How can the present moment be infinite and eternal while each moment also appears as a fleeting instance within the flow of time? Someone commented that yesterday’s post seemed inconsistent with the boundlessness of the present moment of Now, which Eckhart Tolle’s book leads us toward. That is a really interesting thought: how are moments both eternal, yet obviously fragments or instances lost in the flow of time?
Tolle has it that there is a stream of consciousness within which we participate as both one and many, and that this flows from a source (which I name God). His metaphor is of the sun and the sunlight flowing from it. Could it be that this necessary flow is what creates the direction of time and breaks the otherwise symmetrical perfection to allow physical experience?
One way into this question is through physics, not as an explanation of purpose, but as an analogy for how form may arise. One of the concepts within physics is symmetry and symmetry breaking as a creative act. In essence, physicists observe that almost everything is symmetrical, but there are rare transformational moments when this symmetry breaks and the physical world comes into existence.
An instance of this is the mirror of matter and antimatter. It is said that these spring into existence all the time in a kind of infinite fizz, but matter and antimatter immediately annihilate each other. Except sometimes, for some reason, they do not. In that case, matter exists on its own and a whole physical world is born. Perhaps, speculatively, some answer to this imbalance lies in the 97% of the cosmos physicists still do not fully understand: dark matter and dark energy.
I remind myself that, whilst fascinating, physics is all about how things work and does not speak at all to reason or purpose. Still, it may help illuminate why this existence might be like this. Perhaps the flow of consciousness from its creative source is what gives time its direction, breaking otherwise symmetrical perfection so that physical experience can unfold. This brings me back to T. S. Eliot’s insights in the Four Quartets.
He seems to hold together the paradox I am circling: that time is not merely something to escape, but the very medium through which timelessness is disclosed.
“Only through time, time is conquered” — T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.
“History is a pattern of timeless moments” — T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.
“At the moment which is not of action or inaction / You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being / The mind of a man may be intent / At the time of death’—that is the one action / (And the time of death is every moment) / Which shall fructify in the lives of others / And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.” — T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages.
The physicist David Bohm had deep insight into the connection between the how and why of the world. Like Eliot and so many others, he drew on Eastern thinking. He conceived of existence as flow, like a river, where what appears to us as stable is actually an eddy in that flowing oneness. Perhaps this is a different way of putting Tolle’s sense that we can dive into being through the gateway of Now, and that this is an infinitely connecting flow of consciousness from the creative source. In that case, as Eliot says in The Dry Salvages — in the voice of Krishna — we never simply say goodbye to what has been, or to each other, but embrace the movement itself.
“Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers” — T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages.
Not farewell, then, but a willingness to dive into the flow of being rather than simply doing: to fare forward.