Unborn and Undying

Sitting for meditation I straighten the back and follow the breath, the basic rhythm of life. Watching thoughts come and go, rise and fall, I then slip between them and find myself in a space outside of time. Shamans may shapeshift, becoming a bird, or a jaguar traveling through the jungle. Mystics can slip between the worlds, into different dimensions of time or timelessness.

One summer afternoon when I was twenty-three, I was awakened on the plane of the Self, or Atman, that is found within the heart. This timeless dimension of bliss and peace is our true nature, deathless, “maker of past and future.”¹ For six months I rested in this state, knowing neither time nor space. I would sit all day in the same place, or pray through the night, because time did not exist. Gradually I returned to the world of the ego and mind, its thoughts and patterns. I finished my college degree and became an English high school teacher, teaching Shakespeare and poetry to teenagers. I fell in love, married, and had a family. But this inner state remained as if hidden behind a secret door, and in the evening, when the children were asleep, I would lie on my bed and turn towards the wall and return to its endless emptiness, to its silence and love. Here there were no problems of the day, no thoughts, no time.

I experienced something similar, though in waking consciousness, a few years earlier at the age of seventeen, when, through a strange set of circumstances, I was sent for work experience to a coconut plantation on a remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. This tropical island was so beautiful and remote, and so unlike anything I had experienced until then, that all the images that normally covered my mind, or gave me any sense of self, had no grip and slowly faded away, until I found myself, moment by moment, present in its elemental world: butterflies a myriad of colors, wild parrots screaming in the palm trees, storm clouds a dark wall over the water. Here there was no time, no thought, just pure awareness—changeless and changing every instant.

Like the in-breath and the out-breath, meditation and nature took me out of an everyday world of time, of clocks and calendars, into a primal world. Inwardly into silence and emptiness, outwardly into pure awareness of the sights and sounds around me. Formlessness and form mirror each other, and while the inner states of meditation and the outer world are both constantly changing, each moment different, each carries an imprint of what is eternal. In both, time is absent. This is the deeper reality to which we all belong, our natural state, and yet it is lost, forgotten, covered over. Our chattering mind, its thoughts, and the ten thousand things divert our attention, catching us in a myriad of impressions, addicting us with endless desires. But underneath is this land on which we all walk, and which, however we may experience it, is fundamentally the same:

And this landscape, both inner and outer, has one essential quality, which is love. The mystic knows the truth of this love through direct experience, the love that is at the root of all, from which creation comes into being. The love that is in the dark silence of the unborn and in all the myriad of life’s forms, sensed in the fragility of a spider’s web sparkling in the early morning dew, or a hummingbird drinking nectar from a flower in my garden. Quite simply, love is experienced in all things. It is the very fabric of existence, which calls to us every moment of every day. Both emptiness and form are saturated with love. And our love for each other and for the Earth is the most natural expression of this one quality.

And love does not belong to time. Love is always forever, because it belongs to what is eternal. As Rumi simply says, “Step out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.” You cannot love or experience love tomorrow or yesterday, but only in the moment, and in that moment you are fully alive, awake, sensing the mystery of things. Through love the Divine, the Self, the Atman, communes most directly with each of us, is awake within our heart.

Emptiness and form, and the love that binds together existence and nonexistence, are the foundation, the bedrock, of our life, even if we never know it. I grew up in a family in which love was unknown, never spoken. I never heard anyone say, “I love you.” Only material things mattered, and the whisky bottle which was my mother’s sanctuary and escape. But I now know that love was still present, even if hidden, invisible, undiscovered. It is one of life’s greatest secrets: how love is at the source of all that exists; is the source of all that exists.

This mystical consciousness lies at the still center of the turning wheel, life’s axis. In Sufism it is called the qutb, the pole, imaging the central pole of the tent that supports our shared existence, and also the pole around which the world revolves. It is the axis of love that is present in all things, from the microbe to the stars, connecting together all the levels of creation, the seen and unseen worlds. It is outside of time and yet interacts with all that is made manifest, experienced in each and every breath, in every heartbeat.

AND YET TODAY we live in a civilization seemingly without foundations, spinning out of balance, faster and faster, in an accelerating self-destructive death spiral. We may be witnessing a climate crisis and loss of biodiversity, a sixth mass extinction accompanied by fires, floods, and famine. But these are the symptoms of a civilization that has lost its way, that has put short-term profit before a living future, a future seven generations or more. My grandchildren’s grandchildren will pay the price for our greed and addictions. And one day, far into the future, we will look back on this time with amazement. That we walked so blindly into the coming days, that we waited so long.

