Synopsis

Ancient wisdom: Creation indicates an unsatisfied desire on the part of the creator. If the Ultimate Reality be complete or perfect in itself and self-satiated, then the act of creation can never be predicated of it. But if there be no creation how can one explain the multiplicity of empirical experience in the universe? Because this is the very nature of the Effulgent Being

Are heat and light attributes of sunshine? Of course, but they are not in themselves sunshine. Neither are they different from sunshine. In the same way embodied beings are attriutes of the Ultimate Reality, the undivided being. They (we) are not in ourselves the undivided being, the Ultimate Reality. Neither are we different. We are, as attributes, markers, manifestations of that from which we owe our relative existence. As such we can also be said to be the means by which that Ultimate Reality, undivided being is, or can be, known, understood. So! In the same way heat and light are ways of knowing or understanding sunshine, embodied beings, you and I, are ways of knowing or understanding Ultimate Reality, undivided being.

Jesus was, is an attribute of God, the Father. He was, is not God, the Father, but neither was, is he different from him. What he was is a way of knowing or understanding God, the Father. Jesus was - is - God as man. He was, is a Man-God.

Heat and light could also be said to be, besides mere attributes, instrumentation by which sunshine exercises a creative force. Heat and light make life, grasses, trees, creatures, possible.

We sentient life forms are like that, too. We can be said to be co-creators of the Ultimate Reality, undivided being, instruments by which God has self experience and by which he grows, cultivates the manifested universe because we share his very nature as an effulgent being. Notably, the emergence of sentient life runs concurrently with the emergence of things like love, truth, wisdom, liberty, justice, and beauty. What else is waiting in the wings to be made manifest? We have only just begun!

The realization of the non dual nature of the Ultimate Reality - that it is undivided being - is the condition for understanding what is said here. From that standpoint the relative existence of the world(s) of manifested beings, the phenomenal universe, is illusory, not real in itself, neither is it different from the phenomenal universe, but exists as an aid to realizing its true nature, our true nature, God's true nature.

God appears as the world without forfeiting his essential nature.

Nagarjuna's Philosophy as presented in the Maha-Prajnaparamita Sastra by K. Venkata Ramanan

I ask you, can you put your hand in the same river twice? Raja Rao

Does a waterfall ever change? Raja Rao

It is with rash insolence that we belittle the great to our own measure, as when talking of God. Blaise Pascal

Neither doeth anyone know the Father, but the son, and he to whom it shall please the son to reveal him. Matthew 11-27

As stated previously, I am not a scholar which does not mean I won't enter into some conjecture about the religious or philosophical schools of India, the world. Here I am primarily concerned with Nagarjuna's philosophy. I've written about Yoga, the Mandukya Upanishad also. A cursory reading by anyone reveals all those involved in the development, establishment, furtherance, of these systems were well versed in the work of their coevals, predecessors. A common style, common thread is discernible. They contend with one another, vie for attention, compete, use one another's work as part of the learning process, as talking points. It has ever been so. Taken together the various formulations, structures, make a kind of dialectic. One leads to the next and is developed further and another plateau is established as ground for even more developed systems. Centuries, millennia are involved, yet these people, enlightened beings, talk to each other like you and I might, so, like contemporaries. They must have had a sense of time not common to most people. Buddha makes his mark and Jesus, a close study would reveal, counters with another. And, this writer, at least, finds it interesting that Jesus and Buddha walked the earth so near one another in time and that their teaching had in common an emphasis on compassion or love. Great teachers, Lords, appear and are followed immediately by those who would explain or amplify the insights. The author of the Mandukya Upanishad, Guadapada gives way to Sankara for amplification. In later times Desani puts it all in order for a new generation. It is like a celestial orchestration of self realization, actualization. And, to be sure, the bloom is ever on that rose. For any who have developed an appreciation, these expositions are exquisitely beautiful. The proponents were dedicated to and loved their work. One is joined in their joy of having found the precious gems and delighted in sharing them with anyone who might benefit. True, its said, some authors would sign well known names to their work in order to get attention; for instance, the Bhagavad Gita was a later work than the parent to which it is attributed - it is said.

The commonalities abound in Judeo Christian and Indian philosophies. and are centered around self realization, actualization, understanding the Truth. At University Raja Rao taught a course on Mahayana Buddhism. The text book was the one in the title of this post. An internet search reveals this work is still in print.

So, from the Vedas of the Indian sub-continent, to the contributions of Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle East, to the Upanishads, back in India, to Tibet, to China, Japan, its a long road from antiquity to modern times. Nagarjuna, who likely lived about a century after Christ, five centuries after the Gautama Buddha, takes up the task of setting to right what he considers to be the straying teachings of those who came after the Buddha. It might be said he was to the Buddha as Jesus' disciples were to him, though, of course, the disciples were contemporaries of Jesus.

Ramanan was a fellow at Harvard's Yenching Institute and this work was published with their assistance. Nagarjuna's Prajnaparamita, which means the way of the perfection of wisdom wasn't available in India at that time. Dr. Ramanan, traveling in China, found a copy translated by one Kumarajiva. It is also noted that Kumarajiva translated some texts on dhyana (meditation) and that his disciple, Tao-Sheng has been credited with founding the precursor to Ch'an (or Zen) Buddhism .

Buddha, Nagarjuna were proponents of the so called Middle Way (Madhyamika) which in turn came under the heading of Mahayana Buddhism, the highest truth of which is known, realizable in the state reached through contemplation, meditation, trance (dharna, dhyana, samadhi) as Nirvana.

Nirvana is not the Judeo-Christian heaven and, for that matter Buddha was never proclaimed as God. The family unit used in Judeo-Christianity as a metaphor to make easily understood the basic principles of the ultimate reality is not used at all in Buddhism. For that matter it isn't used in any of the systems with which this writer is familiar except the Abrahamic religions. Buddha was considered Lord and no doubt it could be claimed, as I do, that he enjoyed a hypostatic union with the divine creative spirit, the ultimately real substratum from which mundane, relative existence comes to be. Relative existence, mundane things, are said to have conditioned reality and really are nothing in themselves. Having originated in the undifferentiated, changeless, unutterable ground of reality they reflect the ultimate even while having no separate existence. As ever changing entities they owe their essence to that from which they emanate, from which they spring and return to on expiring.  The manifest has no self being and the purpose of the created is only to fulfill the potentialities of the substratum.

