Time Present and Time Past
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
Curious prose. I use to have frequent bouts of cough syncope (http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=9314) where after laughing, coughing, sneezing etc. I would faint temporarily. In these unconscious moments I perceived me as living whole other lives, within seconds of unconsciousness. Sometimes the lives I lived, were different from each other, sometimes they were continuations of a previous unconscious existence. The feeling was they were in real-time but time those unconscious existence didn’t equal time in this existence, as this one doesn’t equal time in the other lives I lived in those periods. This wasn’t reincarnation but rather more the many worlds feeling…I lived my other selves in parallel worlds is best I can explain. I kinda miss those experience as embarrassing and dangerous as they were.
So my sense is, on a parallel world, we did choose to enter the rose garden. Thus, nothing is ever truly lost. The paradox of beauty being all is ephemeral thus fleeting :).
I adore T S Eliot and this, IMO, perfectly sums up the grief of lost love. More pertinently, perhaps, for you master Billijef, is he was thought to have been rather a great initiate – in true poetic tradition – and may even have written some of his masterworks in the Green language.
As for the rest, I am also a fainter, although it doesn’t happen often. Your dream life experience sounds wow, right up my street that kind of thing, as well you know!