Yet, the fairly common experience of falling in love shares all the hallmarks of an enlightenment. It is an overwhelming, radical shift in perspective, which seems to come from the outside — unprovoked, undeserved, a grace, a gift. It happens rapidly, changing everything in its wake, challenging one’s deepest assumptions about the world and one’s place in it, most particularly the assumption that one is essentially alone, disconnected from others in a fundamental way, separated from God.

Every aspect of living is touched by it. The lover’s mental and physical processes are changed, and the shift is quite visible to everyone who interacts with the affected person.

When asked to describe what has happened — how, overnight, the lover seems to have departed her usual, mundane existence for one in which laughter and coincidences rain down upon her with such force that it is hard to see anything at all that does not appear to be drenched in beauty, and yet, at the same time, she has not truly left her old world at all, but is actually more fully immersed in it — all but the most sensitive among us are left at a loss, clinging at lyrics from love songs and sappy poetry and cliched adages that can only capture some tiny fraction of the sensation.

Just like the mystic, the lover will be asked such questions as: How did you know it was really God/love? How did you know this was the Real Thing, and not just a delusion? What makes this experience different from all the other, looney, short-lived obsessions you’ve had? Can you please tell me how you provoked this, what caused this thing to happen to you? What can I do to make it happen to me? How can I be happy? How will I spot it when it comes, will I hear it, the small voice whispering to me in the night, saying I’m the one you’ve been looking for?

And oh, oh, how the lover would like to say — is dying to say.

But she finds that she cannot.

This wisdom is not to be known intellectually. It is beyond rationality, beyond logic, beyond proof. It is to be seen, felt, experienced. It cannot be owned. It cannot be attained by grasping. It cannot be found by looking.

You do not need to worry, says the grandmother deep inside your chest: when it happens to you, and it will happen to you, you will know. You cannot fail to notice.

You will find yourself, my child, someday, looking into the eyes of someone who had only weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, been a stranger, and seeing in those eyes your own future, as clear and recognizable as your reflection in a mirror.

You will ask this person, do you remember what it was like, weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, before we had ever met? And this person, this other person, will reply, No, I don’t.

You will not remember either.

* * *

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, reader, without whom I could not exist. My life depends critically on yours, and so I offer you this advice:

The next time you find yourself standing at the edge of an abyss — unable to see the bottom and yet sure you will lose everything you hold dearest in the fall, certain that you ought to be terrified and yet still, somehow, inexplicably, drawn forward — do not hesitate. Jump.

Affliction can be a blessing. The older I get, the more I see that, more often than not, it is.

* * *

I dreamt my teacher and I were out of the beach, running around in the sand, trying to collect data about the waves. The waves always receded before we got all the information we needed. The task was clearly impossible. We could never fully understand the ocean this way. There was so much time pressure, on every cycle of flow and ebb, and yet we weren’t panicked. What mattered was not that we solve the problem. What mattered was that we were out there, looking, making the necessary observations, together. And it made me so happy to know, that of all the people in the universe, we were the ones out there. I was shocked by this, actually, that we were out there alone, and amazed that he was willing to take on the whole ocean with only me.

I asked the daughter if she wanted to read the story or just look at the pictures, and she said, look at pictures, so we looked at them and said what they were, all the animals and the pink trees and purple trees and ladders and words, and she gives her love so freely, her mother says, but not to everyone. I went looking for Antarctica and found the beginning of time, the beginning of the new notime time, and somehow every movie I see and every concert I hear has a man dressed up in a tiger suit in it. I want that rapper’s tiger coat, I said, and my friend said he would back me up on that one. My fortune says I should reevaluate my plans for the future. My best friend says he cannot breathe. I buy plane tickets for an exorbitant price, I realize I cannot possibly use them, I don’t talk, I can’t say. I would kill you with my bare hands, I text, while sitting in a dining hall crying my eyes out and not eating the food I have gathered in a daze.

Time is the most precious thing you can have, her grandfather says. The rain. The new corset. In Quebec, tabernacle and chalice are swear words. The coincidences. The one I love so much I cannot speak to him anymore. And yet I brag about him, he made that, he did that, my best friend! I have already cried in front of so many people who don’t know me yet. There is a way in which imagining a certain future seems to prevent it from happening. There is a way in which imagining a certain future is the happening of it. To the one I may be beginning to love, I cannot shut up. You already killed me. I feel like my breath is gone I can’t breathe. I can’t believe.

