Neither Bored Nor Waiting

Harvest Of Stars, 30.

Eiko has had to conceal download Guthrie in the upper branches of the Tree. She asks:

"How have you been?'

"'Bored.'

"'I am sorry,' she repeated, while thinking that she would not have been. To rest without hunger or thirst or any need of motion, amidst sky and Tree!" (p. 287)

 

Eiko shares the perspective of an extraterrestrial/supernatural being imagined by CS Lewis (author). When Lewis (character) asks whether that being:

 

"'...has been waiting in the next room all these hours?'"

 

- Ransom replies:

 

"'Not waiting. They never have that experience. You and I are conscious of waiting, because we have a body that grows tired or restless, and therefore a sense of cumulative duration. Also we can distinguish duties and spare time and therefore have a conception of leisure. It is not like that with him. He has been here all this time, but you can no more call it waiting than you can call the whole of his existence waiting. You might as well say that a tree in a wood was waiting, or the sunlight waiting on the side of a hill.'"

-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), 2, p. 168.

 

Then Lewis is:

 

"...made to stand before the featureless flame which did not wait but just was..." (ibid.)

 

And we practice being, not waiting, in zazen.

 

(Eiko experiences the Tree and Lewis mentions "...a tree in a wood...")