Imagining the Time Before Coming Here
Despite its endless and vital artistry, Nature maintains great secrecy and reserve. When we see a pregnant woman, we know that some new person is coming here. Everything else remains unknown. Who that person is, and what she will bring to her family, and world, and what kind of life she will have remain unknown to us and even to the mother, the carrier and the labyrinth of this creativity. This is one of the great privileges of women, to be able to give birth. Mothers are the priestesses of the greatest Eucharist. In and through the mother, empty space is changed into person. The anonymous water element becomes face, body, soul, life, and inner world. To give birth can also be a great burden. Sometimes the weary face of a pregnant mother reveals how her essence is being rifled and her body and mind become implicated in the baby’s destiny. A bond is being developed from which she will never be released. In a sense, she can never part from the one she has carried under her heart. To be involved in Nature’s most powerful mystery can also destroy all illusions and innocence. A friend told me recently that her moment of bleakest disillusionment was in hospital shortly before she went into labour with her first child. She walked out onto the hospital fire escape, looked into the night, and realized her absolute isolation and saw opening before her a never-ending path of responsibility.
There is no other way into the universe except through the body of the woman. But where were you before you were conceived and entered the womb? This is one of the most fascinating in-between times in any life. It is also the one we know least about. Yet it is a journey that each of us has made. In the Western and Oriental traditions, we have a vast architecture of theory regarding life after death; there are bardos, purgatories, Nirvana, and beatific visions. There is a carefully thought-out path of continuity, transfiguration, and final homecoming after death. It is interesting to note the substantial absence, especially in the Christian tradition, of any geography of the time before we were conceived. Maybe it sounds ridiculous to explore this, since we did not exist before we were conceived. This may be true, but it is surely too simple to imagine that one moment there was no sign of you, everything was blank and empty, and then the next moment you began to be there. If you came out of somewhere, then you had to be somewhere before you came. There can be no such apparitions or pure beginnings. As well as having an “afterwards” every person has a “before.” The difficulty in imagining this is that the other world is invisible, and all we have are intimations of our invisible past.
Each of us comes from somewhere more ancient than any family. Normally, if someone asks you where you are from, you can name a house, a street, a landscape. You have an address, parents, and family. This is indeed where you are from now, but this information becomes weak when the question deepens to where you are ultimately from. When you think even simply about your parents’ life, they had a whole life as strangers before they ever knew each other. You were not even a twinkle in their eyes then. Even when they came together, there was no sign, talk, or notion of you. When you reflect further, you begin to see that your ultimate address is Elsewhere. Though you are now totally here, you are essentially not from here. You are a child of the invisible. You were not in any physical form before you were conceived. You emerged in seconds from the invisible and began to grow within darkness. This is why birth is always a surprise. It is the first sighting of the invisible one. Everyone wants to see the new baby. Suddenly, there is someone here who has never been seen before. In the excitement of the new baby’s arrival, we often fail to notice the silent wound in the invisible world which allowed the new arrival to come through. We also forget the whole background which the new baby has had in the invisible world: the dream of its destiny, body, face, life, and temperament. Many silent questions accompany a birth: Why did this baby come here now, to this family? What changes will it bring? Who is this new person? In each new heart a bridge between the invisible and the visible world opens.
The Invisible World Is All Around Us
That which we can see is the visible; that which we cannot see is the invisible. Within us and around us there is an invisible world; this is where each of us comes from. Your relationship to the invisible influences so much of your life. When you cross over from the invisible into this physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or finally cancel. When you cross this threshold, you come into the gravity that rules the visible world. Space and time now set the frame for most of your experience. Once you come here, you can never stop experiencing things. Every second of your life something new is going on: you notice a tree, remember a phrase someone said last night, daydream of holidays or wonder what is making you so uneasy. Everything that you experience is now framed in a very definite way. All your experience happens someplace and always at a definite time. As you live here you build a new section of your biography each day. You trust what you see and know what you hear. You know your real life is happening here. Yet your longing for the invisible is never stilled. There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to the horizon or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths. You know that the real nature of things is hidden deep within them. When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. This tension infuses your life with longing. Now you belong fully neither to the visible nor to the invisible. This is precisely what kindles and rekindles all your longing and your hunger to belong. You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold.
Forms of the Invisible
The invisible is one of the huge regions in your life. Some of the most important things about you and your life are invisible. What you think and the way you think control how you feel, how you meet people, and how you see the world. Yet your thoughts are invisible. One of the most fascinating questions about your thinking is, Why do you have the thoughts that you do, and why do you link them together in these patterns? The secret bridges from thought to thought are invisible. No surgeon operating on a brain has ever found a crevice full of thoughts. What you believe about yourself determines how people treat you. Yet you can never see your beliefs. Belief is invisible. Your feelings make you sad or happy, yet the feelings are invisible, too. The greatest presence from whom all things come and who holds all things together is also invisible. No one can see God. Because the invisible cannot be seen or glimpsed with the human eye, it belongs largely to the unknown. Still there are occasional moments when the invisible seems to become faintly perceptible. Sometimes, over a fire built out in the open, one can glimpse layers of air trembling. Or when a candle seems to make the air quiver. Maybe this is why we love colours. They bring the longing at the heart of the invisible to such passionate expression.