Available Now

Sometimes the TSK vision seems to ask us to repeal all our existing perspectives and notions of how reality works.  And sometimes it points directly at what we have always believed, but does so in a way that animates these beliefs with new insight and energy.  In this week’s reading there is a sentence that points to the familiar in a surprising way: “No longer a blank canvas to be filled in through reference to the past, the future emerges as the realm of possibility and freedom–an unbounded opening, available now, available within specifics–precise and definite, yet wholly indeterminate.” (DTS 95).  What a radical insight that the future is available now (not just at the boundaries of the moment, as we have been practising for the past few weeks, but wherever we look).  Isn’t this idea also beautifully familiar?  Not only in the TSK vision itself, but in all the world’s spirtual traditions, in Plato, in George Santayana (who uses the word ‘entelechy’ to invoke the sense that the potential of life is present as a living seed)–this idea that a finer realm animates the murky, ordinary realm in which we live, is very familiar.  What I find radical is to call this finer realm the future! –Michael