LIVING IN THE HALLWAY OF TIME
The bridge of sighs
In Venice, Italy, there’s a famous, elegantly arching, carved stone covered bridge connecting the 13th. century city hall (the Ducal Palace) with the ancient prisons. Thousands of the condemmed passed across this bridge for centuries, catching their last glimpses of sunshine and freedom before entering into those deep, dark and damp prison cells. It’s called “the Bridge of Sighs” and not without reason. And it’s symbolic today of how most of us live in our personal over-arching minds – suspended somewhere between a fragmented yesterday and a feared tomorrow. In our thoughts and feelings about yesterday, we comtemplate a vague tomorrow. And that habitual and conditioned mind-set is always in motion, in anticipation – always about something, angry about this, worried about that, and almost never engaged in this living present now.
An old mind is a decided mind
This apparent life-of-the-mind rarely touches reality because it has no real connection. It’s all ideas-about-ideas. It’s over-arching theme is always about the old “me” and a reality we think we know, and about its perpetuation. Its a constant manipulation of experience based on our conditioned projections about what happened (which is stored in memory) and what could or should, happen. Our composed and pre-disposed “experience” is rarely new and fresh; our minds’ view paints the same portrait of the life we think we’re living day after tedious day.
Live the four seasons everyday
In truth, all this living of a supposed life in the hallway is not only cramped and confined – it’s imagined! For life itself – no matter how or what we think of it – is actually only ever lived in the living present. And we move out of the hallway into the spaciousness of Now when we simply see our minds’ activity for what it is – imagination. We see in this moment (and only in this moment) that the mind is the writer of the fictional “me” and “you”. We perceive rather than conceive the world as it is. And we come into our inheritance -an infinite reality freed of our former personal and preferred “reality”. We abandon in an instant, all the notions of a seperate and isolated “me” and re-join ( re-ligion means a re-joining) the reality we in truth, never actually left.
In summary, here’s a poem from my notes when I lived in Venice in 1986-87
The bridge of our mind
spans this clear Space.
It arcs over the unknown,
pretending to know,
trafficking in meanings
of “you” and “me”.
Our vaunted mind
in its terminal musings
and endless begettings,
is the haunt of Hopes
endlessly suffered.
Even as this bridge connects
minds to minds,
it disconnects.
It overlooks, but cannot see
that Space it spans that is
mindless Reality.