Buddha's core teaching was to make accessible a path out of the suffering, pain of existence in this world. To this end a great edifice of categories, causes, effects, a virtual world of sometimes very intricate formulae was built up and taught in a great variety of ways to his followers. Many other schools of thought on these matters existed before and clearly Buddhism takes these into account. After all, the Vedas date back perhaps four or five thousand years. They are the basis of Hinduism and the Upanishads are considered late or post Vedic writings.

It doesn't take a scholar to see the common threads running through these ancient texts. The Prajnaparamita lays them out in a concise, easily understood manner. As already mentioned a basic tenet is that the conditioned reality has no meaning other than that borrowed from the unconditioned, ultimately real. Things of dependent origination are sunya, empty. What is Real is the conditioned in its eternal aspect.

What is common in all philosophy, in  all religion is the thirst for the Real. All that differs is the Way to that end. Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, the Life. No man cometh to the father except by me." Buddha said the same thing substituting the ultimate reality for father. He said he actually was the unconditioned reality apart from that conditioned form with which he was embodied, made apparent. Made apparent. What is made apparent? Well, it is obfuscated by clinging. Clinging to illusion, to passion, to false knowledge, all kinds of things. Only proper understanding cultivated over a long time, with compassion, without hatred, anger, greed, in short, with clean living, can lead to a full self-realization; but mostly, avoiding the error of misplaced absolutes leads one to the truth of the undivided nature of ultimate reality, birthlessness, unaffected by time.

Nagarjuna set himself to the exposition of the teachings of the Prajnaparamita-sutras which "...embody the central teaching that the ultimate nature of the determinate is itself the unconditioned reality - that in the ultimate truth, the undivided being, there is no division of conditioned and unconditioned.." The wise do not cling to the determinate as indeterminate. The wise do not cling at all. What is speakable is determinate. Only silence, for the wise, pertains to the highest truth. Thus it is that the tendency to seize is the root of conflict and suffering.

The indeterminate is not a separate reality from the determinate, something to be realized transcendentaly, because determinate entities are dependent on the indeterminate as their ground. The ultimate truth cannot be taught, says Nagarjuna except in the context of the mundane. The ultimate truth can, however, be comprehended and only then can Nirvana be attained. I would add that its unlikely that it would be granted by a higher being though I believe that one who sets himself to the task gains assistance in some way from beings greater than ourselves. This I was taught. It has to be an achievement of one's own efforts to have a full meaning. No specific view can be had of that. Being a specific view connotes divided being. Thus it is said that silence is the ultimate truth for the wise.

This makes me reflect again on Rabbinic Judaism. YHWH is supposed to be God's name. But it has no vowels, is unpronounceable. Seems to me that the same understanding of the ultimate reality is at play here as for the Buddhists. The ultimate reality cannot be known, named, owned, or even pronounced. Only the conditioned can and this is owning an illusion since the conditioned has no reality, essence, unique to itself as a seemingly separate entity. To name God is to bind the ultimate reality to the world of named objects. I suppose that, also, is why Soren Kierkegaard made his well known statement that God doesn't exist, he is eternal. Well. Simple people need something to carry them over life's troubles and I've no quarrel if they want to name the unnameable. It gives comfort to have a personal savior and it is good that it aids some in their efforts to surrender to God. But, really, one doesn't need a named deity for surrender. To realize the true nature of the ultimate reality in relation to mundane existence leads to a kind of evenmindedness which is the same as resignation to a God concept.

To reiterate. "Mundane existence itself becomes possible, conceivable, only on the ground of the unconditioned reality." And, "That which is of the nature of coming and going, arising and perishing, in its conditioned (mundane) nature is itself Nirvana in its unconditioned (ultimate) nature...the unconditioned reality is the ground of the conditioned, contingent entities." Therefore it can be said the world of becoming (Samsara) is Nirvana.

But those are just words to be made real, given the universal, cosmic, import they vainly attempt to embody. It is a pretty statement but living it is a different matter altogether. One has to see it with the eye of the Buddha.

There are claimed to be five eyes which this writer finds corresponds with the five Yogic levels of Samadhi. Based on that, the Dharma-Megha-Samadhi of the Yoga practice would correspond to the "eye" of the Buddha, the fifth eye. In Yoga that would be at the level of the ultimate reality characterized as Kaivalya, silence. For Buddhism that would correspond to Nirvana. It is a state in which silence prevails, in which the mind falls away and consciousness alone shines forth. The true nature of all is established in its own right. Determinate reality would no longer be seized as ultimate. The one who goes this way is entirely free from becoming.  The ground of the conditioned is understood as the unconditioned reality. The basic elements of existence are comprehended as not ultimate.

Such an achievement cannot be put into words. Words can be used to point the way, like a finger pointing at the moon, but clinging to the finger prevents actually seeing the moon as clinging to the teaching actually prevents, inhibits, seeing the Real. The best that can be hoped for is to follow the words, the teaching, till a point is reached where it is realized that beyond here is uncharted territory and a leap of faith is needed. That leap is into understanding, or comprehension. A potentiality is realized, created anew, and that latency, manifested renewal, becoming, continues in a new light. Life is continuous renewal which means, basically, that it is the freedom to create. It is taught that the mind, and consciousness, operating through various vehicles operate to satisfy the so called thirst for the Real. As one progresses on this path the vehicles become more and more subtle till only the main instrumentality of consciousness, the mind remains. When that too, by meditation, is compelled to dispel itself, then the last veil covering consciousness itself falls away and the "seer is established in his own right."

To be illuminated in or by consciousness is to borrow, take loan of a conditioned reality and it is mind that operates here. Existence is an attribute for that relative entity, the mind.

Process and simultaneity.

Fire. Each moment of a flame's death is simultaneous with the birth of the next moment of the fire in the continuing process of burning. Fire is a constant renewal involving extinction and rebirth. That is a good metaphor for life. Subsets of simultaneous processes continuously work together to produce the phenomenon. The fire as process rests on top of multitudes of supporting conditions right down through molecular action to the sub-atomic participants of neutrons, protons, electrons and below these the quarks, muons, leptons, neutrinos, the pi-mesons, the higgs boson. The complexity is astonishing and needs to be appreciated when a claim is put forth that something is known or even knowable, or, for that matter even there at all except as an essentially empty shell. Some say, particle physicists, for instance, that without the higgs boson nothing at all of the phenomenal world would have mass. Therefore it is called the God Particle.

