Encounter with the Eternal

Encounter with the Eternal

From our friend Lindsay V.

“Time is the moving image of eternity.” ― Plato

I don’t find myself often thinking about Eternity. It feels like an abstraction beyond the scale of my existence, hard to wrap my head around. Eternity appears in many cosmologies and creation stories, but do I even know what it means? The dictionary says, Eternity is a state to which time has no application; time that is unlimited, endless and without bound. All these words point to concepts beyond the realm of the intellect and its understanding. Although we may not be able to understand eternity intellectually, we can (and may have) experienced it directly. It is through those experiences that we can come to view it as a spiritual tool.

If you have ever been lucky enough to stand under a brilliantly clear night sky, looking at the jewel-like stars or the Milky Way, and stay with the experience long enough, a sense of wonder and awe arises, time stops. An experience of the eternal, the infinite. People can speak of their experiences with nature, childbirth, and death similarly. And, sometimes these experiences seem to be just too much, we might see ourselves shut down and move on to something else. That is an example of buffering, to use a Fourth Way term, diluting the intensity of reality into something more palpable and familiar.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake

Gothic cathedrals, the Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids, and the giant statues of Buddha all have the same effect in that they make the viewer feel small in relation to the eternal, bestowing a sense of humility, reducing any sense of self-importance. All are essential prerequisites on the spiritual path. Experiences of Higher Centers, spontaneous reality, are intimate experiences of eternity that can be provoked by an encounter with a greater scale. Without time and thought, they can only be realized, although not explained or understood.

Every thought lasts a kalpa (an eternity). ― Bodhidharma

Living in digital age, as we do, our cosmology is shaped by the vast achievements of science and modern physics. Intellectually we are aware of different scales of size, energy, and time. We know of atomic weapons, the age of the universe, and many other scientific marvels, such as our cell phone. These small devices are literally made of stardust (any material other than hydrogen or helium was once in the burning core of now exploded star) and the very operation of a cell phone is a verification of the reality of the world of quantum physics, a strange world of the very small where the laws of ‘thingness’ do not apply. Scientific constructs add to our thought framework of what is real and possible. Encounters with the eternal often provoke a re-examination of these seeming limits.

On the death of an old friend, Einstein said, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Perhaps, when we pick up our cell phones today, we will do so a little less mechanically and with more of a sense of wonder, seeing our devices as a doorway into an experience of the eternal, part of the mystery that includes all things.

“Handle a single leaf in such a way that it manifests the body of Buddha. This in turn allows Buddha to manifest through the leaf.” ― Zen Master Dogen

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