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The unique ubiquity and infinite actuality of life

As already described, on one fine day it was seen that ‘reality’, whatever that may be — but certainly, the source of everything that is in appearance — is one, and whole. It’s whole, or integral.

UNI-Verse

Thus, everything in appearance adds up to the one whole, or Universe. In appearance of course that whole is discriminated – or dis-integrated – or refracted1 – into apparently separate and distinct elements. But because there is one whole, it is seen that there can be no two discriminated elements that are identical. This is true in human experience: no two people, or animals, or plants, or days, or items are actually indistinguishable.

Humans attempt to manufacture in manufacturies items that are identical and indistinguishable – except for their serial number or sales ID. They aren’t. Nothing is identical to anything else…

But.

Warning, Geekiness ahead…
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

Any physicists reading this (hello, all one of you) will know that there are (apparently) indistinguishable elements in our (apparent) reality, even if they are not visible to the human eye. Sub-atomic ‘particles’ – electrons, protons, neutrons, for example – are indistinguishable from apparent others of their class.

The Princeton physicist Wheeler theorised light-heartedly (or apparently light-heartedly) that the problem of the identity of all such versions of one ‘particle’ – the electron – could readily be explained by there only existing one electron which travelled back and forth through time to appear at all possible positions that an electron could appear at, thus giving rise to the appearance. When travelling in one direction, the electron appears as itself, the fundamental unit of (arbitrarily) ‘negative’ electric charge. When travelling in the opposite direction in time, it appears as the positron, with the charge reversed to an arbitrary ‘positive’ (this is anti-matter).

Source


Non- physicists might think this an absurd proposal (and would be horrified by much that is taken for granted in the physicists’ current model of the universe!) but there is nothing in physics to render it implausible: ‘time’ is not something that appears in fundamental equations except as a direction.

The main objection physicists raised to this proposal is that if it were true, then an equal number of forward travelling electrons and reverse travelling electrons, aka positrons, are needed to cancel each other out – and this is not observed, at least here and now.

However, I would propose that the reason we observe less positrons than electrons is because the viewpoint we have is apparently moving in a ‘forward’ direction in time, this causing the asymmetry observed and also the imbalance between apparently-observed quantities of matter (lots of it) and anti-matter (not much). Whether this is mathematically feasible is beyond my capacity to investigate, and so my proposal is assuredly absurd nonsense.

Interestingly Wheeler, who was deeply engaged in the development of the current view that physics holds, came up with another conventionally-‘bizarre’ proposal, the ‘Participatory Anthropic Principle’, a statement that the apparent world is created by the presence of the Observer. To which I can only say, ‘Yes’.

Implicitly…

Equally, anything that has ever apparently existed is a reflection/projection/refraction of something unique and permanent in the permanent reality that lies behind.

As such, nothing real — that is, in its uniqueness — that has ever existed can really die, as it is a part of the timeless reality…

Image by Karin Henseler from Pixabay 
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…Many in One in Many in One in…

 ἓν τὸ πᾶν (“The All is One“) from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist 

Faced with the multiplicity of apparently-discrete objects, people, sensations — ‘the ten thousand things’ as Daoists have put it — how on Earth can it be maintained that reality is One?

It’s because it can be seen — is seen! — that there is just the One source, and that One is differentiated into the ‘ten thousand things’ by the actions of the senses.

Famously, Plato touched on this in his descriptions of how Idea was transmuted into Individual imperfect objects.

One analogy by which this somewhat difficult notion can be grasped is by considering the way that a prism breaks the one white light beam that enters it into many separate colours.

Which is truth? That there is one white light? Or multiple different-coloured light? Both are truth, they are the same thing, undifferentiated or differentiated aspects of the One whole. Interestingly, in principle (and quite recently, in practice) the multiple colours can be put back together to make the original white beam. And interestingly, and in practice — your own practice — the differentiated objects of perception can be perceived as being ultimately One.

Ubiquitous uniqueness

A non-obvious implication and consequence of the nature of the One is that everything perceived in existence is necessarily unique.

Consider another analogy: take a beautiful decorated vase, before and after it has inadvertently been dropped on the floor and smashed into ‘ten thousand things’.

Before it was one. Now it is many. The many still add up to the one, but putting it back together requires clear perception, skill, patience. Every part of the whole is different, by necessity, as there cannot be two parts of the one whole that are identical. Some parts may be very similar, but similar is not identical.