One breath, dieing, gives birth to the next. One instance of flame, dieing, gives birth to the next. For fire it happens so quickly that the separate parts are not discernible. Breathing, while following the same principle, is so much slower that the parts are easily discernible. Where does this principle take us? One star, dieing, gives birth to the next. One Universe, dieing, gives birth to the next. How about one God, dieing, gives birth to the next? Or put a bit differently, one Reality (Dharma), dieing, gives birth to the next? Becoming is, it seems, simultaneous birth and death. The way of the ever new follows this principle. For Buddhism this principle conflates into becoming, the elements of which do not really exist as discrete entities. The process has a stronger claim on the Real. Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, in opposition to Heraclitus, asserted something similar when stating reality is one, not many. The "many" therefore cannot be seized, held, owned, defined, bounded. In themselves they are not actual, real. They have no svabhava, self being, you see. Therefore phenomenal reality is illusory and the manifold being empty carries over to the ultimate reality which is itself likewise sunya, empty. Yet the manifested world has relative reality and finds its meaning and purpose in pointing to the substratum from which it, so to speak, borrows its reality as it ever and anon springs forth anew. Effulgence.

In this emanation we find, or try to find, or confirm, or manifest, or realize, ourselves. We have potentialities unknown but we do know the urge to actuate these, to fulfill, to make alive, to realize. If there is a meaning, purpose, to this can it be known or understood? Many have tried and failed. Many have tried and had partial success. The philosophies of the world must be appreciated in this light. Accordingly, a kind of evenmindedness is the most efficacious approach to life to be had. For those who fare the middle way, the way of the Madyamika this is known as non-clinging.

Notable, to this writer at least, one does not find in Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga the ideas of the ultimate reality conferring on the manifest, particularly sentient life forms, universality, or conversely, embodied beings conferring on the ultimate reality individuality, enabling thereby the substratum, whatever it is in itself, if it is anything at all in itself, the gift of self awareness. Not directly at least is this taught or appreciated in the East, or for that matter in the West, either. My mentor, G.V. Desani, did teach this, saying that the person is the instrumentality of "God's" self knowing. So, we are the means by which the ultimately real has self knowledge, enjoys, experiences itself. And, yes, by the methods of the East you can realize the ultimate but does that make you co-creator? Are we in partnership with the Divine Creative Spirit? Is eternality conferred on man in what would be a hypostatic union? Does, conversely, this relationship confer on the ultimate, individuality? I think it is implied but not necessarily specified in all the spiritual practices if one goes deep enough into the esoterica. For it seems to me that, clearly, in it's ultimate nature, any and all manifestation is essentially identical with the substratum. Therefore a fully self realized individual, Jesus, Buddha, "spark of the divine" is a wholly manifest instance of the ultimate reality. The Word incarnate. Put differently, the ultimate reality, whatever it might be in itself is totally, completely exhausted in the mundane, nothing at all being held back, reserved. So, and the Mahayana of Nagarjuna agree on this point when they express that the world of becoming, Samsara, is when seen from the right perspective, Nirvana. As Edward Conze puts it in his paper The Ontology of the Prajnaparamita "Nirvana and I are absolutely different. I cannot get it, and it cannot get me. I can never find it, because I am no longer there when it is found. It cannot find me, because I am not there to be found. But Nirvana, the everlasting, is there all the time. 'Such-ness is everywhere the same, since all dharmas have already attained Nirvana.'" The ultimate reality is that all of conditioned nature, all of the mundane and/or manifest is illusory. There's no division at all in the ultimate reality. Clinging to anything at all introduces division.

Yet Professor Irwin Lieb's saying that the only true individual is the entire universe, taken all as one, is easy, though, not so much realizing it, acting on it, living it. Jesus and Buddha and others having done so show us the way but we must nevertheless walk that path for ourselves alone. The flame, dieing, gives birth to another. Setting one's self up to be that other is a lovely dream to be realized by extremely rare individuals.

And by emptiness fullness is known, understood. So Samsara, the world of becoming, is not in itself Nirvana, the ultimate reality.Yet neither is it different from that. For to cling to either is to fall into error, what Nagarjuna would name eternalism. The philosophy of Prajnaparamita, the path of the perfection of wisdom, teaches that the tendency to cling, to "reduce the great to our own measure" is a most difficult error to root out. So, from the standpoint of the ultimate reality Samsara might be Nirvana, but only if one realizes it, in a sense, owns what is impossible to own. In other words, without the direct input of a Tathagata, one who goes the way of Buddhahood, it is not actualized, remains potential. So for Samsara to be Nirvana requires input, so to speak, of a sentient life form. One who has this attainment might be said worthy of having co-creator status.

This is a stretch, but thinking outside the box, one might go so far as to say God has gone astray and it is our duty to bring him back to reality. That might be, in part, what it means to be a co-creator. A notion from Rabbinic Judaism is that God having created the world withdrew so as to make room for man. Well, another take on that is that he didn't withdraw at all. He just became so involved in his creation, shall we say, lost in his work? that he forgot his true nature. So, as embodied beings we are tasked with helping him realize same, come back to himself. From another perspective one might say God descends into matter, sleeps there in order to, on awakening, reascend a fully self realized being (Jesus, Buddha) to his own nature as a kind of renewal while at the same time benefiting the people of his creation, reviving their interest in realizing as much as possible their own true nature, this done out of love or compassion. This too gives a sense of what it is for Samsara to be Nirvana; as a means of refreshing a self realized being. What is a sentient life form other than the instrumentality of this renewal?

Involved in matter. This absorption amounts to the loss of true nature. Absorption in an endeavor frees abilities, might be a way of realizing hidden capabilities. Working from the bottom up created man makes of the sacred, individuals, whereas the sacred makes man, immortal and in hand with that it goes without saying that the variety of individuals is endless.

We would know God, the ultimate reality, as a final Thing. It would give us great comfort to have that. But ipso facto this reduces these to mundane reality. These are not like other things we own, have direct access to. Essentially they are unknowable. How can one know that which constantly changes? "Can you put your hand in the same river twice?" I know, it is said by some that God is the same today, yesterday, and forever. But that is defining "him" by man's measure, putting him in a package we can take along with us. In reality he is certainly not different than that but at the same time he is not limited by that either. Finally, one must give up trying to understand and just be resigned to that; in other words one must, in order to be on the right path, simply surrender to God. Silence. Be still. Accept without any imposition at all. If you would be full first become empty.

