{"id":269600,"date":"2024-07-22T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=269600"},"modified":"2024-07-16T04:25:28","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T03:25:28","slug":"the-ecstasy-of-eternity-richard-jefferies-on-time-and-self-transcendence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/07\/the-ecstasy-of-eternity-richard-jefferies-on-time-and-self-transcendence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars, is made meaningful entirely inside the self, but the self is a mirage of the mind, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable. A few times a lifetime, if you are lucky, something \u2014 an encounter with nature, a work of art, a great love<\/a> \u2014 sparks what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed \u201can occasion for unselfing,\u201d<\/a> dismantling the cathedral of illusion and rendering you one with everything that ever was and ever will be. Because time is the substance of being<\/a>, past and future meld into one, then vanish altogether. For a moment you become one with the absolute \u2014 not a self islanded in time, but an oceanic particle of eternity.<\/p>\n

The psychologist Abraham Maslow termed such moments of timelessness and selflessness peak experiences<\/em> \u2014 \u201cthe most blissful and perfect moments of life\u201d \u2014 and placed them atop his seminal hierarchy of needs, in the realm of transcendence. He believed that every religion arose from them \u2014 from \u201cthe private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer.\u201d After interviewing thousands of people about their peak experiences, Maslow uncovered the core common denominator \u2014 a profound sense that the universe is a harmonious totality to which one belongs and of which one is an indelible part, as essential to the integrated whole as any other, existing outside time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Dorothy Lathrop<\/a>, 1922. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I know of no more beautiful or deeply felt account of such contact with eternity than the one Richard Jefferies<\/strong> (November 6, 1848\u2013August 14, 1887), patron saint of modern conservation, relays in his altogether breathtaking spiritual autobiography The Story of My Heart<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

In the final years of his short life, Jefferies touched transcendence while climbing a hill he climbed regularly. (This is part of the mystery we are \u2014 why peak experiences unfold when they do, often in the midst of something familiar, something encountered countless times before without this shimmer of the miraculous.) Crowning his magnificent account of the experience<\/a> is the revelation that presence \u2014 this prayerful attention to the here and now \u2014 is the supreme portal to eternity. A generation after Kierkegaard insisted that \u201cthe moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity\u201d<\/a> and a century before Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to observe that \u201call eternity is in the moment,\u201d<\/a> Jefferies reflects:<\/p>\n

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yet it is only through the body \u2014 this perishable reliquary of life \u2014 that the mind can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it is only through absolute presence with the aliveness of the moment that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity. Jefferies writes:<\/p>\n

I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow \u2014 the time \u2014 of the brook does not exist to me. The great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time. Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always will be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement these fragments of the wholly soul-slaking Story of My Heart<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with two centuries of ravishing reflections on time<\/a>, from Borges to Nina Simone, then revisit Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence<\/a> and his contemporary Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My name is <\/em>Maria Popova<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which <\/em>bore the unbearable name <\/em>Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (<\/em>More<\/em><\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":125273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1177,1170,805,321,2382,800],"class_list":["post-269600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-inspirational","tag-life","tag-spirituality","tag-time","tag-transcendence","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269602,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269600\/revisions\/269602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}