By analogy it can be seen that in existence, every thing that exists is necessarily, unimpeachably unique — for it comes from the differentiation of the One reality. Similarity there is: identicality there is not.

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‘I’ and ‘Will’

Image by 【中文ID】愚木混株 【ins-ID】cdd20 from Pixabay 

When false self disappears it becomes apparent that there’s only one ‘I’ in the universe. This sometimes is said as, there’s only One.

The notion of a personal ‘I’ is seen through, is seen as a phantom, it wavers in the fresh breeze flowing from the source of all and fades, never to be seen again.

What there is then has no personal sense of ‘I’ in it — it cannot be described, it will be personalised by description — it is indescribable but oh so actual, it’s there for you to live when you can: and then just be it. May it happen soon.

A related issue is the personal will.

A person has a will, after all, more or less, such is the appearance. The personal will is manifest in personal will-full-ness.

Does the personal will die at the same time as the personal ‘I’?

It may not. It may linger — or at least it did here. Or better, the notion of it lingered.

Until now.

Because it is seen that the notion of the personal ‘will’ is as deluded, as much of a figment, as the notion of the personal ‘I’.

There’s only one ‘Will’ in the Universe. Only One. Only one ‘I’.

In the ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ ways there is much talk of surrendering the personal will to the universal: a rather well-known example is ‘…yet not my will but Thine be done’, often used as a maxim and aim.

It is seen that this could not have been an enlightened master’s words. This could not have been said from the same clarity that said, ‘Why callest thou me good? there is none good but One’.

There could never have been in such a master, such a One-demeaning notion, as that there could ever be a secondary will, a ‘my will’ to set against the One Will. The notion lacks meaning.

There’s only One in the Uni-verse.

Image by moritz320 from Pixabay 
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Endless clues

Image by John Hain from Pixabay 

It’s all in there somewhere, the hidden gems in all the ‘holy books’, but it’s all buried in specious comment and lurid wrongheaded thoughtful interpretation by those who have not ‘attained the goal’ and so the whole lot appears, to the critical sense, to be nonsense.

It’s often clearer in the little sayings.

‘A full vessel can hold no more’

So, it is necessary to empty the vessel to let anything else in.

What’s it full of? Self. So what do you have to empty out? The self. Then there’s room for the no-self, the no-thing.

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The Dreaming

Image by Hermann Schmider from Pixabay  
 Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream

This is believed to be a traditional nursery rhyme and round. It’s actually of US origin. It may look like a nursery rhyme. It may work like a round (try it!)

But it’s actually a gift of truth…

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Ruminations, but not Rumi

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

Monism is as close as philosophy can get to the truth. Why? Because of Occam’s razor, rigorously applied. The physical world is produced by the sensory apparatus rather than the other way around. Who doubts it has yet to look hard enough.

The Idea that consciousness exists is just that, an Idea. It’s true while it is true. On the other hand, Idealism is closer to truth. The most radical cut to irreducible present fact is required, rather as Descartes attempted, but he was insufficiently radical in his reductionism. Only presently demonstrable experience can be admitted, all speculative extrapolation must be abandoned.

What is, is presence. ‘Thought’ is another shibboleth. No thought is required for presence, but few know that as they have not tamed thought. States do not exist. What exists is senses and their results, the apparent physical universe. No senses — no universe. The central self is false too.

‘Thought’, ‘consciousness’, ‘feelings’, ‘states’ — these are all false because only the present moment and its content actually IS, all else is false. Past false, future false.

In this moment I am conscious of that of which I am conscious and not conscious of what I am not conscious of.  The thoughtful act of reification of this present conscious awareness into ‘consciousness’ is false. There is no state of consciousness, only what I am conscious of. Equally in the absence of thoughtful speculation there is no movement in the moment, merely the experience of this moment…

Evidential confirmation: death and life. All philosophy, science, art and psychology collapse at the edge of physical reality, the black hole that is death.

The Eastern philosophies have for thousands of years stated the monist conclusion.

There are only two fundamental sciences, physics and psychology. Of course there are many emergent sciences, that are not reducible to just that. With psychology the emergent sciences are social and other non-reducible aspects, but psychology is fundamentally compromised by its abandonment of its primary field, the psyche. Physics envy has lead to attempts to mathematical-ise psychology but number is not the primary modality of conscious experience (except perhaps for a very rare few).

