Touching The Eternal Now . . .

While hiking the West Ridge Trail in the Prairie Redwoods section of Redwood National Park, we came upon a bench located deep in the forest. As you can see, it has a plaque on it that says, simply: "Forever."
Old growth forests really do provide us with a sense of timelessness, and they embody perfectly what is often called The Eternal Now. I'll never forget the moment when I first grasped the spiritual meaning of Plato's "Forms," "Ideals" or "Archetypes" - realities like "Humanity," "Love," "Goodness," or - in this case - "Treeness," that underlie all of the particulars of life. In that moment thirty years ago, it struck me that these Archetypes do not exist in time; or rather, all of time flows FROM them. The "Nowness" or "Form" or "Archetype" of a thing is something we touch in an instant, before our attention is immediately pushed away from It and into the particular things that arise from It. Augustine used the term "That Which Is" to speak of It. In this connection, I've always loved this passage from Thoreau:

"It is not when I am going to meet God, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean."

Here, "God" is another term for the "Nowness" or "Ideal' underlying a thing. How sad that our society has largely lost touch with Plato's insight! Indeed, modern folks often seem to believe that individual things are all that really exist. I trust that people will eventually tire of the shallowness of this approach and once again return to a love affair with the timeless Universals that underlie all of the various particulars of Life.

 Photos: Redwood National Park, CA, July 25, 2015