Mere being could become an event

Extensive as the ‘external’ world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited… It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabits the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the further we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldy, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, ‘normal’, apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.

– Rilke, letter (tr. Mitchell)

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