We are so IN it, enmeshed and immersed, that we rarely have the expanse of time and decluttered space to contemplate that which most people think is just a given: the Wheel of Time.
This last week I had the luxury of some open ended, warm lazy beach days and the TIME to simply take a step back. Rushing out the door to the airport, I'd forgotten to pack anything much to read, so just grabbed the first thing on the large "unread" stack: Carlos Castaneda's The Wheel of Time. It was not a book I had purchased for myself, but rather a left-over from the life of our friend, Geraldine, when she went into nursing care and her advancing dementia meant she was unable to read anymore. I was intrigued enough not to have sent it to the charity shop with the others, but it hadn't so much as whispered to me since. Just gathered dust.
Ironically, time had gotten in the way of making the time to contemplate time.
About 9 pages in I was already irritated. Because I had wanted something meaty, all-consuming, mentally stimulating, indeed distracting, for my beach days. And this is almost the opposite: simply a collections of quotes and short teachings about time from Castaneda's other works. And so every few moments I found myself putting it down and gazing absentmindedly into the distance.
I did a lot of just sitting, allowing the sparse text to reverberate against the physical open space around me.
"Dwelling upon the self too much produces a terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around him."
As I sat there gazing towards the horizon and feeling my own deep soul fatigue, I read those words. And I came to acknowledge as the moments and hours passed without distraction how much my preoccupation with myself and my self-created drama, symptoms and story produce a profound existential fatigue.
The Wheel of Time ponders the elements of Castaneda's teachings about the fundamentals of shamanism: space and time. Through simple fragments of text, designed to be digested slowly, he unpicks the idea that cognition - our way of defining the world around us - is fixed. Indeed, the shaman begins to bend space and time by first coming to that place of true cognition about their subjective nature.
Somehow I came to grasp these past days that there is so much merit in simply sitting in a physically expansive place without daily pressures, be in on a beach, a mountain top or looking across a vast plain. To sit and simply BE it such open expansiveness had never occurred to me to be transformational unto itself. Not meditating, per se, not thinking. Not feeling much beyond tired. Just BE-ing as an observer on the fringe of physical expansiveness.
Sure, I have mentally thought about Time and Space. Stood at gravesides and beside deathbeds and observed it ending for someone. Pondered my own maybe small measure of Time. But I had not ever really come to this place of feeling that the relativity of space and time rely SOLELY on my cognition.
And so the Gift I received is a new appreciation for simple Expansiveness - physical expansiveness - as a doorway to contemplation. A wide open beach, a vista from a mountain, an open plain.
The expansiveness invites a level of mirrored contemplation which leads to, and becomes, a simple shamanic doorway - a place to begin one's interactive journey with the relativity of Time and Space.
The challenge? To Consciously Create and Allow Ourselves Regular, Unencumbered Undistracted Connection with the Expansiveness of the Natural World.
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