Piercing the Temporal Veil

In other writings and often well after the reading, I have noticed a literary device that I have never seen explained.  I call it the ‘mesa effect’ and it consists of approaching an idea or an appealing mental image from a number of different directions.  The net result is the cancellation of the ‘noise’ of circumstance and trivialities and the gradual emergence of those common central items of importance that form the gist of the author’s intent.  I see it as starting with a barren landscape of unimaginative regularity.  Each succeeding onrush of words and descriptions wash away that which has an importance only in the immediacy.  By the end of the erosive process of reading and comprehending, all that remain are the mesas that constitute the harder rock of lasting relevancy. 

In my estimation, good learners are adept at selective forgetting. All that which is of value is retained and all that which has little or no utility is cast away as lost memory.  Casting away as lost memory is selective forgetting.  Soren Kierkegaard in “The Rotation Method” in Either/Or page 84 wrote:

“When someone has perfected the art of forgetting and the art of remembering, then he is in a position to play badminton with the whole of existence.  Nothing much will come to a man who cannot forget.”

Reading is learning with the prose being the lesson and the final self exam being the sigh and reflection upon turning the last page. Good teachers look at examination scores in two ways; first as a measure of the students ability to comprehend and, secondly, to assess their own effectiveness at teaching.  Writers should do the same thing with emphasis necessarily placed on the second because the feedback link from reader to author is broken as soon as the book is purchased and the sales counter rung up.

Am I saying that I have encoded the keys for piercing the temporal veil as visages of granite buried in a plethora of irrelevancy in the following pages?  Or that I expect the reader to earn the right to learn through some mystic process?  No.  I am neither so gifted that I can do so nor do I have the motivation to intellectually manipulate.  What I have tried to do is provide some raw ideas that are useful for the enticement of atemporal thinking.  What works for you - the individualized mesas that you construct - may not work for the next person.  At times it may appear that I inundate with words and ideas rife with temporalities rather than prune the obscuring distractions of time.  An analogy that you will meet in one of the essays is flying into the eye of a hurricane.  It is necessary to pass through the strongest part of the storm to get through to that area of calm.  Some but not all the tools that you need for rending the veil that separates us from God are in these pages.  It must be left entirely up to you to apply these concepts as they are written or, preferably, as you can modify and extend them based on your own belief system.