In terms of knowing there are more than three modalities. Well known are the scientific and artistic modes of knowing, very loosely attributable to the conocer/saber pairing.

But also there is a third different knowing sometimes indicated as gnosis or gnostic knowing. This unfortunately is largely identified with esoteric religious groups, but in real experience is referring to direct unmediated knowledge that is not dependent on any medium – intuition is a lower form of it.

And there may be non-knowing beyond.

That’s quite enough of that…

‘You must now live what you have been reading about’…

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
― Rumi, Masnavi i Man’avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula


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Perception’s place

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

For some time now I have been attempting to localise perception. What I mean by this is to locate where in apparent perceptual reality the differing perceptions lie. This can only make sense to those few attempting something similar.

Visual perception ‘seems’ to be immediately ‘in front’. The sensations of the body are down a bit and perhaps slightly to the right. Hearing is sensed behind the plane of the visual perceptions, it is ‘closer’. Taste is roughly aligned with most other body sensation. The guts are slightly to the left. Clearly I have no idea whether this is universal or unique — there’s few to compare notes with.

What is both universal and unique is the realisation that every bit of anger, violence, cruelty and exploitation I ever apparently perceive in the outer universe is not there at all. Its source is within me. It is actually projected into my (as I now, today, know) very intimate plane of perception through me. I am the source, I am the gate through which all that comes. All awfulness comes through me. All beauty, joy, kindness and love comes the same way.

I am the way. As a Man once said.

What comes along my way?

As another Man said, ‘Surrender’.

And what does Woman say? Men always pretend that it is woman who never stops talking, but paradoxically, as far as I can tell, Speech is not necessarily her Way. Her Way is Love, and that means Action, not Words.

WOMAN

Woman is a ray of God, not a mere mistress,
The Creator’s Self, as it were, not a mere creature!

Rumi

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Giftedness

I am gifted. Today, another gift.

That statement—‘I am gifted’—seems to make some claim about I.

The fact of it is, though, that ‘I am gifted’ means that I am receiving gifts!

Image by Jess Watters from Pixabay 

Today, 16 April 2018, the gift was a revelation of the nature of perception.

I have seen conceptually (via one of those gifts — but intellectualised) and for what seems to be a long time now, that the perceptions we have can be likened (inter alia) to images projected on a movie screen.

I have also for much time been aware of the ‘black and white’ (not really, but that will have to do) ‘grainy’ background that is there when the eyes are closed. More recently, I have become aware that the grainy screen is still there when the eyes are open.

Today I see by direct perception that the grainy background IS the ‘movie screen’. In difference to a movie theatre, the movie screen is not at a distance. I am ‘right up against it’, for want of a better image. The reality that I experience, the differentiated projection of the universal real into what appears as my senses, is at no distance from me at all. My nose is stuck right into it, again for want of a better description.

This means there is no space in there at all for a personal interpretation of this. It also means that the whole of my experience of reality, the bits I like and the bits I don’t, all is from the same immediate source and that source is ‘behind’ me (it’s not, or rather ‘behind’ is not the right direction, but the words to describe this direction do not exist, to my knowledge).

My perceptual position, my locus, is right at the edge of reality looking out into an (imperfectly?) reflective screen. The whole stream of sensation is coming up against that screen where it is reflected. ‘Distance’ is perceptual not real.

Everything in my perceived life, all the stuff I had used to ‘dislike’ or ‘despise’, and the lover who I so love at my apparent side, is coming from the same place, ‘behind’ me, in the root of reality.

What a gift.

I know absolutely nothing now.

Except – how do ‘I turn around’? Look to the ‘source’?

I saw earlier (some days ago) that the fact of my existence is due to the descent of a ‘focus of manifestation’ from what I suppose I would have to call ’source’ or ‘unlimited being’ which lies ‘behind’ me and is what gives me apparent form and substance, realises me. Presumably, when that focus is withdrawn the life ‘here’ ends…

“Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.”

Virginia Woolf: The Death of the Moth

This is as if my ‘face’, the projected front of me, has behind it an infinite thread springing from the ultimate source.

Some artists have represented this. How can they not? If the perceptions I am gifted are real and true they must be universal in the unconscious and be regularly caught up unconsciously by the species, as I find to be the case here and there in all art.

