To see into the life of things...

Reflection given at Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace - March 13th, 2020.

I wonder how I will reflect when I die.

What shall I see? I’d like to think that what comes over me will be similar to two sentiments expressed by the Impressionist artist, Claude Monet, who said:

“To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.”

And, “People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”

In other words, what I would like to think, or at least, perceive, is that I shall see and understand that everything, really, was an apparition; an hallucination of some collective imagining that we all believed to be real.

It is a similar sentiment, or thought, reflected in a poem I wrote many years ago that begins with the lines:

“How is it so, to come to this, that through life’s days which end in bliss
“I should have felt such darkened scare at all that I’d encountered there.”

Does life really end in bliss? That state of all-knowing when it is no longer necessary to understand but simply to love. When to see, we merely see, not knowing nor needing to know the name of what we see because, that too, is, in the greater reality, no less an apparition of what we truly see and what is within everything.

The English poet, William Wordsworth, described it as the ability “to see into the life of things…”

All of which reminds me of another even earlier poem I wrote as a young man after sitting alone in a small apartment near Battersea Park in London where, late one night, I fell into a daze during which I saw myself as that old man, teetering upon death, and in that moment I knew that I could wish for anything and so I wished to be young again.

And then I awoke, and saw that I was that same old man, now young again.

The poem I wrote subsequently I called “Time and Direction”, and I recall if for you now:

“‘Where am I going?’ I asked myself one day.
“I smiled at this, then smiling still
“Said ‘to the grave’.
“‘But what will I pass?’ I asked again that day.
“‘Oh, this and that’, I thought, for I was thinking now
“’But nothing much’, I mused.

“Then stirring on this point I sensed that I would greatly miss
“So much of life, unless I thought about it now.
“And there I sat
“A long, long time ago.”

In a way, this Reflection was triggered, rather than inspired, by a recent post I saw on Facebook.

“We were all humans”, it said, “until race disconnected us, religion separated us, politics divided us, and wealth classified us.”

What does it take for us to see without definitions? To see, as I understand it, as Christ and the Buddha saw. We understand these Enlightened Beings – and others from our religious traditions – to have transcended death. Perhaps that is the key – the purpose: not seeking to understand, nor to give a name to what we see, but rather:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
“And Heaven in a Wild Flower
“Hold Infinity in the palm of our hand
“And Eternity in an hour”

William Blake finished his poem, “Auguries of Innocence” with these closing lines:

“We are led to Believe a Lie
“When we see not Thru the Eye
“Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
“When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
“God Appears & God is Light
“To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
“But does a Human Form Display
“To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.”

In its highest sense, I believe that life is to be utterly sacrificed, and anything less than that means to come back; to be reborn, to look again until we become transformed by this underlying unity that lies behind all things; and to simply love without a need to understand because the Truth is already known.