Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog

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.   There isn’t anything really new about New Year’s Day… but, nevertheless — though this may sound odd in these non-spiritual times — the sacred (i.e., the timeless) is new (and truly is something beyond the framework of time).  The following is an excerpt from my book, The Eternal Fountain of Youth.  It (i.e., the book) shows how Archibald MacLeish is among the best — and most famous — poets of the world who intelligently and eloquently/poetically write about limitation and relationship, such as the eternal return (and the possibility of going beyond it).  I feel that these famous poets have touched upon something that goes beyond the limited writings and proposals of many… (even, in my calculation, beyond the proposals of the best of philosophers).  Nietzsche, for example, did not go far enough; what he delved into was far too limited.  My book is a reflection, i feel, of what many of  these famous poets expressed; it is also an attempt to help others transcend limitation and separative ignorance intelligently and holistically.  Please, regarding this, intelligently realize that having attained the status of a major (famous) poet is not easy whatsoever and — in the overall scheme of things — is only remotely likely at best.  Additionally:  If you don’t care about this or about my book… or grow from what i have written here… that is just fine; but i’ll tell you one (perhaps expanding, perhaps universal) thing for sure:  I know of more than one ten foot poet among inchlings.  

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Excerpt:

   Obviously, it is not what we are “accustomed to” or “used to.” However, sometimes change happens that way, and for the better, in the long run.  Before the time of Columbus, they used to think that the world was flat, that there was an end to it; they thought that you could fall off the flattened part and then perish.  Many of us think that when you are dead, you are dead; they think that you come to the end, and that is it… finished.  However, if our universe is truly in a cyclic-oriented dimension, then what occurs happens over and over again, endlessly.  There is a possibility, when you die (if the omnipotent “otherness” does not temporarily intervene), that your consciousness will not exist until the “next round” of the cycle.  Since “consciousness” (that depends on brain cells) does not exist after you die, then psychological “time” does not exist after you die.  One must be “conscious” to realize “time.”  Without consciousness, there is no “time.”  The time, from when you die, within universal cycles, to when you are again “reborn” as the same person that you (in the exact-same repeated cycles) were, does not exist psychologically; therefore, it does not exist as “consciousness.”  Therefore, as soon as you die, no time elapses until you are again born to the same mother, and are again conscious of “time.”  So, in a real sense, as soon as you die, you are again (for all practical purposes) immediately born to the same family as you were born to before. Time is not recorded, from when you die to when you are again reborn.  This is not reincarnation.  You do not come back into another body; in one echoing, mirroring sense, you remain exactly the same. In a sense, you never really die.  (Of course, you are incapable of remembering what happened before, in the previous cycles.) Like our earth, our universe is globular, circuitous, and cyclic. People, at one time long ago, thought that the world was flat.  People think, at the time of this writing, that time is linear and non-globular, without the same things recurring repeatedly.  They may be crudely erroneous.

from Archibald MacLeish:

Lines for a Prologue

These alternate nights and days, these seasons 
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems 
I have the sense of infinity! 

(In your dreams, O crew of Columbus, 
O listeners over the sea 
For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—) 

Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden. 
I thought, What time is it? I thought, 
Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time? 

(Tell me your dreams, O sailors: 
Tell me, in sleep did you climb 
The tall masts, and before you—) 

At night the stillness of old trees 
Is a leaning over and the inertness 
Of hills is a kind of waiting. 

(In sleep, in a dream, did you see 
The world’s end? Did the water 
Break—and no shore—Did you see?) 

Strange faces come through the streets to me 
Like messengers: and I have been warned 
By the moving slowly of hands at a window. 

Oh, I have the sense of infinity— 
But the world, sailors, is round. 
They say there is no end to it. 

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Just one of the “Bantams in the Pine-woods”… (not beyond Nietzsche and the eternal return)… by Thomas Peace 2013