J. van Rijckenborgh

The superlative

This is ‘amazing’ ‘awesome’ and ‘mindblowing’. In this way we resort to English superlatives to express, in a rather exaggerated manner, our amazement and bewilderment of the things we experience. But in doing so, we too easily forget that even the most extreme experience is spatially determined, and therefore still relatively restricted and limited. It may perhaps denote a yearning to go beyond the known, to what surpasses it all: the limitless and endless, that challenges us to transcend our boundaries. For example, cosmological science uses ingenious satellites to scan the most distant horizons in search of water on Mars and life outside our planet. And at the same time, conversely, highly educated quantum physicists are in search of ever smaller particles, searching to penetrate deeper and deeper into matter, where physical matter seems to transform into the spiritual. But in doing so, do we really touch the truly superlative level that rises above all experience of our limited three-dimensional perception? Is not all our knowledge and experience that stops at

whatever boundary, already outdated before it has reached its conclusions? Is not every endeavour with a pre-set goal in mind doomed to fail, even before it has realized anything whatsoever? Where shall this all end? Surely, ultimately everywhere. And at the same time nowhere! For it can’t be anywhere other than where time and space collapse, and all plurality finally either disintegrates or amalgamates. In a unity that both includes everything and transcends it, and where the many universes and dimensions that surround and penetrate us, are all One. We know all this intellectually very well. But are we also truly aware of it? And the most important question: do we ourselves also live this knowing? Has our state of consciousness really become a state of life.... a life that has merged into that absolute unity and has given up all identification with separateness....a life in the light of an eternal and boundless reality? If so, there will be no room left to deviate, no more time to postpone. Then there will only be the one and only option to devote our entire being to it. Now that truly is ‘amazing’ and ‘mind-blowing’.

And the most important question: do we ourselves also live this knowing?