Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge

Pt. 2 - The Soul Outside of Time

The Soul Outside of Time

Fionn grows from infant to boy, being taught not only by his mother’s sisters in the arts of story, poetry and hunting, but by the shifting movement of the seasons and the minute lessons of the natural world in which he lives. Above all, he learns how to see, to listen, and to feel. The description is an old one of idyllic timelessness. It may be that many of the human myths, legends, and creation stories of a past golden age are the placing of this childhood vision into a mythical context. A childhood vision that may seem far from our daily work experience, but one that underlies much of our agony at the lack of time in the accelerated world of the corporation.

In the Zen tradition they say, “We study the self to forget the self.” It may be that the child has a vision of the world that has not yet crystallized into self and not self. This is not to say that childhood is by definition idyllic; many of us carry remembered horrors of the loneliness and powerlessness of that time. But whatever timelessness we did experience somehow lives on inside, and refuses to die, whether brought to the surface of our present busy work lives or not. As a way of reminding ourselves, we tell stories that carry the timelessness encoded in their details. Storytelling evolves as an art partly because we become self-conscious or wisely tired of our own personal story as the final arbiter of reality. Tired of placing ourselves at the center of the world, we tell a story to say the same thing in a more embracing context. We say, “The Boyhood of Fionn,” or “The Garden of Eden,” or “Once in Royal David’s City.”

Fionn is the portion of each of us that understands physically what it means to live in eternity, where eternity is not an endless amount of time but an experience outside of time, free from the stress of never being enough or having enough. A numinous experience of the present where we forget ourselves in the consummation of the moment. Perhaps more important, Fionn is the part of us that refuses to forget that experience. His story takes us through a series of initiations to a seminal moment of self-knowledge.

Fionn grows to maturity in the shadow of constant threat, and in his growing strength as a youth the storm clouds of jealousy whipped up by the sons of Morna begin to gather about him, until, deciding his place of hiding could no longer protect him, and called by his future, he sets off into the world.

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