Beyond Time

In the quiet dawn of realization, I at last knew my being entirely beyond time, beyond everything conceivable. The foretaste had sparked into direct knowing. A sweet silence and bliss began to blossom. It is like being in love and watching as all hesitation and doubt fade into nothingness. The mind, the body — all was awash in pure presence and stillness. In stillness was the awe and wonder of an absolute aloneness beyond every created thing, yet without any loss of ordinary perception. I felt, as D. H. Lawrence wrote in the poem New Heaven and Earth, that ‘I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in. I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is nobody to know.’ And I did cry with joy.

Nothing outward had changed. But the sense of being a known mental or physical object had collapsed, taking down with it the diaphanous boundaries of the dream-self. Suddenly life was immediate — unmediated — charged with presence. An unworldly stillness prevailed, along with the most delicate and immense sense of love I had ever known — a love without object. I was drenched in the original innocence of being, and I was the innocence.