An Invitation

[excerpt from WELL]

This is an invitation to the absolute and infinite.

Maybe you are old enough to remember a time when television was something that began and ended.

Programmes stopped at midnight. And began again at 9am the next day. And sometimes there was no television in the afternoons. When there was no television, the screen displayed the test card or lines or static.

Not only was it tightly limited in time, television was of course also limited in scope.

In the UK, for example, until 1993, there were only three channels available.

And it could only be watched in the living room. Or in the very posh houses on a portable tv on The Brand New Breakfast Bar.

So, television was finite. Limited. What could be experienced and when it could be experienced was defined, set out, entirely predictable. There were edges to it - with nothing beyond those edges. No other possibility.

This was the reality of tv.

Now…

Trying to explain this to my kids who have only known tv as boundary-less, as unlimited possibility with no start or end, is… interesting.

They inhabit a paradigm of media infinity that just cannot exist alongside the concept of limits in which I was brought up. A boundary in time, geography, scope or space is, to them, literally inconceivable. (When it comes to tv viewing options that is, cleaning on the other hand has very strict limits that are apparently set in stone.)

But when we were there in the early 1980s, watching our limited programmes at limited times (while eating our crispy pancakes and wearing our fluorescent headbands), the infinite (much like good nutrition and subdued fashion back then) was unimaginable.

And yet it was there the whole time, just waiting to be realised. All that was needed for it to be discovered was the readiness for it. The infinite was latent, always present - just not grasped.

As it is for tv programming, so it is for everything. The limits are only ever false limits, believed and inhabited unquestioningly until all of a sudden, they no longer exist and the unlimited is clearly all that has ever been.

Who we are is life itself - the infinite. We are not the tightly defined and boundaried idea of self. And the infinite is all there is.

We are the absolute and the infinite.  Infinite love. Infinite peace. Infinite joy. Infinite possibility.

We might, for a while, celebrate the narrow wins of an extension of that limitation as we did the introduction of breakfast tv or the arrival of channel 4.

The equivalents for the self of that momentary extension would be, for example, satisfaction with the body, temporary peace of mind, a brief experience of what we want to happen.

But today, we are not interested in the narrow wins that just redefine apparent limits.

This is an invitation to the infinite.

To the unconditional.

To what has always been.

To anything else being inconceivable.

To who we really are.