Reclaiming Eden

It is a kind of global forgetting, a laundering of our soiled universe, washing away accumulated layers of names, memories, associations, and leaving it all unfamiliar and fresh and sweet-smelling. It is ceasing to take everything and anything for granted. It is the re-discovery of the obvious as very strange, the given as wonderful and precious, before we bend it to our purposes. It is admitting the glory that was there all along. It is actually looking at the "meanest" stone and fallen leaf, at the "nastiest" piece of garbage, at "irrelevant" things like the shape and colour of shadows and the reflection of coloured city lights in wet roads at night (which we've ceased to see because we don't drive round them). It is consciously being what we really are - Capacity for things - the Space in which each of them is allowed to arrive at its peculiar kind of perfection. It is consciously viewing everything from its Source, reuniting it with the Infinity that lies this side of it. It is seeing, hearing, smelling, touching things as if for the first time, relieved of the crushing load of time past. It is the revitalizing and extension of our childhood astonishment. It is being present at creation's morning, before Adam named the creatures and got bored with them. It is seeing them with their Creator's eye, as very good.
- Douglas Harding, On Having No Head

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