Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

The Mutations of Time and Sense

... In particular, we'll need to identify how the contours that turn rational thinking into a thinglike figure... might be contours that, viewed differently, render anomalous experience visible. We'll need to examine how those contours might constitute literal boundaries between states, boundaries that could turn states of mind that appear mutually exclusive into foreground and background for each other. If we can start to specify how that happens, we might be one step closer to comprehending how a loss that strikes most of us as unimaginable and even dangerous could turn out to be tolerable. We might become more comfortable with the idea of deliberately, temporarily letting go of rational thought in order to see something we wouldn't otherwise... How we get to experience of that state is a separate question, and one to be taken up later. But we increase the likelihood that we'll at least be open to getting there if we know that going back and forth is built in. We need to know that getting there doesn't mean giving up our grounding in rational thought for good.

-- Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer

Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.

-- Mary Baker Eddy

I want to live above the world,
Though Satan's darts at me are hurled;
For faith has caught the joyful sound,
The song of saints on higher ground.

Lord, lift me up and let me stand
By faith on heaven's table-land,
A higher plane than I have found:
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

-- Johnson Oatman Jr and Charles Hutchinson Gabriel