Part 16: LIVING HERE – The Eyes Of Time
Woman waiting for the future, by Jonathan Beth
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
If death is the end of the illusion of being a person, birth is the beginning of that illusion. At birth –and for the first three years or so, we gaze through the innocent eyes of Infinity at what Is. What is simply presents itself-to-itself as the pure expression of the un-manifest. What is, is obvious without cognition, without any collected sense of self and the subsequent overlays or “stories” that the body/mind assumes. What is, is timeless, unaltered, pure Nowness.
The gradual assumption of an entity called “me” leads to the viewing of a world with the Eyes of Time.
Our “original” seeing through the non-personal eyes of Infinity remains, of course, because that is what we are – unborn and undying spirit, or awareness, or God, or Buddha, or Tao – but something wonderfully and mysteriously human, begins. And we are launched into Time.
From Oneness now comes separation and the amazing flowering of our differentiated, individual and therefore personal, perspectives. We no longer see purely through the eyes of Oneness, but now an entity called “Jack” or “Jill” takes shape even as it shapes its environment. Our new sense of what is, takes on form; we define a new reality based exclusively on what our body, and later, our mind, tells us. From an unlimited absolute truth–in-infinity, we experience the dawning of a new relative truth–in–time; an invented “I” now touches things, feels emotions, sees objects, smells odors, hears sounds, and thinks thoughts.
The eyes of time focus solely on that which is now conceived as “true”. Sensory data is stored, memory is formed and that which, before Time , was known yet unlabeled truth and reality (the two are One, of course) is seemingly forgotten. But never, ever, lost.
Fortunately, we cannot cease to be what we are; the illusion in time finally submits – as it must, to its own inevitable, timeless Being. And we see it was and is all a dance, and that we are neither the dancer nor the dance, but the dancing.
Life itself shows us what we need to see through in order to be free. The ball of Beliefs forming opinions about our personal reality, and the world at large, falls away in the gentle or otherwise brutal rubbing that the abrasive nature of real life persists in delivering. “We reach Nirvana through Samsara” as the Zen tradition tells us. And we come to know, to view from the Infinite Self, all that which we formerly thought of as “self” and “other”.
We see the beauty of it all from this infinite place, and a love arises that can not be described, but one which we could call compassion, a “suffering with” all the pain of a humanity whose limited “eyes of time” have temporarily blinded it to the unlimited nature of reality. A humanity where body, mind and spirit is fully incorporated as One.
Real life is lived in both of these human and divine realms, as a movement and a rest; we are moved through this glorious life we’re living even as we rest in the unmoved stillness of being…indeed, in that stillness, we know that place we never left as if it were “for the first time”.
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