Succession and substance

The stream is nothing less than the sparkling surface of becoming. For us, I suppose, it is time, since we are transient waves on the motion of what is coming to be; and we can only see what has been – which we call life, or the past.

To come to an end of knowing, to a place where reason and observation fail us, is the beginning of what Spinoza called the Third Kind of Knowledge: direct perception of what is as a necessary, unique expression of the immediate activity of the stream (God, the Tao). In that we are the locus of seeing, the inevitable awareness in which things come to be what they are.

For me it is in simply sitting still that we come to see the glittering light from the wavelets on the swift skin of the stream itself. We are each no more than that, but beautiful; and able to love, each in our lift and fall on the running stream. Nothing is lost. The stream goes on, and each wavelet cannot be other than the stream itself.

This entry was posted in awareness, consciousness, contemplative, death, isness, practice and tagged Benedictus Spinoza, Laozi