When I turned fifty I was set free of time. A peculiar claim, I know. Surely, at fifty, a person has fewer years ahead than behind. Surely the current of time increases, the din of death growing like a distant, yet approaching, waterfall. Only denial of one’s mortality would permit a relaxing of effort, a softening of resolve; that refusal the shutting of one’s eyes tight around the soul, afraid of facing one’s end.
But no. The half-century mark liberated me. As a younger man I wanted whatever I wanted sooner rather than later. Any process, whether of learning or building or developing, was always too gradual, and the mere awareness of a duration was enough to dissuade me from undergoing a journey, like a would-be explorer who, surveying a difficult terrain in front of him, decides to call off the expedition and return home.
Age alone did not accomplish this sense of freedom. Like a vine, it grew alongside and then intertwined with the burgeoning awareness of time as an aspect of eternity, or of life as immersed in immortality. Despite the event of death, life is deathless, but not because, or not only because, of the nature of life in itself.
Whatever has a beginning must have an ending, as the philosophers and sages have said. Surely life has a beginning, right? We are conceived and gestate and are born into the world. With birth we are begun, and in time the begun ends. The sun of a life rises, peaks, and descends at the horizon of death, disappearing on its far side.
“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was with God in the beginning.” We can take these familiar words and refashion them to stress the mystery they reveal, the mystery of the Unbegun. Here again–
“In the Principle was the Logos, and the Logos was with the God, and God was the Logos. It was with the God in the Principle.”
Note the differences.
Principle cleans any residue of time from “the beginning.” The Principle is the source of all that proceeds from it, and it is more: The Principle is Reality, purely and simply, or ultimately. With “In the Principle,” the familiarity of the verse begins to melt away. We are not here talking about the start of time, or the first event in a series of events. We are in the origin, the absolute.
The familiarity melts further with Logos instead of Word. The Logos is the intellectual source of the world as well as the divine’s own knowledge of itself, or the image of the divinity, here called “the God,” with the definite article. This is Father God, or “God the Father,” as the ancient creeds say. The Logos of Father God is the Son, God without the definite article. They are together in the Principle, which is the Godhead, divinity itself, and this Godhead has no beginning. Godhead is the Unbegun.
“In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” Life is in that which has no beginning, and the knowledge of life’s location is the light, and that light enlightens us. Ours is life in the Unbegun.
In the same way that we can traverse all kinds of land and sea but are never not on the earth, we are never not in the Unbegun, whether we traverse the lands we call life or the sea we call death. The light that enlightens all dawns in us with the inevitability of a sunrise. Whether we will acknowledge it is the question of us. What are we for? We are for knowing, and our knowing ones us with the knowing beyond being we call “God.” Knowing can do no other because God can do no other than one with that which has disposed itself to divinity. This knowing disposal to divinity is what we mean by contemplation.
Within the Unbegun, life is enough for the living of it. We have time, we have ability, we have help. Spirit rushes down to meet us and rushes up from within us, sent from the God and sourced through the heart. The horizon called death draws into the foreground, and past it is a view only our finitude limits. By our own power we can see just so far. The knowing of the heart tells us our distances traveled to date amount to no more than a beginning, as life in the Unbegun is endless.
I can take no credit for the coalescence of age and understanding I am describing here. We participate in our lives, we do not own them or control them. Our explanations of why we are the way we are are rationalizations and stories we tell ourselves. Meager rations to feed the voracious mind that is always hunting and gathering meaning.
The whole of life is to realize oneself in the Unbegun, and that the Unbegun is not other than us. Any notions of God as being “up there” or “out there” or any where at all dissolves. Paths and itineraries, maps and methods, states, stages, and experiences, evaporate in the radiance of divine isness.
