Circles, Horizons and Depths

"Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

"The eye is the first circle," Emerson observes, "the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."

[Emerson, "The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson," p. 252]

In a classic series of sermons, the great 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, observed, like Emerson, that there is a fathomless depth to our being, a depth so great and infinite that it is the ultimate Ground of Being.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "The Shaking of the Foundations," Scribners, pp. 56-57.]

Thus, our lives are circumscribed by the orbits of the stars and the horizons of time and space, but beyond each such horizon we see there exists yet more distant horizons, including some we can never see. Similarly, there are depths within that delimit our knowledge of who and what we are; yet, they, too, are infinite and each depth yields to a further depth; and even underneath the depth which we must take to be the ultimate of all depths, a lower deep needs open. Such is the nature of the universe and our Being within it.

"A New Heaven and a New Earth"

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away . . ."

-- Revelations 21:1 --

The Book of Revelations is perhaps the most understood work in the entire New Testament. First, it is the revelation of a dream which the Apostle John reportedly had; and, second, it, like the rest of the New Testament, deals with thought rather than future events. And, perhaps, the well known verse of "a new heaven and a new earth," to me, aptly describes how our perceptions and 'world-view' are radically shifted when we let go of that near-universal affliction, the human "ego" - not "ego" as in pride, but "ego" denoting the sense of  individuality and "separateness" that Einstein referred to as "an optical delusion of consciousness."

Nearly every individual has "two selves" - the small, false "self" of the ego, and the real, expansive "Self" of our true being. It is when, through spiritual practice, 'self' gives way to 'Self' that "a new heaven and a new earth" manifest in our consciousness. We then become, or are becoming, a part of the Whole, a part of the 'Ground of Being,' a part of the "new earth." (It is no mere coincidence that the best-selling spiritual author, and enlightened teacher, Eckhart Tolle, titled one of his books, "A New Earth.")

The renowned 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, talks about our two "selves' and the 'reality' of  St. John's "new earth"' in the following passage from his book of sermons, "The Shaking of the Foundations," pp. 100-101:

"Where can we feel this new reality? We cannot find it, but it can find us. It tries to find us during our whole life. It is in the world; it carries the world; and it is the cause of the fact that our Self and our world are not yet thrown into utter self-destruction. Although it is hidden under anxiety and despair, under finitude and tragedy, it is in everything, in souls and bodies, because everything derives life from it. The new being means that the old being has not yet destroyed itself completely; that life is still possible; that our souls still gather force to go forward; and that the good and the true are not extinguished. It is present, and it will find us. Let us be found by it. It is stronger than the world, although it is quiet and meek and mild."

The "new earth" is a profound psychological metaphor for the change in our attitudes and conceptions - indeed, the change in our entire mode or way of thinking - as we shift from a narrow self-consciousness to an expansive and inclusive higher consciousness. The following video interview with Father Thomas Keating by integral theorist Ken Wilber amply illustrates this shift in perceptions and attitudes, as well as its implications for personal and collective well-being.