It is by the manifest that we first apprehend the ultimate reality though when focused on the manifest understanding of the ultimate reality is inhibited to the extent of the clinging thereto. We might be walking down a path and see a snake there but on closer examination realize it is only a rope that our mind mistook for a creature. The snake imagined, still is real in a sense, but not in itself. Only the substratum, the rope, the ultimate reality, is real and the imagined snake has borrowed its reality from that rope and must relinquish it when realized to be an illusion.

Consummation

The Ultimate Reality is the whole Universe as the ground or substratum of all  mundane manifestation, of all divided entities. It is the only true individual on which all else depends. It is the conditio sine qua non, if you will. Its easy and natural to combine, conflate, all that is into one reality completely empty whatsoever. All the divisions of the Universe as a whole are of dependent origination no different, in principle, than the snake in the rope. There is only one thing here and it is that on which all "things" depend for their borrowed existence.

Venkata Ramanan, citing Nagarjuna, writes that when the bodhisattva attains Buddhahood "light emerges from the top of his head." Interesting, I think, to compare that to the Christian Pentecost.

The disciples went into the "upper room", which I think is a metaphor for meditation where one focuses consciousness in the region of the top of the head. There "appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit..."

Ramanan also writes that the Bodhisattva "...realizes the ability to understand the different languages of different kinds of beings and gains also the ability to teach every one in one's own language."

At the Christian Pentecost when the tongues of fire came to rest on the disciples they "...began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim." And "...there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language."

I cite these items because, easily discerned, my purpose is to harmonize the various modes of self realization mankind has practiced.

The final word goes to a scholar, Edward Conze, which is congruent with the thought expressed herein of another scholar, my professor, Irwin Lieb. I am of the opinion that Nagarjuna and the Buddha himself would agree with Conze's statement that "The ontology of the Prajnaparamita is a description of the world as it appears to those whose self is extinct."

 

 

 

Potpourri

My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

A lyrical mystique pervades in parts that lay skillfully against the march of the beloved infinite regress of efficiency of west world which is given expression in a language that to me treats the object of language as a kind of abstract space or form. The use is correlative to the use of these elements in the visual art of America in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. Objects are seen to become muddled in each other. Does the arm of this nude end here? Does it matter? The object looses its boundary. Man lives more in the infinite each minute. So? Well, he does it less and less from the standpoint of the finite. One despairs of the body, the medium of existential mass. The sensual genius revels in music as the medium. One such obviously recognizes the absurd and is making in the same movement a grasp for faith. I am here in my body, a finite articulation of the infinite. This is how I find myself fundamentally, the condition without which nothing. This is home.

Concept and culture.
Compare psyche and pneuma, Greek and Latin, animus and spiritus.
In preliterate culture breath (psyche) and life (pneuma) were more or less equivalent, while in literate culture we can speak of these in two senses, one in which they are equal and one where they are not.

The exodus is the mother of the myth of creation. The Jews were brought out of Egypt. The world was brought out of the cosmos, of infinity.

What leads to self realization, the bringing of the absolute to the front of the consciousness, is vibration, frequency, whether visual, audible, or mental; the entering of the state of consciousness returning on itself is inevitably accompanied by the occurrence of a precipitating encounter of the “individual” soul with a certain harmony that, like a rose bears its fragrance, bears the “fragrance” of Ultimate Reality.

Desani, March 14, 1973
Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high Samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

The daemonic urge is the erotic in nature gone wild.
The medium of architecture and sculpture is existential mass.

Jan 30, 1973
My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

The unadulterated spirit is will. Will is power. The urge to go beyond the self, the daemonic urge, or romanticism, is a perversion of this power. Classicism to the extent that it elevates the intellect, or dwells on the distinction that can be made between the power of the mind, rationalism, and mere corporeality, sets up a tendency toward adulteration of the will. The next logical step from classicism is toward romanticism; one is respite for the other, in our history, in my personal life.

The daemonic spirit appeared through the movement of Christianity. Physical attraction, the daemonic urge, being suppressed was instead given prominence, life, perpetuated. What was natural was made evil. What was corrupted was faith, the opportunity for self actualization.

Romanticism – The daemonic spirit, erotic in nature, the sensuous genius of Don Juan, the music of Mozart.
The attempt of the soul to go beyond itself. The urge to see reality as greater than itself. The attributing to God what is properly shared by God/man when properly joined.

Music, absolutely speaking, gives perfect expression to romanticism, the post human force. Music is the most abstract medium.

Sculpture or architecture gives perfect expression to existential mass, pre-human force. It is the most concrete medium and is, as existential mass, the medium of architecture or sculpture. The only substance concrete enough to be worked for these. Music can not be a medium for sculpture.

Language, the word, gives perfect expression to the existential spirit; it is the medium most perfectly suited to express inwardness. The spirit, the void, is the beginning and end of force.

I feel the urge of romanticism, I give it perfect expression by making it into music.

I feel the urge of existential mass, I give it perfect expression by making it into sculpture or architecture.

An expression in language, in thought, is of inwardness. The perfect expression is one that expresses inwardness. Does every expression participate to a degree in this?

By virtue of regress a certain freedom - who can deny complexity which where is now, which time is there, on your beloved papers packed in their particularity, above below, between beyond?

What can I say that will stop the world, reveal the lives? The man centered universe? You expect an answer? You tempt a man who has elephants?

I do not make fun, but play; but loosing my pen my pen my pen the seed is extinguished.

Excited ideas carry away a place where presence in you is eternally presupposed. First meetings where the simplest seeds, just a transparent gaze of eyes into mind falling on most fertile furrows of honest openness where what now grows is rapidly evolving configuration tumbling cataclysmically in and about each other spontaneously like a waterfall of thought and emotion. Like light playing on light in the abyss, ecstatic revelation of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our joined eyes play like solar flares and which alone could support our perpetual falling and simultaneously reflect our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of progressive subtlety till finally I am a mere benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into fluttering enticement.

The path we follow is in a sense the wake of our thoughts and emotions preceding us. This note is a part of that path, a sign post on the way.

