The Nonsequentiality of Eternity

A New Meditation Upon an Old Meditation

The WORLD is not this little cottage of Heaven and Earth. Though this be fair, it is too small a Gift. When God made the World He made the Heavens, and the Heavens of Heavens, and the Angels and the Celestial Powers. These also are parts of the World: So are all those infinite and eternal Treasures that are to abide for ever, after the Day of Judgement. Neither are these, some here, and some there, but all everywhere, and at once to be enjoyed. The WORLD is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: till the Beauty and the Serviceableness of its parts is considered. When you enter into it, it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonder and Delights. But it is an happy loos to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts and adore His Glory.

Centuries, Thomas Traherne, 1.18

Heaven and Earth, matter and form, physical and spiritual. Earth–the realm of matter–cannot exist without heaven. Prima materia–earth without heaven–as synonymous with pure potential is nothing but precisely that: pure potential. Without the actualising identity of heaven lending itself to the matter of the earth, that primordial potentiality is indescribable as anything beyond simply potential. Earth without heaven is eternally what could be but never what is (although, to identify with what could be is to implicitly affirm that which is and thus to leave the realm of pure potential, which in itself is entirely undefinable without either an explicit or implicit internalisation of actual identity). Without the forming and shaping consciousness of heaven–without mind, in other terms–earth is nothing but a realm of infinite, indistinguishable quanta. It is only in the context of the unifying heavenly principles or ideas embedding themselves within the material that the emergence of meaning from out the tohu wabohu quantum realm is possible.