#being-time

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Inception illustrates how time works: moments upon moments upon moments, all in contact with one another. Edith Piaf's song "Non, je ne regrette rien" penetrates three layers deep into drug-induced dreams, it slowing toward unrecognizability with each new dive of the film's heist crew. Through it, we can see how art establishes our contact with various parts of reality.

Over a year ago, I launched toward a realm or a vantage point I can only describe as "higher." Within it, I saw my "true" body and those of other humans, our illustrious forms presented digestibly to me as if we had reels of film moving throughout our shapes. The founder of Sōtō Zen, Dōgen Zenji, postulated that beings are in actuality made up of time, under the term uji ("being-time").

I have been back to that higher vantage point. The other night, I did not get there, but I did see how every moment in one's lifetime crowded against the others, melding. The fiction writing of the 16 year old touching up against the religious beliefs of the same person twice their age. My 33-year-old self, experienced as the present, turning to talk to myself aged into the 60s.

I saw how time-being isn't a matter of chronology, of there having been a past and a present now coming to a future. Not like how you progressively read a book. But in how every page in a book simultaneously exists at once. Like the pages, my own life laid upon itself like different types of sediment, some similar molecules passing through to layers beneath them. And once this life "completed," the others...

"Do you see how my lives are structured now?" the reincarnating side of my spirit asked me, displaying my past lives lining my current iteration. I know that I as that vaster spirit am proud of my reincarnation cycle, my beautiful project. I am glad to have constructed a human lifetime where I could behold it, an audience to my own design.

~

People ask me about Lilith a lot. Mostly in the widespread assumption that if Lucifer is so present in life and spiritual path, she must have a role. This is, in fact, according to Per Faxneld's book Satanic Feminism a very recent 20th century view. Lucifer in his history has had plenty of partners, human and fellow demon. But perhaps the question is still fair (not that many of the inquirers know), only because I am writing a novel about Lilith and myself.

The first time I ever met Lilith, she was cold and silent. She had a manner of wet earth. Not witch as one often assumes, but primordial. It was strange for the intimate context in which she had arrived.

But when I shared this with one of my close Luciferian fellows who has a longstanding relationship with her, the description matched. "She's the mother of mushrooms," Cindy said. "She is kind of selectively mute."

I haven't met her in a humanoid form since. Every time I tried, I ended up back at myself. This was puzzling until another psychic friend took a look and said I had what looked like a canker sore filled with ancestral pain on the base of my neck.

~

Lucifer does not have movement like film reels on his body in the higher place where I can see all beings. A Jewish thinker quoted in the siddur of a local synagogue said of the angels that it's not that they lack a body that makes them unique from humans, it's of their lacking of potential. Of what I can see of him, Lucifer is more pure. Unchanging. Or perhaps, if you believe Buddhist cosmology of devas, much more slowly changing.

"If I am made up of Time, what are you made up of?" I asked him.

"Concept."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that while you live with chronological perspective and can only be in one place at a time, usually within your body, I can be in many places at a time in various forms." There is more to this, but he trusts me to understand what a concept is and the power that it holds. "The word you're looking for is everpresent.