The eternal Now and the “sky of mind”

One day the sun shall shine…into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as a bankside in autumn.

Henry David Thoreau

There is something about the light in late autumn and early winter that you don’t normally notice, but which surrounds you on golden days like yesterday in Charleston. Everything seems bathed in pure light. The skies were so crystal clear blue that you could even imagine seeing beyond to the universe outside, or within yourself to the multiple universes that wait to be discovered. The universe of mind.

Sometimes, the outer and inner converge. Innocuously rocking on the porch recently on a late Fall afternoon just as the sun was entering its final phase of illumination, a very fleeting revelation of peace and well-being came over me. Just for a few seconds. I cannot really describe it. Try as I might. One could call it a faint apprehension of timelessness, of eternity. But then it was gone. It was gone in the flickering seconds when that golden light waned and disappeared, and the afternoon began to descend into evening. Slowly.

Years ago in the late 1980s, I bought a Ray Lynch album called “The Sky of Mind,” and looking back and thinking about that music, I can occasionally understand what he was referring to. The sky is a reflection of my mind and heart, if I want it to be. This morning the sun is barely wedging through the clouds. It started to appear as what I imagined was a faint light in back of the oak tree. When I went to the window, it was gone. Then, there are days when the sky is filled with clouds of unimaginably diverse and beautiful shapes, colors, and sizes, sailing away in great puffs of wind, or steady currents. Or sunsets when cirrus clouds offer bands of colors across the sky. It’s always different.

While the ocean’s horizon seems infinite, but is not, the sky has no upper limits. And that is why I am always looking at the sky when I am outdoors, and why I often turn my head to the window a few feet from where I sit now to gaze at the small patch of sky that I see from my indoor sanctuary.

The sky may be gray for hours or days on end, but my perception of it is never the same. From moment to moment or hour to hour. So when contemplating the sky, one is truly living in the present, the Now. In the sky of mind, there is no past and no futurre. Only the present.

Recently, Eckhart Tolle said this to an interviewer:

Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment…If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now… The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and the Now are one.

Autumn Light

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/0G8KTDZu3f

Ray Lynch – “The Sky of Mind”

https://youtu.be/MDoNB9D-o4g?si=wPBOkW0U2alCyruS