Thomas Stearns Eliot was a St. Louis-born British poet, playwright, and essayist who wrote often about the subject of time. In “Four Quartets’” “Burnt Norton,” he poetically echoed Eckhart Tolle in “The Power of Now”:
Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
Elsewhere, he wrote:
And all is always now.
His poetry on the subject could positively make a time traveler’s head spin:
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the great Indian sage with whom I had the great pleasure to study closely, and who taught me how to teach his Transcendental Meditation in the world, said of time that it’s “a concept to measure eternity.” Eternity isn’t time moving forward horizontally into an endless future, but a realm beyond time vertically in each moment.
The Still Point in the Turning World
The eternal moment in which we live rests in the infinite silence in a nonchanging realm that’s transcendental, or beyond the changing world. Its nature is not only silence and stability but stillness as well. Eliot referred to it as “the still point of the turning world.” The world indeed is turning and changing, as the Buddha so aptly put it, but there’s also this nonchanging realm embedded in each moment in time underlying the change. Let Eliot from “Burnt Norton” continue:
At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still
point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And
do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement
From nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for
the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is
only the dance.
This changeless realm also is the foundation upon which all this change rests and has its basis. To repeat Eliot: “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance.” Eliot tasted the stillness of the eternal moment, even though he may not have been intellectually versed in it enough to fully comprehend it or even name it for that matter. But look at and listen to his verse:
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
The intellectual understanding of this relationship between time and the timeless is, to Eliot’s mind, the domain for the mystic, although he did read thoroughly the lives of a variety of Catholic saints, studied Evelyn Underhill’s “Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness,” and delved deeply into the classic Vedantic text “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.” What’s more, he held the “Bhagavad Gita” to be the greatest philosophical poem next to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” As he wrote elsewhere (“The Dry Salvages”) in “Four Quartets”:
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the
saint—
No occupation either, but something
given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of
time….
He does realize, however, that this experience is out of time:
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
He goes on:
The inner freedom from the practical
desire,
The release from action and suffering,
release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still
and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy.
This nonchanging moment out of time that exists deep within each moment in time is a fourth state of consciousness unlike the changing states of waking, dreaming, and sleep are from each other. It’s known by many names – Samadhi in Sanskrit, transcendence, a state of Being, a glimpse into your higher Self – and it dawns when the activity of movement, perception, thought and speech disappear, or fade away, leaving one the infinite silence of that state. As Eliot wrote:
Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.
Eliot knew that to enter this state of grace, the mind and body needed to be at perfect rest. As he wrote in “East Coker” from “Four Quartets:” We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion.
The experience of this silent fourth state is so peaceful, so blissful, such a state of grace and love. This transcendental state is the source of our being and, because it is pure happiness, it is also the goal of all our endeavors.
As Eliot wrote:
Love it itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement
My favorite line of poetry, however, says it even more beautifully than that. It speaks of the wonderment with which the infant sees the world and how the sage sees the world. I’ll let these lines from “Little Gidding” in “Four Quartets,” which started this piece, bring it to a close:
The end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.
