One of the stories about time told by Alan Lightman in his excellent little novel Einstein’s Dreams is of a world in which effect precedes cause.

In such a world, people don’t act in order to make something else happen, but as a result of something we’ll hope for or decide upon in the future.*

Forty years ago today, I began a spiritual journey, and, turning Lightman’s story into a question, “Was the decision to begin the journey back in 1976 really  the effect of where I have now arrived?”

Or, “Is the place I have come to (I can’t say I’ve not arrived) more or greater than the reason I began?”

My answer has to be “yes,” and, it’s why I began.  Now I press on, and the question comes again, “Is this the effect from a choice I’ll make in the future because of the new, larger, more colourful place I find myself?

Only time will tell, this strange time.

I see how, looking back, I thought I’d begun this journey with a fully formed way of seeing, feeling, and behaving, and I see, as I’ve continued the journey, how so much of this was burned up along the way – a letting go in order to let come.

‘[E]very mass-produced product comprises a bundle of “take-it-or-leave-it” features or dimensions offered to all customers.”**  

Now I see this journey could only be understood as one of becoming, and as I continue to open my thinking, my feeling, and my behaving, this path of fire continues to burn up what is unnecessary to my becoming an authentic human being.

And it is the same for all of us.

“The new foundation consists not in objective statements but in subjective reality.”^

‘The sense of wonder can also help to recognise and appreciate the mystery of your own life.’^^

(*Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Joseph Pyne and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy.)
(^Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, quoted in Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)