and there, now and then! That is good! That is what you set out to learn! And now you also know, like those of us who continue our searching, that the more your soul transcends those separations, the more you come to understand the connectedness of everything, the more pronounced the distinctions between here and there and now and then might become to you. It is an odd consequence of the work you do.
A person comfortable in time feels no such thing; a person who lives an ordinary life and does not seek to refine his soul, has no need to question where, when or what he is. He does not contrast what he sees, hears, or feels, with what is. But you, you have no such luxury. Now you contrast not part with part, as such a comfortable person would, but rather Whole with parts. And that, my dear, can seem to be a painful, insurmountable divide. But it is just a new mountain, a new gorge. Bigger than any you have experienced so far.”
The master smiles at me. “You ‘go away’ to experience the unity of then and now and of there and here. You go from here, from the ‘parts,’ the fragments, the world of separation, to the ‘whole.’ You can fly adeptly back and forth now, like a bird to and from her nest.”
“And the consequence of that is that I now feel how wide the gorge is between my nest and the world?” I asked, “What should I do?”
All he said is, “You want to experience the Great Hall, you want to dance with the stars, you want to feel the breeze as the wizards’ cloaks flap in windless flight between the pole star and the vega star? It is one thing to go out of oneself to experience creation and the universe; it is quite another to find the universe, to find here and now and there and then inside of you. You want to come home to the home of the universe without feeling afraid, then you must become the temple, the home, yourself.”
“How?” I asked, quite sincerely. The master laughed and said, “You will have to create where! And of course, when!”
I do not ask him if I will find the one I left battling waves of pain on the dock-- the one I am always leaving, the one who makes me whole when I live in the world of fragments, the one I miss when I can feel the whole of the universe. But I know, in myself, that this is my question.
“How,” I ask, knowing better, “Do I do that?”
“You are already part-way there,” the master said. “When you are still, be like a mountain; when you move, be like water; when you sit, be like water, when you move, be like a mountain. When you do this, the mountains will multiply and the waters will flow eternally. As the mountains become so many and so still, they will create a river bed between them into which the waters will flow. Follow that river.”
And so I sat. I put the Great Coral Hall in my mind and I watched as Wang Li danced with my mother, and my children from another life played with who they were to become as adults: the princess with the seamstress and the swordsman with the butcher and the mute with the inventor.
The witch brewed tea for the
