Healing Metaphysics Home > Archive> Time, Space and the Tao

Article by Michael Finn
Copyright Michael Finn

"..And you run and you run to catch up with sun, but its sinking,
And racing around to come up behind you again,
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death..."
(Pink Floyd – 'Dark Side Of The Moon', 197

"Whatever it is you might think you have, you have nothing to lose,
Through every dead and living thing, time runs like a fuse
And the fuse is burning and the earth is turning....."
(Jackson Browne, 'The Pretender' album, from the 70's)

The overpowering impulse behind the creation of this site, is the sobering, yet liberating awareness of what the mystics have reiterated to many generations of beings.

That time is, in this dimension at least, finite and pertaining to the inside boundaries of birth and death. The latter lies in waiting for us all...

My ephemeral nature of itself, then, spurs me to grasp each arising moment as the time of my life, literally.

Sharing my ideas globally, then is a precious project, important enough to have a lot of time devoted to it.

Certainly, one may dream and plan ahead, our very development demands such. Yet one must not necessarily adopt this projection (of time and therefore event sequences) and hold the picture so rigidly as to believe it is the way events will unfold; e.g. that one will live happily ever after, or at least die peacefully in one's sleep etc, etc.

Adherence to strict projections, is a form of 'framing' reality. It is not surrendering to the chaos of events which paradoxically exists within the orderliness of everyday life.

We are challenged to allow 'change'.
(From 'River's Way – The Process Science of The Dreambody' by Arnold Mindell, Arkana Books, 1989.)

'....Helmut Wilhelm warns us: "It is in constant change and growth that life can be grasped....If it is interrupted, the result is not death, which is really only an aspect of life, but life's reversal, its perversion....The opposite of change, in Chinese thought is growth of what ought to decrease, the downfall of what ought to rule."

If the Tao ought to rule, then the opposite to the Tao would be a tyrant, A 'framer' who insists on determining how things should go........which preprograms events before they occur".

Following the 'Tao', is being able to surrender to the arising moment and following the unfolding of events – to be adaptable to the unknown........that which we believe we actually predict and control.

Framing reality presumes desired outcomes and such are fodder for the idea that behind our decision making processes and thereby, our expectations, lie deep background beliefs , such as that : 'I' am somehow special, and that something greater is on my side.

Such 'givens', contribute overwhelmingly, to stress reactions,(from events which come 'out of the blue') and can escalate powerfully through popular culture to phenomena such as war ,conflicts and other episodes of indifference.

Healing Metaphysics Home > Archive> Time, Space and the Tao