If you’ve dipped into ancient Christian
philosophy, you might have come across Boethius’ idea of how eternity is the
simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life, and how that means for
us, as creatures created to spend eternity with God (should we choose to accept
the gift), that there is a sense in which our state of being encompasses all of
life at once (see an earlier blog post Everything At Once that conveys something similar).
I think there is a sense in which that’s
true - and to see why, we only need to think of what it’s like being ourselves
in the present moment. Our ‘now’ sensation encompasses our history, where we
can recall to mind the time we had a burger and chips with our chum in secondary
school, and the time we grazed our knee when falling off our skateboards, our
first day at work, and so forth. Our whole remembered life is in us in the
present moment, even though we’ve forgotten much of it. What is remembered is
there.
God doesn’t have the problem of
forgetting things; His perfect Mind persists through endless time by being both
part of time and outside time altogether. He sees all events - past, present,
future - in a single, timeless now. But while we don’t have perfect minds, we
are made in His image, and we do, in one sense, possess the fullness or
potential fullness of life all at once, in that everything we are, everything
we’ve done, and everything we could be, are all part of a single, unfolding
reality. A kind of unified experience of being in which there always exists the
potential tapping into the ever-present totality of life - a bit like how a
tree contains its whole life in a single moment: rings of the past, leaves and
branches of the present, and all the future growth contained within, all
existing together in the living organism.
Consider what this means for you and for your
potential if you think about it in the right way. Imagine that your life is
like a film reel composed of countless frames. Each frame shows a single
moment of your experience - a snapshot of what you think, feel, and perceive at
that instant. If your life is everlasting (this life and the afterlife), then the film reel simply stretches
on forever. Frame follows frame, moment follows moment - the story continues
indefinitely, but always one scene at a time. Now imagine something stranger. Suppose
that instead of a film reel, your entire life is encoded in a holographic plate
- a two-dimensional interference pattern that contains, within every
microscopic region, the information for the entire three-dimensional image. In
a hologram, the whole is present in every part: each tiny patch of the plate
can reconstruct the whole scene, though with varying degrees of clarity. In
this “holographic” version of your life, every point of time contains the
fullness of your whole existence - not just a slice of it.
I like what that implies about our
potential - and the fact that we are never all we could be. Through this model,
every thought, every stage, every experience is co-present within the single
timeless structure of your being, and you can tap into the entirety of your
life simultaneously, as the hologram possesses the entire image for us to
navigate at once. It gives a real sense of what you might call a totality
waiting to be awakened step by step with each new improvement, every fresh
edification from experience, and every new unfolding – that all that we could
be is, in some sense, already here in potentia - shimmering beneath the
surface of our awareness, waiting to be drawn into the light of our becoming.
Life is a journey, of course, and a continual invitation to open ourselves up
to the infinite depth that already dwells within.