Time haunts us with missed opportunities and the dynamics of denial, with the pain of our patterns of ecological destruction, with the love and care for the Earth we are not living. It is easy to blame governments and corporations, greenwashing their carbon emissions, but most of us in the Global North are complicit—with an energy-intensive way of life we can no longer afford and a history of colonization and exploitation. Collectively we are caught by time: time past with decades of avoidance of real ecological action, and time future in the approaching catastrophe some still imagine we can escape with new technologies, electric cars, or carbon capture. And just as significant as these cascading crises coming towards us are the voices of young people crying out for a future being stolen, for wild beauty they may never see, song birds they may never hear. Their dreams have been stolen so that a few people can make enormous amounts of money, and world leaders can continue with their fantasy of eternal economic growth.

We cannot deny this dynamic of time, of years lost in a senseless pursuit of material well-being that cares nothing for the well-being of the Earth and her myriad inhabitants, and of coming decades and even centuries that will exact a price for our abuse and neglect. In my own lifetime I have witnessed the way time has gripped us, “held us dying.” When I first sat with my teacher half a century ago and learned to turn inward towards the heart, there was no sense of any coming climate catastrophe, just an ancient calling to step into the eternal silence we all carry within us. In her small room the outside world fell away as I followed the traditional path of the mystic that seeks what is unchanging, the Truth that cannot be named.

Similarly, when I was seventeen and immersed in the primal beauty of a remote island, there was no feeling of responsibility for whether this wonder would remain. Life was fully present around me—the power of the wind and rain bending the palm trees, the beauty of a colorful snake crossing the path in front of me. And I was part of this landscape, aware but not separate. Now, half a century later, as I watch the fog coming in from the ocean, or hear the egrets squawking in the wetlands, there is another quality of consciousness present, a different awareness. The passing years and a global crisis have changed me, an innocence is lost. I wonder how long this landscape will last and at how much we have already destroyed, polluted, filled with plastic. My heart feels a sorrow I never knew when I walked the pathways of a tropical island.

I no longer believe that spiritual practice should turn away from the world, even if it gives one access to an inner reality of pure being and a love that is without limit. Similarly, any moment-by-moment awareness needs also to carry a quality of responsibility, a response to the present “do or die” decade. The moment, the “now,” may be all that is real, but this moment also includes the seeds of the future as well as the poison of the past. Awareness of the moment is not isolated, but part of a whole, part of its texture. Similarly, timelessness does not deny time, but can give it a foundation, return it to a ground that is real, rather than the spinning fantasies that increasingly surround us.

Inner practice can be combined with outer engagement, in whatever way we are drawn to participate in this work. And our most basic engagement is love, our love for the Earth. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes so eloquently:

Time and timelessness are not separate but part of a living structure that includes a mayfly that lives for a day and a thousand-year-old sequoia. Unfortunately we have lost an understanding of time, of its patterns and unfolding, the spiral of water flowing and the birth of galaxies. We regard time as a river always passing, never returning. But this is only one aspect of time. It may have given us an image of progress but not of the deeper patterns of life and its interconnections.

Time today is mostly schedules and hours and minutes, numbers changing, always passing, never returning. Even the circular analogue face of time, with the hour and minute hands turning, is foreign for many postmodern young people replaced by numbers on their smartphones. We have created a linear, rational image of time, with equal segments of hours, minutes, seconds, and then imprisoned ourselves in this image, creating stress and anxiety, as it demands more and more of our attention. So often we feel that we do not have enough time, as if it is a commodity rather than belonging to life.

And with the advent of computers, the internet, and social media, the demands of time have increased exponentially even as our attention span has shortened. When I first started teaching thirty years ago, students communicated with me by letter—a few days to arrive, a week before I wrote a reply, and then a few more days in the post. With email and then text there is an urgency to answer instantly, yet the processes of the psyche and soul follow rhythms vastly different to our conscious self, often evolving over years and decades, a much slower pace than our ever-faster moving surface world. If one is to travel in this inner landscape, one needs to be rooted in these deeper rhythms, more aligned to nature’s patterns. Yet we have become increasingly disassociated from what is natural in the inner and outer worlds.