“Thinking and the object of thought are the same for you will not find thought apart from being, nor either of them away from utterance.” Parmenides

We are what we seek in an artificial other, yet out of fear, perhaps, of being alone in the universe we are blinded by the nearness of the truth. Yet the thirst for the real is so great that finally all barriers fall as one embraces this last of a thousand demons, loneliness.

Bronowski
Errors can’t be taken out of observation. Stars or atoms; we can’t fix their location, boundaries. There is no scientific certainty. There is no God’s eye view. Errors are bound up in the nature of human knowledge. Fire electrons at atoms of thorium; we see a blurred outline. The act of observation inevitably shapes the observed.

Max Bohm stated that theoretical physics is actually the new philosophy

About 4.5 billion years till the sun dies.

Bodies stopped changing one million years past. Brains stopped changing about 100,000 years ago. Man’s evolution is perhaps in a way a closed chapter. But life itself? Consider that a billion years ago the worm was the most advanced form of life: at some time in the future a form of life will evolve that is a quantum leap above humanity. Perhaps it already is here but hidden.

Heisenberg. No events can be described with certainty.

Plank. The area of uncertainty in the atom is mapped out by the quantum.

It is true that any recognition whatsoever occurs only within certain tolerances. How the mind works. What if the mind is removed?

The theory of uncertainty fixes the fact that knowledge is limited. And understanding? And consciousness?

Measurement is not the same as understanding.

Hiroshima. 6th August, 1945, 8:15 a.m.

More Bronowski. Science does not turn people into unthinking, unfeeling monsters, psychotic invalids. The search for absolutes does. Hitler’s Germany is an example of what happens when people think they have certain knowledge. The scientific art is always on the verge of error and is therefore personal in that the witness sees himself as responsible for eliminating error, or for going further into it.

We must rid ourselves, all humanity, of the itch for absolutes.

Here is what I am perhaps looking to say. I am not so much the person John Hinds as I am a being in the primitive matter of the universe finding articulation through John’s activity. I am his spirit. He lives through me and I through him. It’s a matter of intention, ascending intensities, a continuum; John and his spirit are really one in one projecting simultaneously the universe. What an awesome task. Mind comes to matter to produce consciousness.

To supercharge with possibility sometimes with ambiguity in speech is to violate expectation, to startle, stun, silence. And then you are open, don’t know what to expect so the possibilities are endless. And whatever does happen is complete in and of itself because vulnerability asks for nothing more than what just comes out of each momentary necessity. This is the secret of real manipulation, for instance in advertising, or in the springing of the eternal trap by fear and panic, its eternal components. An exquisite move, whatever the medium (architecture, dance, painting, music, prose, poetry, philosophy) is merely one that provides a moment of surprise which provides what is really the object. Silence. In that openness, vulnerability, the message is given and it goes to the person because he has been stunned into vulnerability, into non-clinging. They have his attention and therefore his intention. Polarities and spin merge to a common purpose.

Ambiguity in speech is poetic. It makes for lightness which makes for uncertainty. There is also repetition, variation, transformation. Variation follows only when expectation is violated. Repetition is what is expected.

The silence, the sweet play of figures.

The wind sometimes blows so hard and so fast here, that it takes on a new meaning. It is fierce, awesome in its power to subdue everything in its way. Yet in the evening as the sun sets and the wind subsides, branches, grasses, dust, and birds respond to subtler forces than the departed winds. The dance continues in a different tone, at a different pace. Orchestration of the infinite.

Medieval world view was world as center of universe and man as center of world. Man was the measure of all things. Faith was depended on for an understanding of God. For Aristotle forms are perceived by the passive mind and abstracted then by active mind to become ideas. Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.

Descartes, educated by Jesuits, worked against the medieval scholasticism. Medieval man was in a quagmire as to how he could understand God, the infinite, from his finite view. Because of this quagmire mysticism sprang up to circumvent it. Mysticism does not attempt to explain. Descartes goal was to establish a new order. He was concerned with the real world and real problems.

Cartesian epistemology intends to take man from not knowing to knowing. He struggled against Meno’s paradox that if man is truly ignorant he can not come to knowledge. Descarte's fundamental view of man in the knowing situation is that he starts with reason and many ideas, some true, some false. So it is not a moving from ignorance to knowledge but from confused knowledge to true knowledge. His philosophical task was how to think rightly in the mental journey to truth. He argues that there are some innate ideas from God, the source, and most, from experience through the senses. The method and its task are served previously by custom and habit because they work. The principle criteria was “what works”.

Descartes said, “Because we conceive of a possible state of order, there must be one.” This is why we should be concerned with searching after truth. He thought that realizing disorder is desiring order. Descartes accepts nothing as true which could not clearly be recognized to be so. (Distinct from this, but what occurs is the application of the doctrine of doubt.) He divides difficulties and proceeds from the simple to the complex. His method was mathematical in that he took the complex and divided it into simple parts, proved those, and then reconstructed. In this he has been accused of being reductionist.

Descartes was opposed by the Catholic church as he innocently advocated man’s return to himself for solution to consciousness crisis. If the people turned within for guidance, if he recognized thought over action, his thought, then the church would loose power over the realm of action.

Descartes's method is not meant to find new wealth of knowledge but it is to form the mind and its confused data. He admits that one cannot live by the method. It is only a directional teaching or learning aid. It insists on radical subjectivism. He speaks in terms of “I” and “my mind”. This problem is alleviated by relegating the method first to the realm of thought and when truths are found to the realm of action. He thinks that radical subjectivism is man’s natural state. He must be such to function in society.

Descartes felt that numbers are something more than a mere quantitative metaphor, as the Pythagoreans. To him mathematics was an abstract, fundamental truth and he is fascinated by this in that we can all, eventually, agree on mathematical truths. He adopted this function as a procedure to aid us in coming to an agreement of truth in general and also to avoid the problem of radical subjectivism. He feels that objective means object for thought as it exists in my thought. The objective thought as it exists outside my thought is the “formal reality”. A chair, for instance, is a formal reality while as a chair in my mind it is an object for thought. He sought to establish whether something is indubitable because it is certain or vice versa.

Page 23
Something greatly distant engenders a longing to be joined. Bring yourself to this and finally achieve completion, salvation. Said of Christianity and the "Western" experience in General. See Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus, and also Kierkegaard and Sartre.