Is that the value of art, to represent unconscious aspects of reality that are otherwise unrealised? Perhaps.

The art of realisation is to make the unconscious conscious.

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On reality…

From here where I now am placed I see the problem with the whole of what we call human society and culture. That problem is that the whole thing is premised on a set of complete falsehoods; though hardly anybody is aware of this. Better, no-one!

The first great falsehood, of which people are more or less aware but of which they are not presently conscious, is that we are all quite apparently going to die. This means that whatever we accumulate in our lives is going to be left behind.

As I say, most people have some awareness of this but they don’t seem to allow this awareness to guide their behaviour in life. The limited animal aspiration to accumulate resources and dominate the local environment is transmuted in the ‘human’ being into an unlimited and knowing desire to accumulate without limit and dominate all. Driving it all, the fear of loss, and ultimately fear of death; a fear that animals apparently lack except when the threat is imminent—as they lack reflexive knowing.

The fundamental core belief that lies within such conceptions as ‘capitalism’ is that ‘more is better’. Of course more than nothing is most definitely better for those who are starving or have nowhere to live. But once you have the basic requirements of life sorted out, how much more do you need?

Is it perhaps the case, that if everybody only took what they needed, there would be enough for everybody to have what they needed?

The other more toxic reality that lies behind this and every other part of the posturing of human life is the second falsehood. This is the promotion of the self and its needs as being the central imperative of all human action. Of course, this also lies at the root of capitalist acquisition which is acquisition for the self. The problem here is, as remarkably few people ever find out, that the self is not real. Consequently all its apparent actions, aims, imperatives, and goals, are also completely unreal. One has to find this out for, err, oneself, of course…

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Thinker, RIP

Today, with the arrival of the 25th of March 2018 and the coming of BST, I have awoken to the departure (or better, dethronement) of another old ‘friend’, the resurgent and insistent ‘thinker’.

For many years ‘I’1 have attempted to first, gain awareness of, and then, break the continuity of the self-referential internal dialogue. It’s the internal voice of self-commentary. It’s secondary, and it’s false in its claims to be primary. I had used to call it, after the practice of many others, ‘the thinker’, but have stopped doing that… more on that elsewhere.

With the loss of, or self-destruction of, or implosion of, the central ‘I-self’2, that continuous narrative that there is a self; it was seen that a lot of freedom from the impositions of ‘the thinker’ arrived at the same time. It was easy– well, easier– to throw off ‘the thinker’.

As described previously, it has been much easier to shift attention from thought to the now-continuously-available sensation of the sensory body. Still, however, when at rest, the thinker would often start up.

Just to describe this, the thinker is triggered mostly by images, often by reference to memories of emotional events that relate to images, and sometimes by similarities in circumstances.

But today, there’s a wonderfully echoing silence here. The same silence that was first encountered, briefly but life-changing-ly, over 30 years ago.

‘The thinker’ is not gone. But it’s stopped yacking, for now at least.

Oh, ‘I’ have a vacation! I’m vacant!

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Continuous presence

It is noticed, realised, that there is now an almost unbroken timeless experience of continuous presence.

What’s that?

Well, it is the continuous location of the senses — presence — within the sensory universe that starts with the body. It’s a continuous ‘in-the-body-experience’.

This is not the opposite of an ‘out-of-body-experience’. It is rather its obverse, perception within its locus of origin.


© Copyright Sam Blight, used with permission

At all times the body-as-sensation is readily available as a sensational reality, just by attending on it.

Previously it had been necessary to wrench attention away from whatever its object was, and drag it towards the sensations of the body – where it would then, reluctantly, rest for a while.

Now it is a simple act of focus. The senses have returned to their home.

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What’s it like?

Image by Harald Lepisk from Pixabay 

What’s the difference? When one is lightened? What happens in the very ordinary day-to-day? That is, today? What goes on, what’s evolving? Is anything evolving? Or just revolving?

Is ‘enlightenment’ an end — or a beginning?

Well — let’s try to document some of that.

Stream of consciousness? Nah. ‘Consciousness’ is actually self-aware, as perhaps may become clear.

Let’s just look at ‘aware’ without any self in it… I can’t promise any of it will immediately ‘make sense’ for you though… you have to make your own senses. Best bet to check — does anything ring a bell? Have the sound of the truth?

Whatever enlightenment is, it’s not over until it’s over, after all…