SPIRITUALITY
Touching The Mind Of God
The brief moments of eternity that remind us who we truly are
The wild geese shock me out of my torpor. Their cries of freedom lift my mind from where I sit hunched over my desk, tap-tapping away at my latest project. For a long moment, it almost seems that a half-forgotten scrap of my spirit flies with them, buffeted by the winter gales, calling out to each other in unbridled joy as the moonlight glances off our wings.
Then they are gone and I fall back to my writing, the clatter of keys the only sound to break the empty silence of my shadowed study.
There’s an ancient magic in the cries of wild geese which has the capacity to stir our own inner wildness, the freedom that soars deep within the soul.
As a teenager growing up on a council estate in the north of England, I could scarcely have imagined that one day I would live in a place that was also home to wild geese, buzzards, ravens and peregrine falcons. That younger version of me, obsessed with nature, wildlife and birding, would have been thrilled at the idea.
Then again, that lusty, windblown youth, who spent so much time outdoors, exploring the woods and streams, yomping around the moors or camping and hiking in the mountains at every opportunity, would no doubt have been shocked to discover just how much time his older self would spend indoors at a computer.
Hunched over a keyboard in the dull and dusty recesses of an old creaky house, I can’t help but smile sardonically to myself at the irony.
Nowadays, I rarely travel, but several times a year I make a journey by train from my home in Northwest England to rural Wales. Yesterday was one of those days. At one point on the journey, we cross a tall viaduct. The trees drop away suddenly, the vista opens up below and it’s almost as if we are flying over a wide river valley, bounded by ancient woodland, deer grazing peacefully down on the valley floor.
At that point, something powerful stirs inside me and I look up from my mobile phone. It gets me every time, a kind of tugging at my sleeping soul within, much like the brief magic I sense when I hear the wild geese flying over my home, and I stare out at the vista below as if I could capture something solid and permanent and real, if only I could look hard enough.
But then, just as suddenly, it’s gone. The valley, and the moment, passed and left behind.
Yet such moments are never really gone completely. These are the moments when we touch Eternity, however fleetingly, and remember that we are more than the parts we play in our everyday, workaday lives.
These are the moments when we touch the mind of God, for want of a better word, when we feel the mysteries of the Universe whispering within us, however quietly; the moments that remind us that, whatever our physical situation, we are and always will be sparks of the Divine, the Eternal watching itself from behind a mask.
These fleeting moments of Eternity remind us of what the sages have always tried to tell us: that the world is simply a veil we can sweep aside, a dream from which we can awake, if only… If only.
And even though it seems to this dreamer that it is this worldly life which is the solid one, and those brief magical moments are nothing but passing ephemera, in truth it is the other way round.
In the Diamond Sutra, Gautama Buddha urged us to see that our worldly lives, and all the passing phenomena — the words, the wild geese, the river valleys and trains and cups of coffee and joy and laughter and tears and pain and hope and despair — all these things are the illusion, while that ungraspable essence we sense behind it all is the true unchanging reality of the Universe:
Like a flash of lightning in the sky,
A bubble in a stream.
Like the shadow of a passing cloud,
A phantasm or dream.
Like a dewdrop in the morning sun,
Impermanent, transparent.
The fleeting nature of all things
Has thus been made apparent.
Back at my desk, engaged once more in the task of trying to create something worthwhile, something meaningful, something to help make the world just that little bit better, these are the moments that sustain me.
Yet paradoxically, they are also the moments that remind me of the folly of grasping, the error of trying to cling to experiences, however magical or mundane. It does us good to remember that, however beautiful and horrific and unbearable life seems at times, the world as we know it is nothing more than a shadow show, a dewdrop evaporating in the morning sun.
And with that thought, my fingers fall silent on the keyboard. For how can words express what is beyond all phenomena? How can anything we write be more than the babble of geese lost to the sky in a winter gale? As the great Persian poet Rumi wistfully observed,
“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”