5/12/02. In this truth is the derivation of the "power" of the evangelicals, the "Imam", the "guru", indeed any teacher whatsoever. They thrive on false dichotomies.

The truth IS, reality is not a process but only seems so. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, held to this idea. "The real is complete." The value of the "pastor's coin" derives from the opposite idea, that the real is process or, becoming. Salvation, enlightenment, are so much flim flam. Whatever knowledge or truth there is in the cosmos commingles or coexists with all that is and is immediate to any consciousness whatsoever. The task of the acolyte of true knowledge is just to put a handle on the void by the mere means of realization and with just a little twist turn emptiness to fullness. When realized one sees that it was always there - waiting. Nothing has changed yet all is new.

5/4/07. Take neither process nor completion for the absolute. The "real" is both. Completion is process! All process is additive to completion, the whole, the Real.

Yet, absolutes are only to be seized; must avoid clinging to comprehend the Ultimately Real. Buddhist philosophy.

2nd Rumination on Encounter with Mandukya Upanishad and Karika of Guadapada with Sankara's Commentary

If the sole object be the attainment of the Highest Truth (the supreme goal of existence) the single Upanishad of Mandukya  is sufficient.
— Muktlkopanishad

The Upanishad (Mandukya) with the Karika embodies in itself the Quintessence of the substance of the entire philosophy of Vedanta
—Sankara.

Reference: Here Helpful: Here

If one journeys to the East and studies the culture it becomes apparent there are many practices for spiritual development. Some have no doubt died out but along the way there were practitioners who more or less hid themselves in caves, the hermits, lone seekers. For years, their whole life, they would follow their chosen practice. Also one would find the same types, but not so secluded, in monastic surroundings, for instance. And, further, one would have been sure to encounter practitioners of the various types of Yoga from Mantra to Hatha, training themselves to concentrate. Some would concentrate on their breath or the act of walking, others on visualizing a light, repeating a sacred phrase.

Note that Yogic philosophy was put forth by Patanjali and holds that "...Iswara, Personal God, possessed of attributes, is the cause of the created Universe." (MU, III-5.11) Then there are devotees of the Deity, of Devas, or Devis. Asceticism and renunciation were common. A legend about the Buddha goes that he, at one time, ate only one grain of rice per day. One day a little girl stopped him and begged that he give up this practice because, she said, "we want you to live." He did, and ironically, it's also said that he finally died of food poisoning.

Interesting other story about Buddha; he encounters a man who walks on the water's surface across a river. The Buddha asks him about this and is told that after decades of solitary meditation he developed this craft. The Buddha instructs him, in so many words, that he has wasted his time because for a small coin he could hire a ferryman to take him across.

The technical basis for these crafts is succinctly stated in Sankara's comment on Mandukya Upanishad III-32: "The proposition is that all this duality perceived as such by the imagination of the mind is, in reality, nothing but the mind. The reason for such inference is that duality is perceived when the mind acts and it vanishes when the mind ceases to act; that is to say, when the (activity, i.e., the Vrittis of the) mind is withdrawn unto itself by the knowledge got through discrimination, repeated practice and renunciation - like the disappearance of the snake in the rope - or during deep sleep. Hence on account of the disappearance of duality it is established that duality is unreal or illusory." Vritti, modification.

It is further put forth that success in quieting the modifications of the mind does not necessarily completely destroy the seeds of former deeds. What we do creates seeds that cause the activity to continue - until, somehow, the seeds are extinguished. So, the student might realize the one true nature of the Real only to afterwards continue as before. This is a profoundly difficult undertaking, craft.

All these practices are critiqued by the Mandukya Upanishad (MU), and not always with a beneficent attitude, either. Buddhists are named nihilistic, devotional types, simple minded, and so forth. At other places, however, a more beneficent attitude surfaces. At MU III-18: "Advaita (non-duality) harmonizes all other doctrines and theories."

I expect many of these crafts grew up in the time of the Upanishads, or the Vedas, as much as thousands of years before Jesus, the Christ. I also expect that the authors of the Upanishads were kept by potentates of the time and that their disputations were held in said courts as forms of art and philosophy and even entertainment. Its likely these people were akin to performers for their public and no doubt gained their material support by their particular genius, like Michelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, Blaise Pascal (mathematician) were in the royal courts of the West, though separated by thousands of years.

I agree with my old professor, Desani, that were their only one religion we would have a partial view. Imagine if there were only one science. Similar.

Now, I hold there are hierarchical modes of being in the world and have written in these pages frequently about said. Faith, for instance, opposite the Sensuous Genius of Don Juan. Also, some, like R.G. Collingwood in his book Speculum Mentis, have noted a progression to the various modes of being; Art leads naturally to Religion, to Science, to History, to Philosophy. Progressions like this mean something. It's how a lump of coal becomes a diamond.

The appeal to devotional activity is, for this one, based on a premise of more or less hidden beings, centers of pure consciousness, if you will - the MU refers to such, which beings are beneficent guides, or can be if properly propitiated, to those sentient life forms, embodied beings, bound, as it were, to the lower levels of incarnation, shrouded in the grosser elements of flesh where the "centers of pure consciousness" are just beginning to develop. Propitiation is not something this one does, however. I don't think it comports with yielding or surrender. Some do, though.

I'd put this out there too. Why would one not realize the purpose of duality is to aid actualization of non-duality, or the realization of same? If the substratum, the rope in the previous post, is to come to understand its true nature, that of the substratum itself, and drop all illusion whatever, this might be to that affect.

We want, naturally, to make our being in the world anthropocentric. That might or might not be illusory. It is a sublime truth that the Universe is centered everywhere, bounded nowhere (Blaise Pascal). This one does not believe that is selfish. Not if its true. There is such beauty there as to entice even the greatest "centers of pure consciousness". From William Blake: "To see a World in a grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour."

