That is the nice paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars, is made significant completely contained in the self, however the self is a mirage of the thoughts, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable. Just a few instances a lifetime, in case you are fortunate, one thing — an encounter with nature, a murals, a nice love — sparks what Iris Murdoch so splendidly termed “an event for unselfing,” dismantling the cathedral of phantasm and rendering you one with every part that ever was and ever might be. As a result of time is the substance of being, previous and future meld into one, then vanish altogether. For a second you develop into one with absolutely the — not a self islanded in time, however an oceanic particle of eternity.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow termed such moments of timelessness and selflessness peak experiences — “probably the most blissful and ideal moments of life” — and positioned them atop his seminal hierarchy of wants, within the realm of transcendence. He believed that each faith arose from them — from “the non-public, lonely, private illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely delicate prophet or seer.” After interviewing hundreds of individuals about their peak experiences, Maslow uncovered the core frequent denominator — a profound sense that the universe is a harmonious totality to which one belongs and of which one is an indelible half, as important to the built-in entire as another, present outdoors time.
I do know of no extra stunning or deeply felt account of such contact with eternity than the one Richard Jefferies (November 6, 1848–August 14, 1887), patron saint of recent conservation, relays in his altogether breathtaking religious autobiography The Story of My Coronary heart (public library).
Within the last years of his quick life, Jefferies touched transcendence whereas climbing a hill he climbed recurrently. (That is a part of the thriller we’re — why peak experiences unfold once they do, usually within the midst of one thing acquainted, one thing encountered numerous instances earlier than with out this shimmer of the miraculous.) Crowning his magnificent account of the expertise is the revelation that presence — this prayerful consideration to the right here and now — is the supreme portal to eternity. A technology after Kierkegaard insisted that “the second just isn’t correctly an atom of time however an atom of eternity” and a century earlier than Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to look at that “all eternity is within the second,” Jefferies displays:
Realising that spirit, recognising my very own interior consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I can not perceive time. It’s eternity now. I’m within the midst of it. It’s about me within the sunshine; I’m in it, because the butterfly floats within the light-laden air. Nothing has to come back; it’s now. Now could be eternity; now could be the immortal life. Right here this second, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are completely nothing; it’s only a second since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it’ll nonetheless be solely a second. To the soul there isn’t any previous and no future; all is and might be ever, in now.
And but it’s only via the physique — this perishable reliquary of life — that the thoughts can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it’s only via absolute presence with the aliveness of the second that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity. Jefferies writes:
I dip my hand within the brook and really feel the stream; immediately the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the present, my hand stays there. I take my hand away, and the stream — the time — of the brook doesn’t exist to me. The good clock of the firmament, the solar and the celebrities, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand instances, is not any extra to me than the stream of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has by no means been, and by no means might be, dipped in time. Time has by no means existed, and by no means will; it’s a purely synthetic association. It’s eternity now, it all the time was eternity, and all the time might be.
Complement these fragments of the wholly soul-slaking Story of My Coronary heart with two centuries of ravishing reflections on time, from Borges to Nina Simone, then revisit Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence and his up to date Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self.
