger, where one not only comprehends the whole, but one becomes the whole.  Words have no relevance to that pure awareness that invites surrender and submersion with stilled senses.

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Along with the idea of using word-knowledge to get to knowing beyond words, knowledge of one’s self enables one to know the self.  (And, knowing the self enables one to know the other.)  Also, awareness of the senses enables awareness beyond the senses.  All of these enable transcendent movement through knowledge to awareness beyond.  The self and the senses are only portals, they are openings toward transcendence, but because they - like words - are the sufficient sum of our everyday lives, they also can block transcendence like closed doors.  


About a third of our everyday lives is our "every-night" lives, and we mostly ignore the importance of that.  While we sleep lightly, we may still be aware of language, of our self and our senses.  In deeper sleep, if these things are present at all, they are forgotten and we’re not able to talk about any awareness we might have had in deep sleep.  By deliberately quieting the senses while awake, and forgetting about the self, and letting go of words and thoughts, one can sit in the presence of the timeless and formless experience we have in deep sleep.  The same deep feeling of refreshment is about all that remains from the practice.  

Meditation guides abound, and they suggest breathing awareness to start.  (For those that pray, the word "Amen" is a variation of the meditation breathing exercise, sometimes written as, AOM, or OM, or a u m and sounds like"AhhOhhmmm...".   Also, the actual point of prayer is to be open, empty and still - rather than to tick off a shopping list of requests. )     [addtl. note - It has been pointed out to me the commonality among the roots of "Amen" and early Hebrew, Greek, Latin words and in the case of Egyptian origins is has to do with the name of an early deity and later associated with another deity "Amen-Ra".  My source traced the word back to Sanskrit word "Om".] - In all cases, the origins are ancient, and some may have been cross-culturally influenced.

The human path, like that of all other living things, is one of growth and decay, becoming and declining.  For the human alone, though, there are two other, complementary pairs of impulses that parallel this biological arc.  One is the breaking away from and then attraction to the eternal.  The other is the entanglement and disentanglement with the bonds of this world.  Since these latter pairs are not biologically driven, they can easily be ignored or denied by the self, which is captive to physical and intellectual urges.  Unlike the inevitability of the biological arc, these others are matters of choice.

Religions have named these contradictory impulses and externalized them to make them more comfortable: good and evil, God and the Devil.  It’s easier to accept that responsibility for the choice lies outside one’s self.

What sets the human apart is that we must each choose to accept integrity of being that is unconditionally inherent in other living things.  Their part in this world is to sustain themselves and us, but it is also to serve as examples of interconnectedness.  We alone have the choice to live in the illusion of separateness from all else.  The choice to be separate is the source of human pain and suffering.  Regardless of choice, or whether we actively deny it or it remains hidden from us, we are part of the whole.  The quest toward reunification, whether it is understood or accepted, is our life’s work and it is always a matter of simple choice.

Taking responsibility to consciously accept your connectedness to the whole - and living your life out of that awareness - yields the understanding that you are not actually responsible for anything else.   Neither are you in control of anything else - this is both terrifying and ultimately reassuring.  We each have striven mightily for autonomy and now to surrender that seems like a loss.  Any such contest is an illusion; the greatest reward is achieved when we use our free will to wholly rejoin (the holy,) which we renounced as we set out on our mortal journey.

It's important to keep and enjoy emotional attachments to others to the last, and also to recognize them as such.  They are rewarding means for growth, yet their bonds are not greater than your ability to joyfully loosen them with gratitude when the time comes.  This understanding enables both of the emotionally-attached souls to develop mutually in health.

A final thought:  Yes, we are human beings.  That is, we are timeless, formless beings having a human experience - down on the corner of time and space.