The father has nightmares that someone is taking his daughter away, all night, every night. My cunt, there is no other word, is burning. But Antarctica. But the children. We are twirling around in circles with our scarves and our dresses fanning out. Ever since she was born I have never not been afraid. What is the point of doing it if you’re just going to half-ass it? This is it. This is your life. Next to having a baby, nothing matters. Why don’t we talk about the things that really matter? Death and love and intimate family relationships. Why am I so afraid that my emotion will cause you to have an emotion, that I will get inside, that I will impose?

Where did you go? Why aren’t you here? Why did you leave me? But I told you, I told you, this really wasn’t going to be okay. But I have to get more data, I have to write it up, I have to tell the story. I told only one friend about the time we both came just by holding hands. She said, that belongs in a book. Here it is. This is it. No more waiting until you can do it justice. You can’t, ever. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, that Eliot poem has been echoing in my head for weeks. How did you fail to notice that the world already ended? After the end of the world, there is another world.

The worst outcome is, you kill your opponent, better is he kills you, then, you kill each other, and best is everyone lives. But, then, I always preferred tragedy to comedy. In a tragedy, you kill each other. There is a way in which imagining a certain future causes it to happen.

“… it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost too old to have a baby… So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long it would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.”

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension… It’s not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have everything in it. Domingo’s blog was one of the best I had ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, and he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.”

“I suppose this was one of the reasons people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and then forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story.”

– Miranda July, It Chooses You

I just sat on my little futon in my little apartment and read this entire book, cover-to-cover. I can’t even remember the last time I did that. That last bit — and forgetting was just as important — made me cry.

I never thought something like this would happen to us, he said, his hand resting in her heartbeat.

She rolled toward him. The atoms in his skin spread out, making room for her breath to seep through.

I knew, she said.

How did you know?

The first time we ever met, standing on that path, you were already so familiar to me, like we had known one another forever.

But we had never met before.

That’s how I knew something like this would have to happen to us.

So we would know each other forever?

Before you were born, I knew you.

I see you, he said. / I see you.

introduction:
the still to come
the future is beckoning to us, is lonely
stay open to this appeal — Derrida, The Taste of the Secret
sensitive to formlessness
not to define it or pin it down or conceptualize it, or it will recede and vanish
the Now Point
what is really
the future is already moving through us
cannot be pre-comprehended
if we think on it too much, it evaporates
to be open to our own fear that we will end — attraction to the future
moving from the immortal column to the emphatically mortal
vulnerability
porousness
the future streams through us NOW
not one day is promised to us

mother & child:
all effort passes
if she could only verify their existence
all time, all space, rushed to her side in that tiny, indelible moment
coffins vs tables vs hair of children
a soul in transfer
the image is stabilized on the retina only at the moment of death
and the flames and the heartache
suddenly, gravely, inexplicably I feel important
the quality of the smallness
art is rehearsal for the future
how strange is that present with all the past seeping in and all the future streaming through
all was in coexistence; there was no way around it
dark matter really exists, but so does luminous matter
I can’t wait to get there
liquid water… I can almost taste it
you might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer
seeds : protected until the end of time
after the end of the world, there is another world
frozen suspended animation
the global seed vault, seed crib, at the north pole

(and, next to me, Roxi picked pomegranate seeds in her purse)

“The beginner’s mind claim, ordinary yet radical, is that we already have … basic wisdom … Thus people do not need to acquire more information, more logic, more ego, and more skills to make them wise. What they need is to unlearn what they have accumulated that veils them from that wisdom. When they do this, it is believed, they find not only what they themselves really are already but what the world actually is, and, from that vantage point, they can live a good life.

The psychological picture that corresponds to beginner’s mind (which I will also call “inner path”) teachings is of different levels of mind (or modes of functioning or ways of knowing). On the surface is the mind of ordinary concepts, emotions, desires, fears, even boredom – the mind with which everyone is familiar. Below that is the mind that is more in contact with basic wisdom and better able to see and act from it. This point may be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. Imagine the ordinary surface mode of knowing as a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life (and in psychology and cognitive science — and wisdom studies?) researchers mistake the limited surface program for the whole system. The research community keeps trying to study how the system works, but all it can see is the functioning of the program in which it, as well as the people it is studying, are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or religion or scholarship, is frustrated because to try to get out, one is only using the operations of the program itself. The situation would be hopeless, except that it is the operating system that supports and defines the program in the first place and the operating system that offers the escape keys that allow one to return to it.

