There’s this trick of life that makes you think that the sap on your palms from climbing a pine tree, or the cold snow melting and trickling down your back, are things more real than “abstract” things like Time, or Hate — but this is a mere accident of perspective.
When we want to understand things, we idolize the scientific method: we exert force on things we can hold in our hands or capture on film and observe the results. The problem is that because of our perspective, this approach works extremely well on things we can touch, and not very well at all on things we cannot touch. But death is nothing more than a crack in the lens of your glasses just before you take them off. The sap and the snow you felt in your fingertips may turn out to have been an illusion. When you can swim up and down Time as in a strongly-flowing river, when Hate is a rock you can pick up, or put down, you will know you have seen round to the other side.
Money’s another one: people say “you can’t take it with you” after you die. But it’s not that “you can’t take it with you,” it’s that it was always an illusion, something that only seemed like it had heft because of this accident of perspective, the same way Love seems like an illusion to a strict scientist or materialist. Your money never really existed at all except as a lever on your spirit, a pry bar on your deepest desires, which will turn out in the end to be more real, more tangible in your hand and in your mouth, than your possessions ever were.
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