How far is it “from here to eternity?” – Robert Earl Burton

The Burning Flame

We live each day of our lives embraced by a longing, a very deep longing. It is a formless void that we dare not stare at, but that is there. It burns within us as a constant reminder of a higher and more sublime reality.

I thought this world was enough until the stars arose. – Walt Whitman

Every morning I come awake trying to fit myself into my life. A world that I strive to be a part of surrounds me. It is full of people, circumstances, and experiences. Yet another very different world appears to call from within me. Something in me cannot surrender to the excessive flow of the external, of the temporal, of the obvious. Something in me wants to stay intact and survive my own extinction.

This deep nostalgia that inhabits us arises from a very intimate desire to leave the dream of this life. To touch the true, the eternal instant. But where is the threshold? At what point in the ceaseless stream of my existence will I leave the world of illusion to enter, definitively, even if only for an instant, into eternity?

Created Light: Traversing the Threshold

Touch the threshold, approach the temple. – Gilgamesh

There is an effort that must be made. This effort must be of a different quality than all those I have made previously. I can’t use my ordinary means. I must create something from nothing. All I have is my fervent desire to return home, to inhabit myself, and to be present, unveiled, to my own life.

Somehow we intuit this. We know that a tiny point of will in us can create light out of darkness. Just like at night, a voice whispers to us in the middle of the lethargic dream of life and reminds us that we are dreaming, that we can wake up, here and now. Now. Do it. Wake up!

Uncreated Light: The Sacred Assistance

I recognize a different emotion. In my internal landscape there is a new addition, a new energy. I feel invited to be very passive and at the same time very attentive. Something in me is open and receptive. However, this internal disposition is not accidental. It is produced by another part of me that is simultaneously very active and vigilant in regards to my own presence and what is happening at this moment.

This state, arising after my effort, has not been born from the effort itself. This energy was not in me before. It is something new and luminous. What divine grace has come to meet me and has completed, for me, the missing interval? What higher force has set its sights on this hidden area of ​​my soul that had a fervent desire?

I am present. A light that has not been created fills and envelops me. It envelops the world around me, the eternal instant in all its extension. I see clearly what is in front of me. I take it, I understand it, I integrate it. An intense emotion is exploding in slow motion within me and I have the perception that, by being with other people sharing this new state, there is an energy, a radiance like a thousand lamps, lighting together.

A New Understanding

All my internal energies become unified before the evidence of the higher, the unknowable. No opposing force has yet taken me or dragged me out of myself, out of this miraculous moment in my existence. I am able to understand what I have come to understand, without words, without my mind, but with that part of me that has been born from this moment of presence.

Here is the eternal instant. I know that in a few moments I will be immersed in the powerful and cunning currents of life. Almost without realizing it, I will be dreaming again some dream in which imagine I am awake or I will be plunged again into my deep longing. I know it will be so and yet, right now, all of me is here. Every part of me is here.

Everything will last for an instant, perhaps no more than a few seconds. Yet I will have known eternity. I have already seen what is real. If I am lucky and remember it, I will afterwards be able to invoke it with renewed effort.

There are uncreated lights and created lights. There the stars, the moon, and the sun are only once seen to rise and set, and a year seems only as a day. – Zend-avesta

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Elisa Eidner is a practicing transpersonal therapist and has been a student of the Fourth Way for many years. For other articles by Elisa, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/divine-imprint/ and https://fourthwaytoday.org/perfect-harmony-the-ideal-state/.