And that brings me to, what, the elephant in the room? What about beauty,  truth, love, liberty, wisdom? I've called these the concomitants of consciousness for wherever sentient life emerges, I believe, these likewise emerge. So from the same muck and mire from which life comes, comes these qualities of the noosphere. How? Why? Surely, the purpose of life, in part, is to provide for the emergence of such qualities that tend to point to, lead to, the sublime truths found on the higher planes of existence, to complete self realization and/or actualization. In short, when, in the crucible of stars the most plentiful element in the universe, hydrogen, is forged into all the heavier elements and then those into all the minerals found on all the planets in their geospheres, then understand, that is a chain of actualization of potentialities. This stelar process is named nucleosynthesis. Uranium 235 hides, is latent, in hydrogen, in other words. Mankind is latent in the muck and mire of the early Earth. Go find a handful of dirt, a rock. You hold in your hand the potentiality of Love, Truth, Liberty, Wisdom, Beauty. Wait for the proper circumstances and the music of Mozart will emerge. Love, worship of God, will come to be. What else is hidden that will eventually come into existence? The pattern, just like all patterns, doesn't just cease performing. The emergence merely sets the stage for infinitely emerging new stages or plateaus. Life has emerged on Earth and the noosphere is being grown under whose umbrella life continues to evolve. Self awareness becomes awareness of the entire cosmos meaning the entire cosmos realizes its potentiality. Its like the power in an electric grid. Nothing seems to be there until certain conditions apply which manifests the invisible latent power.

Clearly we have only just begun. Or, perhaps a more accurate assessment would be along the lines of we will always only be beginning, there being no completion, which might be thought as always just over the horizon. Ask why are we drawn to that horizon? Discovery is the action of the unknown.

This one can, he thinks, have an understanding of the non-duality of the Ultimately Real - be an Advaitin, in the language of the MU - and all the same have an appreciation of the concordance of Western and Eastern methods of approaching the systems of thought at hand. The MU repeatedly states "All is Brahman", "I am That", "That am I". Consideration of all subsumed ideas, all illusions of the substratum lend meaning thereto, enhance, add flavor, sharpen the insight, quicken, leaven, add piquance. So, the mess that admittedly is life, its processes, and so forth, serves a purpose. Without the experience of living through life's trouble, travail, ups and downs of happiness, then realization of one's true nature would be rather dull. One should, to have an enriched understanding, appreciate the nuances implied here. This fractalization only embellishes its source. A diamond's facets make for greater brilliance.

To be sure Shamanism and superstition played an important role in the daily lives of the people during the time when the MU was set down, debated. Likewise, during the early times anywhere. The gullibility of the people can not be overemphasized. Revered sages, seers, had carte blanche powers. An acolyte might be instructed to practice a given procedure the outcome of which would be the ownership, control, of a spirit, a self created being, to do whatever bidding the practitioner demanded. Yet it would be an illusion, according to the MU; and this one agrees. Christian ascetics, too, would have similar experiences, have visions, visitations of that to which they were spending their lives in devotion. These would be imagined to be real in themselves. The power of the concentrated mind is hard to underestimate, in this regard. Just remember, every illusion has its substratum.

"Brahman (Atman) is always non-dual even during the perception of duality by the ignorant. Non-duality is the Reality and duality is illusion. The truth is that the rope does not become or produce the snake. It is only through ignorance that one sees the snake in the rope. Similarly Brahman which is birthless, causeless, changeless and attributeless is imagined by the ignorant as producing or becoming the universe." MU, III-2. And, MU III-26.6 paraphrase: This is the Advaitic method of reasoning. (Brahman or Atman) God, being beyond time, space and causality, is ever incomprehensible through any empirical means. It is the eternal subject having no object through which one can comprehend it. This incomprehensibility of God (Atman) is the very reason for refuting any attribute that may be otherwise associated with it. If God (Atman) can be known by any positive attribute, it no longer remains incomprehensible. It becomes an object of our thought like any other perceived object. Such God (Atman) can never be the changeless Absolute. Further, at MU III-26.7 "...all attributes are the same as the non-dual Brahman..." Conclude the text states that God is completely without attributes but all the same all attributes are identical with God. This is akin to the western idea that the divine creative spirit is immanent in nature. Saint Augustine, for instance, held this view.

This reader is somewhat confused but is not a scholar and so doesn't dwell on the seeming contradictory nature of some passages in the text marking them up as indices of failure of language, words, to convey the absolute meaning. Taken all together one gets a better sense. The text goes on to say that, page 198 of pdf: "In truth, there is neither creation, nor existence, nor destruction." Then on page 212 its stated "Brahman which is existence, knowledge and infinity." I want to claim the idea of existence is just that, an idea, and that it therefore implies duality. Duality implies a higher reality which I want to call, with the MU, the Ultimate Reality, non dual in itself and yet containing the multiplicity - the world of duality, its myriads of things, objects. In short, is it true that existence is a product of mind, ideation?

Is hydrogen the rope? Substratum, predicate for all that is? All this is Brahman, Atman. The multiplicity is due to Maya, illusion. Only that which is without attributes is real; only that is, only the substratum has being, by which there are, can be, attributes. However, the attributes due to illusion of Brahman, Atman give pleasure, diversity, multiplicity, where there really is none, to Jivas, embodied souls; and all rejoice and make offerings for the beneficence of the Lord! A designator is an attribute. Brahman, Atman are not without attributes. Only that which is unnameable is without attributes and thus the Ultimate Reality. That I am, I am that I am.

Regarding MU III-33.1: Is it an act of mind, ideation to make the claim that only Brahman exists?

Result of meditation, spiritual practice, is falling away of consciousness of subject and object. The mind ceases to exist on becoming identical with the Ultimate Reality.

Existence is for things, objects. Relative nature is required, that is, existence only is in multiplicity, duality. Ultimate Reality does not pertain to that which can be said to exist. The Real, properly understood, can only be said to be that by which their can be existence.

MU seems consistent in its treatment- I want to be charitable - of this and seems to support Existence as not an idea or attribute but that by which these are. Brahman is said to be "Knowledge, Existence, and Infinity."

So, when one says God doesn't exist but is eternal, as did Soren Kierkegaard, it conflicts with the MU's treatment of being, but not, I think, with the essence of the teaching. The conundrum here is that to say God is eternal is to assign a designation but nothing that can be designated can be eternal as speaking from the standpoint of eternity there are no objects. To say God is eternal necessarily means an object.  Its impossible to grasp. One must simply surrender. You don't grasp water from a source, you cup your hands and simply accept the flow.

It's an amazing thing to have an infinitude of attributes yet all illusory. There's meaning there.