Only a few centuries ago time for medieval farmers was dawn and dusk, or the tolling of monastery bells heard across the fields, calling the monks to prayer, from matins to vespers. Clock-regulated time arrived in towns in Europe in the fourteenth century, measuring the hours by the ringing of church bells, while the second hand was not common until the eighteenth century. But the town clocks told different times, and it was not until the nineteenth century with the arrival of trains and the need for schedules that time became uniform. In November 1840 the Great Western Railway of Britain adopted the fictitious measure known locally as Greenwich Mean Time. These hours and minutes have been imposed upon us, without any relationship to our natural rhythm or that of the world around us. And now with the clicking and scrolling of social media we have started actively following digital rhythms, even interfering with our basic body clock, the circadian rhythm of light and dark.

That something so basic as time could lose its relationship to the living world speaks to how our civilization has become out of balance, caught in a fictitious reality of our own creation, a reality that demands so much of our attention that there is little space for real awareness. Time, which used to belong to the rhythms of the natural world and also to the gods, to Kronos, Lord of Time, has lost its sacred meaning, and the passing of hours, the unfolding of days, has become but a repetition, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

If we are to travel together with the Earth into a living future, we need to regain a relationship to time based not just on numbers, but on the unfolding of patterns within life. We have to find again the threads that can connect the moments of our lives to the rhythms that surround us. Living in the midst of nature it is easier: Looking out of my window I can see the wetlands being filled by the flow of the tide from the bay. My day is marked by the rise and fall of the water, and the months pass with the arrival and departure of the birds on the shoreline, the seasons by the “V” of geese migrating high overhead. I have also reached an age in my life when time is less pressing, the demands of each day fewer. I am less caught in manufactured and imposed time, but can sit with slower rhythms—each summer I wait for the speckled fawns to arrive, eating the grass, protected by their watchful mothers.

Time is all around us, speaking in many different voices. There is the urgency of the climate crisis, in which we are told that every year, month, day, even hour, that we act will make a difference. But beneath this accelerating disaster which we have already inflicted on the Earth and its poorest people, there is a calling to return, to reconnect with the Earth as a living being. Although science can help us reduce carbon emissions, I firmly believe it cannot redeem us, “lead us to safety.” If we are to create the foundations for a way of life that recognizes the interconnected wholeness to which we all belong, we need to let time speak to us in rhythms aligned with the natural world. It can be seen in a sunrise, is visible in the moon becoming full each month. It is in the buds breaking open in springtime and the quails in the garden standing guard, looking after their chicks. It is in the tomatoes and squash ripening in autumn, and the promise of making chutney with the green tomatoes that don’t ripen.

Time is also present in the aches and pains of old age, and even in the final moments when we pass into that “good night.” Here time and timelessness once again meet. We return to what is unborn and undying, to the landscape that underlies our everyday life, as expressed in a Japanese death poem by Bairyu:

Collectively we are now all present in the time of the Great Dying. The protests of activists cannot change the fact that we have entered the sixth mass extinction. We have waited too long, and avoided the simple truth that our present way of life is unsustainable. How we respond to this dying will determine the next step in our shared evolution, and the basic choice is whether we work together with the Earth or follow our present path with its dreams of greening the economy or other stillbirths, a fantasy created by AI. One foundational step is to become free from our present imposed images of time, a mental creation of the last era, and return to a sense of time that is life-sustaining. That sings the song of creation, of spring returning after winter.

There are many ways to make this connection—just watching clouds move across the sky, feeling sunshine on your face, sensing the seasons change. I like to sit in meditation, straightening the back, watching the breath, the most primal rhythm of life that connects the soul and senses. Then the mind stills and I can slip out of this world of time into an all-embracing oneness in which love is fully present. Here in the unborn and undying there is still my soul’s sadness for a beauty being lost, for the sacred nature of creation being forgotten. But there’s a deeper knowing that comes into my consciousness when I return, that the seeds of a living future are scattered in the ground at our feet. Like all seeds they will come to the surface in their own season, according to rhythms of time beyond our present understanding. They will not be born from our present culture, our science and technology, its ones and zeros and its image of time passing. Germinating in the darkness of the coming years, they belong to a deeper pattern that connects back to the early days, to that magical moment we may still glimpse in the eyes of a young child, when the world is fully alive and we are present in its timeless wonder. This is the promise that speaks to me, that keeps my heart alive in these dying days.