Time and Eternity
Inner Dialogues on the Nature of Spiritual Experience
Preface
I wrote "Inner Dialogues" in August 2003. The intention was to
outline my spiritual understanding as it was at that point of time. As I was
writing, it quickly became apparent to me that to portray it in a vacuum was not
likely to be of any great value; so I decided instead to put it into the
context of the story of my life. The resulting work is therefore partially
philosophical and partially autobiographical.
On a worldly level, my life has been somewhat chaotic and unsuccessful.
But in many ways this lack of success has been something of a blessing. In
particular it has meant that I have repeatedly found my attention being pulled
to a deeper level. Thus, in my teens I developed an interest in psychology and
philosophy and then, in my early twenties, an interest in the spiritual side to
life and in Zen Buddhism and meditation. Some years later I developed a wider
and more general spiritual interest and I found myself pulled increasingly
towards Daoism and various branches of Hinduism, especially Advaita.
Last year, when I was forty-four, I became aware that something big had
changed.
In fact the change had probably happened gradually over several years.
But last year, because I was able, for the first time, to see it from a
sufficient distance; I could be objective about it. And so I decided that the
time had come to write an account of what had happened.
In the beginning, I was unsure of the best way to proceed. I wanted to
convey the experiences in a way that made them as unambiguous as possible; but
I was aware that much of what had happened simply didn't lend itself to a
straight-forward one-sided explanation. Anyway, after some experimentation I
came to the conclusion that a good compromise would be to write the material in
the form of a series of "inner dialogues" and that is what I have
done.
Although they have been written in the form of "inner"
dialogues; all of the questions that I've included in the script have at some
point also been asked by real people that I've spoken to; in fact, most of them
have been asked many times. The same is true of the answers, in that they can
all be found somewhere in the teachings and philosophies of Zen, Daoism, Advaita
and other similar disciplines and, moreover, they are all answers that I've
found repeatedly to have direct relevance to issues and dilemmas that arise in
people's everyday lives.
I hope at least some of what I've written will resonate with you.
Paul Brocklehurst
August 2003