Life is like an hourglass.
Consciousness is the sand.Imagine an hourglass.
Its shape is like the symbol for infinity. Its form recalls the double helix of DNA. Its two sections represent polarity. The material on one side, the immaterial on the other. The male on one side, and the female on the other. Hot and cold, positive and negative, or any other duality.
The sand runs in a stream, the same stream as the course of energy that runs up your spine, the same stream that is the road of life.
The movement of that sand is what we call Tao. Our consciousness alternates between the various states represented by the hourglass. It is as difficult to grasp as a stream of sand. Therefore, it is foolish to examine things minutely. It is unwise to focus on the material. It is wisdom to understand the movement.
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour”
— William Blake
“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.” — George Eliot
“Speak, speak, for underneath the cover there
The sand is running from the upper glass,
And when the last grain’s through, I shall be lost.”
— William Butler Yeats
“Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, “You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.” Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”
— Bill Bryson
I’m watching the show outside the window this morning as a dozen little birds eat and play around the bird feeder and bird bath. Tao is flowing pretty strongly here today.
We think of things like glass being solid, and yet, it is actually a very slow moving liquid. If we wait long enough, you can look at very old panes of glass and see where they are thicker on the bottom or have kind of a warped look to them as the glass has flowed downward. But here it is, this wonderful invention that lets us sit in a warm house and look out and see the birds playing.
I’m more than a little obtuse when it comes to the movement of Tao in my life. Like glass, sometimes it seems to move slowly, other times it is more like the sand and flows by all too quickly. The Tao isn’t just the sand. It’s also the hourglass itself. And the one side of the hourglass is, of course, connected to the other side, and often indistinguishable from it. The duality is really all one.
Once you understand the sand can become glass, the Tao can become anything, the possibilities become endless.
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