A lover, whom I have not physically seen since 2008, sends a letter from Bern. He introduces a story of his children discovering LPs: “Time, I think, travels in circles,” he writes.
And this is true. Time travels in circles, and, in my experience, those circles are VERTICAL. Time is a continuum that runs up and down. We see the same themes recurring in our personal lives, in our emotional lives, in our psychological lives. (How many times do we have to deal with our abandonment issues, for example? The thoughts that we are not good enough? Our anger? )
Time is like breath in this regard. It is a vertical circle filling our bodies from the muladhara (root) to the sahasrara (crown) and back, without interruption or pause. Breath is our connection to the environments in which we dwell, both internal and external.
We re-visit themes that are significant to us at various times in our life. It used to comfort me to imagine my life as a spiral, so that when I was experiencing some NOW that I’d been through before, I could imagine I was actually having that experience from another (in my fantasies, frequently more lofty, wise, and evolved!), spot on the circle of time. Another perspective.
This is what I now believe, that the vertical element is, in fact, a circle, and not a spiral, but that the circle begins to encompass more and more, becomes more and more broad as we have more and more experiences.
The HORIZONTAL circle is space. It is through space that we connect with others and with ourselves. It is in space that we are embodied. Space is limitless. We experience space when we meditate. Following a particularly purgative moment, for example, after we have been violently and completely ill. During and after orgasm. For those who participate fully and consensually in kinky exploration, it can occur after deep and complete surrender to sensation. And for those on the other side of the flogger, it can occur as we ‘ride our beast.’
The limitlessness of space is transcendence, the presence of something holy. It is in exchanging breath with another, in the glance. It is in Presence.
The meeting of these two circles, vertical and horizontal, time and space, consciousness and presence, corresponds to turiya, the fourth state described in the Mandukyopanishad as:
Nāntaḥ-prajñaṃ na bahi-prajñaṃ nobhayataḥ-prajñaṃ na prajñāna-ghanaṃ na prajñaṃ nāprajñam. Adriṣtam-avyavahāryam-agrāhyam-alakṣaṇam-acintyam- avyapadeśyam ekātma-pratyaya-sāraṃ prapañco-paśamaṃ śāntaṃ śivam advaitaṃ caturthaṃ manyante sa ātmā sa vijñeyaḥ.
Whose cognition is not inward, nor outward, nor both, not a cloud of cognizing, not cognitive, not non-cognitive. They consider the fourth to be unseen, not engage-able, not graspable, unmarked, imponderable, indefinable, the essence of the knowledge of one Self, the cessation of phenomena, quieted, the final beatitude (Shiva), without a second. That is the Self; that is to be realized.***
It is the silence following OM. It is bliss. It is peace. We can access this consciousness through our practice; yoga, mantra, breath, and/or meditation, and it occurs spontaneously. My first experience of turiya happened when I was 4. I had wandered upstairs during a church supper and was transfixed by the quiet in the chapel, the sense of the sacred inhabiting the altar, a dust mote drifting in a ray from the setting sun.
Most of my life has been spent chasing that experience, through sex, through drugs, and yes, through rock and roll. I have attempted to re-create it in love, in silence, in careless abandon, and in exquisite attention. And all of these venues, all of these opportunities for exploration, give glimpses of the transcendence that beckons to me.
It seems as though the harder I chase this mystical union of the vertical and horizontal, time and space, the Inner Marriage, the more elusive that state becomes.
And I have discovered that the secret is that there is no secret. The answer to all of our questions, is in the stillness. The non-doing. The sound of the sacred. The places where the circles intersect, space and time. Corpse pose. In breath and out breath, now and here.
Om.
***Translation by Stephen Powell, and used by permission.