Paul,

Thank you. And by the way, I’d be delighted if you’d like to contribute to the monastery, as well. And if you have insight or opinions or experiences when it comes to these matters — whether it is about ‘moments’ or about insights into the eternal, time or the disruption of time by the eternal, or practical practices, or anything similar, well, that would be great.

There’s contact information here. If you decide you’d enjoy this, it can be short or long.

— — —

Gerben’s essay has brought to mind ‘mind training’ in both martial arts and in meditation, where the student is taught what is sometimes called ‘mushin’ or empty mind. I believe this relates to the essay’s concepts of Paradise. Except in the essay’s examples, they seem to be somewhat ecstatic, somewhat big and memorable experiences. Whereas mushin is all about stilling the mind.

And I think these kinds of things tend to get confused, as though they are all thrown into a big pot and called soup. Yet what’s in that soup — the carrots, the potatoes, the onions… are all quite different.

I’ve seen on YouTube some monks who meditate to the point of sitting in a form of ‘stupor’ wherein they are so immersed in the ecstatic experience that the experience itself seems to becomes the one and only goal. They actually look physically dead… that’s how far ‘in’ they go.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is wrong. Rather, that the rest of us live in a rather large container called ‘everyday life’ and that we need to find ways to integrate these things in a manner that keeps us and (hopefully) our world, balanced.

What I love about Gerben’s take is that he’s associating these occurrences with Paradise, and perhaps even the eternal, but doing that with far smaller incidents, at far lower resolutions. He’s achieving a great thing, actually, by showing us that Paradise and the eternal can be normalized, in a sense. Made accessible.