The eternal Now and the “sky of mind” in Daydreaming on the Porch
- Jan. 1, 2025, 3:21 a.m.
- |
- Public
One day the sun shall shine…into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as a bankside in autumn.
Henry David Thoreau
There is something about the light in late autumn and early winter that you don’t normally notice, but which surrounds you on golden days like yesterday in Charleston. Everything seems bathed in pure light. The skies were so crystal clear blue that you could even imagine seeing beyond to the universe outside, or within yourself to the multiple universes that wait to be discovered. The universe of mind.
Sometimes, the outer and inner converge. Innocuously rocking on the porch recently on a late Fall afternoon just as the sun was entering its final phase of illumination, a very fleeting revelation of peace and well-being came over me. Just for a few seconds. I cannot really describe it. Try as I might. One could call it a faint apprehension of timelessness, of eternity. But then it was gone. It was gone in the flickering seconds when that golden light waned and disappeared, and the afternoon began to descend into evening. Slowly.
Years ago in the late 1980s, I bought a Ray Lynch album called “The Sky of Mind,” and looking back and thinking about that music, I can occasionally understand what he was referring to. The sky is a reflection of my mind and heart, if I want it to be. This morning the sun is barely wedging through the clouds. It started to appear as what I imagined was a faint light in back of the oak tree. When I went to the window, it was gone. Then, there are days when the sky is filled with clouds of unimaginably diverse and beautiful shapes, colors, and sizes, sailing away in great puffs of wind, or steady currents. Or sunsets when cirrus clouds offer bands of colors across the sky. It’s always different.
While the ocean’s horizon seems infinite, but is not, the sky has no upper limits. And that is why I am always looking at the sky when I am outdoors, and why I often turn my head to the window a few feet from where I sit now to gaze at the small patch of sky that I see from my indoor sanctuary.
The sky may be gray for hours or days on end, but my perception of it is never the same. From moment to moment or hour to hour. So when contemplating the sky, one is truly living in the present, the Now. In the sky of mind, there is no past and no futurre. Only the present.
Recently, Eckhart Tolle said this to an interviewer:
Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment…If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now… The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and the Now are one.
Autumn Light
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Ray Lynch - “The Sky of Mind”
gypsy spirit ⋅ January 01, 2025
fascinating entry and it stirs up several notions in me.
The Thoreau quote is beautiful but I see it as more as a spiritual metaphor than any physical example of an awakening. It is that as well of course, but also something much deeper.
A favourite quote of mine by the brilliant wordsmith Leonard Cohen is 'There is a crack in everything, thats how the Light gets in." I guess its saying much the same as Thoreau...a spiritual message of hope.
And as also a lover of light, and the eternal sky I see so much metaphorical imagery in those as well......the example you give of the ocean not being infinite and yet how even the horizon is an illusion, it supplies just enough of a boundary that the human mind's eye can comprehend, yet we all know the ocean stretches so much further than the horizon.
Gee, I love this stuff!
We know the sky is not really blue, yet that is how we view it....it is only in the night sky that darkness shows us the reality of the universe beyond our Earth. I never close my curtains at night because I love to be able to look out at the night sky, and even when there is cloud coverage I know the clouds simply veil it off but so much is there in the distant beyond.
For myself these thoughts and feelings of absolute oneness with the universe from our very tiny being to the unimagined vastness is yet a further reminder to keep us humble, to connect is to the Creator, and just how incredible the incomprehensible universe is. In the next world after we pass from this life, we will each understand so much more about the Great Creator and the awesomeness of His creation. (It is not unlike knowing a little of the artist through his artworks).
Sorry, I am rambling again.....you really do inspire deep and meaningful thoughts in me with your writings often. thankyou.
Oswego gypsy spirit ⋅ January 03, 2025
My friend, I loved this. You have tapped directly into the greatest mysteries of creation and the universe. What a pleasure to learn from someone as gentle and wise as you are.
I have been drawn back once again to the mysterious ocean just a few miles from where I live. It is an awesome thought to know that any time I want, I can access the beach and walk along it, listening to the waves and looking out to the horizon line, trying to imagine how vast the ocean is, and how wondrous this planet is that we inhabit in the infinite reaches of space and time. What a privilege to be able to apprehend at least some of this mystery. That is what I try to do in my wring, as it has been my point of access to the infinite, however humble and feeble my words might be.