Sacred West

I started reading The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light, a classic on mythology, which I had never read. I was struck first by William Irwin Thompson’s awesome power of writing, and then very soon into the Prologue by these 111 words:

The Fall is not only once and long ago; it is recapitulated in each instant of consciousness. The unfallen world beyond time remains as a background to the figured beats of the heart in our world of serial progression. Like the white page that surrounds the darkness of each letter you are reading here, eternity surrounds each heartbeat, and as the contemplative watches his breath, he can move out of time through the doorway which opens in the interval between each heartbeat. Each open space is a spiritualization, each beat a materialization; and both are sacred, for in one is the spiritualization of matter; in the other, the materialization of spirit.

Thompson has spent some time in practices of various sorts, and speaks from experience – or certainly with appreciation – of the gap between. I thought that as meditation practitioners you might enjoy the passage, so I typed it for you to savor.

I can imagine if I had read this years ago, how I would have resonated with the perfect mystical truth of the words, yet still not known how to experience it. Even more, I would not even have figured out that experiencing it is the only way to be satisfied with this kind of knowledge. I would have felt uplifted and defeated all at once, and not understood what was missing.

I would have felt helpless in the face of this supreme signature of reality, not knowing that it could be experienced by anyone, that all along this experience was waiting, simply in the practice of mindfulness meditation.

How good to hear the Dharma. How good to stop wasting time, and to take up the practice of reality.