We have the freedom to turn towards the world, enjoying our time there, suffering through it too, becoming a partner in its struggles, or being a standoffish observer. When we do this, though — implicating ourselves with the world and what arises here — we may limit ourselves to only learning mundane things, even though we may be brilliantly insightful about those things.
Our other choice is to turn towards our intrinsic naturing — our genesis — and benefit in that way by implicating ourselves with the presence of the divine origin of everything, spending our time profitably within the true Presence of Reality.
Insights into the nature of the world might be brilliant and practical in a temporary, and therefore ultimately unsatisfying, way; but ‘in-being’ with the Real, resting imminently as our true naturing, watching the unfolding, is to be liberated from all such disturbances. All mundane concerns of the good and bad of it fall away, and we find peace and tranquillity in accepting what is, while expressing our meaning through our intention and desire, and by what we pay attention to. In this way, we find comfort in the journey of this human life as its ontogenetic potential — and the meaning we give it — in-forms.
To be human in this clear way… Isn’t that a prize?
All natured beings are the activity of this creative principle that I call Responsive Naturing. A being is a sæculum, which is an ontogenetic form of duration. Thus, we can think of it as a form of time, so long as we don’t confuse it with clock-time, a river, or that in which stuff happens. In truth, it is the cognitive recognition of the coherent continuity of the in-forming being performed in the pristine Now.
A sæculum cannot be cut into two or more parts — it is a complete whole. It arises in the clear expanse of eternity as “time in motion” (or just “time”). Thus, these forms do not exist in time so long as we don’t confuse it with clock-time, a river, or that in which stuff happens. Eternity being that which could be called “all forms of time” — a plenum of responsive naturing — because there is no other setting for timeforms to be.
It is timeless because Eternity is not “made up of” time — it is “otherwise than time” — and it does not “unfold”; it does not “exist”; it does not have a nature because it is Naturing; it is Reality. This reality is the clear expanse that gives rise spontaneously to all formal appearances.
Everything that humans say implicates time. The philosophical difference between a “form” and a “shape” is that a form unfolds “over time” — it has a morphogenesis — and shapes don’t truly exist in the world — they are abstractions taken from the world of experience as perfect idealizations of what is recognized within our experience.
Of course, we are seeing Reality from our complicated wrong end of the telescope here. We are seeing it backwards, in other words. A form does not unfold “over time”. What appears unfolds formally, or in-forms!
Think of it as a kind of dance that Eternity does. And what is there to unfold, but manifested time arising spontaneously in the clear expanse of Eternity — the expanse that manifests wisdom by spontaneously manifesting a particular form of time — human time, tree time, hummingbird time, particle time, etc. And this wisdom encompasses more than just simple forms; it is the ability to spontaneously manifest Deeply-Nested Recursive Organic Structuring — weaving the universe we find ourselves in. This wisdom seems to evolve, becoming more complex, even as Eternity rests unchanging.
Eternity is Naturing; it is not a higher self.
A closer take on it is: “Reality” is the great expanse of Eternity whose potential is unlimited, indefinite, and “wakeful spontaneous creativity,” and what it “creates” or “manifests” is all existing things — Now.
It’s all just sciomorphogenesis (“knowing through the genesis of form”), which is a neologism I invented to encompass and express the understanding that what we experience is the active knowing, through the unfolding of form, of Eternity.
