As you know, in particle physics we learn that what we consider to be matter is in fact mostly space. Like to give you an idea, the distance between New York to Los Angeles perhaps a particle of would represent a diameter of 1 millimeter. So it's mostly empty space and it appears to be full. To our ordinary experience it appears to be very compact, very full. It's an analogy, its a metaphor I am using. Regarding the true nature of the manifestation and the true nature of time. As we look in hindsight through memory at past events it seems that our past was eventful, full of events and that there was in fact hardly any empty space, that it was all full of perceptions, thoughts, mentations, bodily sensations, external sense perceptions, feelings, etc. This was due not to the fact that there was no emptiness and no space but to the fact that the only thing we can memorize are the moments when there is something. Due to the fact that the nothing moments, the moments of emptiness don't leave any traces in memory. In hindsight we see an eventful past. This is due to the fact that our attention, our love, our interest is directed towards a phenomenal objective part of our experience. Whereas in fact just as matter is almost onlyempty space, time is almost only timelessness. Once we have been made aware that most of the reality of our experience is made of Presence something happens. It is a shift of attention or a shift of interest away from the phenomenal world to the gap between the perceptions, between the mentations and that which up until then seemed to be nothingness, reveals itself as an emptiness which is not a nothingness, as some kind of vacuum if you analogous to the vacuum of modern physics out of which the Big Bang even not arose but arises. That was just in passing, a second observation in this introductory speech.
Francis Lucille October Retreat 2010
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