I've been reading about soul and time.
One of the wisest descriptions I've come across is from poet John O'Donohue.
In this extract interviewer Krista Tippett asks him about time:
JOD: 'I think that one of the huge difficulties in modern life is the way time has become the enemy.
KT: Time is a bully. We're captive to it.
JOD: Totally, and I'd say seven out of every 10 people who turn up in a doctor's surgery are suffering from something stress-related.
Now, there are big psychological tomes written on stress. But for me, philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven't had a true moment for yourself. And you know, to relax in and to just be. Because, you know, the way in this country - there's all the different zones. I think there are these zones within us as well. There's surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time.
KT: Yes, and over-structured.
JOD: Yeah, over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time. And then if you sit down, like, Dan Siegel, my friend, does this lovely meditation, you know: You imagine the surface of the ocean is all restless and then you slip down deep below the surface where it's still and where things move slower. And what I love in this regard is my old friend Meister Eckhart, 14th-century mystic.
KT: Right. German mystic.
JOD: German mystic. And one day I read in him and he said, "There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch." And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out, what it means is, that in — that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.'
The full interview can be viewed at the On Being website.
Esther
