On the strangeness of time in the eternal




If your last cherished letters were clear signs of your gradually growing, but unmistakably greater openness to spiritual perceptions – even where you had to struggle with your earthly self or thought you could not yet safely trust yourself, – then your latest report brought me a certainty which I had hardly yet dared to expect. But there are no longer any doubts that your spiritual eye has become seeing, and that you are experiencing the first lucid awareness of your eternal life. It is not at all surprising that you, despite all your happiness of your soul, are conscious of your inability to give expression in language to what you have experienced, so that everything you have to tell me appears to you to be ‘completely inadequate stammering’. This has happened to everyone who has had the same inner experience, and usually this inability to put the eternal into words remains.

  We can only make ourselves understood in the field of earthly things by comparing what we want to describe in recognisable language with things which have already been described. This possibility of comparison on the same level is missing when we seek to describe eternal things, and yet our experience urges us to find the words, even if we want to describe in words what has been experienced only for ourselves and only in our memory. From this need we reach for something earthly which, despite its inadequacy, must serve us as well as it does. And it is only possible if this inadequacy is consciously and intentionally ignored: – if one deliberately overlooks the incommensurability of the possibilities to experience drawn on for comparison.

  All experience of the eternal is a continuous sounding of the depths of the eternal moment that is not a sequence, not a before and after, but an, spiritual-‘spatially’ given , in-one-another, completely indescribable in earthly terms, which does not become ‘eternal’ following an immeasurable sequence of existence, but ‘remains’ endlessness in itself, without beginning – without ending. One can never describe to a person incapable of experiencing every second within himself the eternal moment: – the complete, endless eternity which is similar to the circle in its self-containment, for every description takes place in earthly time and is comprehended as temporal. Thus, for those who have never been in eternity, ‘eternity’ has become the idea of an endlessly long time. Eventually anyone who is allowed to really speak of things that go beyond time is  faced with the predicament of referring to this

concept of time with the same word, indeed, to, as it were, ‘divide up’ the eternal for this concept, so that the one self-evidently indivisible eternity in reality can become ‘eternities’, – aeons, – as the symbols of an immeasurably long space of time. And it will be indescribably difficult for all who have not yet experienced the eternal within themselves to give up the false idea that eternity is a continuous presence of all time, and its embodiment  is simply made up of ‘the fullness of all times’.

  You can see yourself how the eternal evades all available comparisons in time because it is essentially different and only accessible to an eternal form of perception to which my books have led you unnoticed. Yet how many ‘sketches’ from all sides have been necessary in order to awaken the feeling 

for spiritual space within you! – Far from all comparisons of value, my treatises on spiritual matters remind me always of certain drawings by Rembrandt where the intended subject is gradually brought to the fore by countless lines which try to follow the image more and more distinctly. It is not only impossible for me to bring the things of eternity into other people’s sphere of intuition in any other way, but for everyone who know eternal reality! For those who know it, however, the slightest suggestions are sufficient for them to be able to understand among themselves and to know what is meant. But you have drawn much more than simply ‘suggestions’, and I must warn you against wanting to become far too clear as that I might miss something in your description…

Remain in the light and be blessed at all times!

 


Bô Yin Râ