Although this is basically a claim about psychology, two religious traditions are examined as examples because it is within religions, particularly the meditative and contemplative strains in religion, that different modes of knowing and the levels of wisdom such modes might reveal have been most clearly codified and taught. Psychology and cognitive science generally take religions to be no more than cognitive beliefs about personified deities whose purpose it is to provide illusory comfort or to explain things that science can explain better. Such an approach obscures the other aspects of religions. As people pursue an inner path, their vision of religious objects changes radically; perhaps that is why inner path teachings have historically had such uneasy relations with their parent religions. If scientists and educators dismiss everything related to religion out of hand, they may miss the chance to understand aspects of the mind that no other part of society can as readily bring to our attention.”

I miss you when you are gone, and when you are near I miss you in anticipation of your next departure. There is no such thing as closeness. Objects can be no closer than they are, co-arisen and inseparable. Everything interpenetrates and yet I long to be penetrated, as if something is missing, as if something is lost. Who am I, if you do not know me? You ask me to write the answer on your face, yet you insist that it must be spoken, it must be in words. For a moment, before you explained your request, I thought you had understood. You said, with your air, or, with your breath, but all you meant was talking. You just wanted me to talk, as if that might bridge the gap. Oh, you do not know me, and I cannot tell you, it would only prove me right. What do you know without words? I am touching you and you are writing words on a screen. You are transmitting thoughts to someone else and you are not totally here. I leave and wonder when you will notice my absence. This is the only reason I leave you, so that maybe you will experience the lack of me, as I experience the lack of you. No matter how close I pull you, even into my very body, I lack you.

We stood on a cliff looking out over the edge of the world. It is so big, I say. It is so still, you say. Back in the town we had touched the leather horse things, and you said, they are made for something so much more powerful than we are, and you said, they are made so well, better than anything for people. And I touched them all with my hands, bridles and halters and bits and saddles. Oh September. The saddles the blankets the crops. Neither of us has ridden a horse. We will talk of the trips we have taken. I will tell you to buy a certain toy for a child I do not know. I hope that child is me. Once, you bought black shoes with white lightening bolts on them. I do not care for shoes because my feet are so big. You put metal to glass with duct tape. You remind me of my father.

My father called me, thinking I was thousands of miles from where I am. I have not returned the call. They say that fathers who have been absent ought to write to their daughters and apologize, even if it is the only thing they can do, even if their daughters will never forgive them or even acknowledge them. This, God bless him, my father has always done.

I want a long dress; I want a knife; I want a baby. We talk of Henry Miller, of his honesty, and the air is so light at the edge of the world, and so many of the trails are unauthorized. Why don’t we worship our ancestors here, you ask. In my family, we do, I say. And in another world I am writing to a stranger about how Georgia is like Russia and already I have nostalgia for the future I might share with the person I would tell this to, the person who might understand. You shove your arms in a heap of manure to see how warm it is on the inside — the people give you a look.

I can feel it all through me, the future we will not act out, the future we have already had, the future we have shared from the beginning. There was never a beginning, there was never. There was the edge of the world. It was so large. It was so still. And the birds on the rocks were sensitive, and the waves were sensitive, and the eyes that saw it all were sensitive.

It was simple: I loved someone and I wanted them to know it.

I would take you with me. I would take you into the hole in the center of my chest where I do not exist, have never existed, the laughter of permeability, the air. I would take you where I cannot go myself. God, this pain is exquisite, and your face, I write on your face, I take you on my life boat, I die in your arms as you change from a boy to an old man and back again, over and over. You are a completely different person. You are a mirror. I want to walk to the edge of the world with your DNA in my body.

The anger of being asked to describe a physical sensation — I can only produce one or two words (warm, nice) that are obviously inadequate but safe for the reason. If I really tried to describe the sensation, the description would never cover it, would produce the wrong idea, would even replace the memory. And yet, once forced to say something, anything, it feels wonderful to have the listener agree — yes, that feeling feels something like those words for them, too.

I wish I could say more and more about such sensations: how putting my hand on your skin feels like dipping it under running water, like the surfaces are pierced with tiny holes and there is light and fluid passing through, back and forth as the surfaces sink into one another, and it seems that I am touching you from the inside and after a while there is no accounting for the direction of flow or whose skin is whose or where the warmth is coming from.

Having dreams where I am accidentally propelled much too high in the air, so high that I know I will die when I hit the ground, but after accepting certain death, the feelings of floating and lightness are incredible, and there is nothing terrifying about the view of the city below me, even as I am rapidly plummeting toward it. Somehow, after all this, I always manage to land softly, even though it is impossible.