“Nothing can have a goal that it doesn’t already have as its origin,” wrote the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Does this mean that sensing the future is a matter of immersing oneself in a primordial memory? And doesn’t this apply to all phenomena in the world: to sense the future potential of things, one would have to return inwardly to their origin? This is where the actual process of meditation emerges: a process of remembering, a plunging into the dark cave of inwardness to find one’s way back to an original light—pulling oneself out of the flow of what our senses tell us about the world, to return to this inner origin, which is at the same time a source of renewal. It is a renewal of the gaze, an inner recapturing of origin, of childhood, of the impartiality of a childlike gaze, which at the same time opens all the possibilities of the future. Will it be possible to overcome all the trials of life, the dramas and challenges of our time, without recovering that unsullied and innocent gaze which alone can open space for the future? “Unless you repent and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18) The Christmas season appears as an image of meditation, an act of remembering origin, and a gateway to the future—a moment of reflection in which the two ends of time join hands.
Translation Eliza Rozeboom
Image Urte Copijn, Laut H.