And, easy to assign negative beliefs to the various religions, philosophical systems. One might nourish beliefs others might see as nihilistic, yet not actually wish to own same if confronted. There's plenty of falsity to go around, I guess. Let's look on the positive side. Maybe anything, attribute, which can be said to be infinite becomes that by which there can be attributes at all, thus merging into the silent, sibilant, sea of the Divine Creative Spirit whose sussuration is a beacon. God, extra cosmic by being beyond all attributes, this one knows by your very unknowableness. This one knows you by your impossibility of being known, in the sense that that which illumines is self luminous, the Sun is a good instance of this. So, look for the self illumined and you find the source of all light.

All participate in the Real, the Truth. No escape. No exit. The sages have no greater grasp of the Real than a butterfly. And the butterfly doesn't even know its beautiful. Yet it is known on its behalf. That's benevolence.

In this regard, MU III-26.3: "...Atman is never the effect of any thought or words. It is not an object of meditation or speech. For it is your very self. Thus the Sruti advises the students to dissociate from Atman all words, or thoughts which were at first accepted as means for its realization. That which is thought by the mind is merely an idea. It is changeable and negatable. Hence it is not Reality. Therefore any idea associated with Atman is not the Atman itself." Sruti, that which is heard, particularly scripture.

MU III-36.4: "...the Jnani may be engaged in any activity, but in everything he realizes Brahman alone. The experiences of a Jnani have been thusly described in the Gita (4.240: "BRAHMAN IS THE OFFERING, BRAHMAN IS THE OBLATION POURED INTO THE FIRE OF BRAHMAN. Brahman verily shall be reached by him who always sees Brahman in action.""

A close study of the ancient teaching of Judaism and Christianity render the same sentiments.  I've written about that in these pages, too. Man is said to be, or have within, a spark of the divine. To fully realize this is to come to the same end as that told in the above quote. And, when God has put in his mouth the words, by some ancient Hebrew author, "I am That I am" it would be foolish, I think, to not conclude that has the same meaning as the Vedantic, Brahamaic, Advaitin formula "I am That" "That I am".

Of course there are seemingly profound differences between East and West. One doesn't see analysis of culture there as here; holding up myth, e.g., Tristan and Isolde as example of death wish permeating society and being a symptom of grave illness. Or Don Juanism as an example of malady condemning Western culture to doom because of evil incarnate. You do see contests of various approaches to true understanding of man's, life's, purpose and meaning. Perhaps Buddhism is a response to the Vedantic idea that one has license to do any action without violating any moral code. I don't believe Buddhists were nihilists any more than I believe Vedantins were free, unconstrained to do anything. I do believe none have true understanding because its impossible. Language prohibits it. Vedanta is best when it harmonises the various spiritual pursuits. Buddhism is best when it promotes compassion. And Yoga is best when it advances the practice of self control and concentration. Jnani (path of knowledge) yoga is highest achievement and naturally follows Bhakti Yoga. If the Jiva (embodied soul) reconciles himself to being an embodied being and lives simply in the world in which he finds himself then these issues will work themselves out. The Bhagavad Gita rates Duty as the highest calling, in this regard. I can see how Buddhism could be construed as nihilistic. I can also see how Vedanta can be construed as giving license to perform any acts whatsoever without consequences. Thus we come around again to being co-creators. Its on us, how we will live. The need for compassion is a universal principle, being in and of itself. Its Love trying to manifest - and the other concomitants, cosmic forces - like gravity. Our duty is to submit to, cultivate these.

In this study I've learned there are more types of Yoga than those taught by Patanjali. The Vedantins put forth Asparsa Yoga saying these Yogis are not like the ordinary ones. Sparsa means pertaining to contact with the sensory organs so Asparsa means without contact with same. Well, I am given to understand that all the crafts cultivated in the spiritual practices of the peoples of this part of the world, and indeed, in the West, too, when one looks closely, are based to some extent or another on the withdrawal from sensory input. And, the Patanjali Yoga Sutras certainly teach this though not under the name Asparsa. Withdrawal of the mind into itself means abandonment of the Bhutas, Indriyas, and Tanmatras (elements, sense-organs, and sensations). When these are dropped what else could remain but what is called here the substratum, the rope, that is, the basis by which there are illusions? Drop the sensory input and you drop the illusion of a separate self.  Only then is direct knowledge possible. Noesis.

We are given diamonds, they occur naturally. We cut facets into these increasing their brilliance. It's not a thankless task; its just something we do as co-creators. Also occurring naturally are wheat kernels. With these we make bread. Our unending task is to cut facets and make bread, and follow our conscience. Do this gladly for the glory of God. The more one surrenders the more one enjoys a valid partnership with the Divine Creative Spirit. Sentient life, too, occurs naturally. Beauty, Truth, Love, Liberty, Justice, Wisdom are like a diamond's facets. The more these are cultivated and increased the greater the shining forth of the spark of the divine in each person as a center of pure consciousness.

Intuitively obvious, easy to see there is only one Ultimate Reality, one Universe - in spite of multiverse theories - and that it follows it is non-dual. Its said all perceived multiplicity is illusion. Allowed. The illusion leads us to realize primacy of an underlying reality, substratum, which is supra real, above the illusion. Good. Who sees this? What is seen? What is relation of seer, seeing, seen? Patanjali - and this writer likes this notion - names the Seer Drsta and states when not established in its own right assimilates with embodied beings, Jivas. But, how should we live? Is it possible to live as a one, an embodied being, and at the same time do that from the standpoint of the Ultimate Reality - to live in the finite from the perspective of the infinite? And! Does it matter? And! If it does, how? As co-creators it is our duty to come to terms with this.

For all of the reasoning and mental gymnastics in the Mandukya Upanishad it is worth keeping in mind that the commentator, Sankara whose revered teacher was taught by Guadapada, was a devotee of the Divine Mother in the form of Tripura Sundari. This from my teacher in his paper titled Guru Parampara. Desani's name for Sankara is Shankarchariya. (Diacritical marks omitted.)

Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.

Footnote: A moment to introduce something about the Hebrews. Hebrew, I've learned, originally meant "donkey driver". In other words, caravaneer. This was before camel caravans. So, these people of old were traders whose commerce took them across the known world. They went to the East, certainly. Also, I've learned that the use of camels for this purpose was, at the time, a great innovation and even greater wealth followed on that development. So, the patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, Abraham, was a donkey driver, a Hebrew. Its said he was actually the first Hebrew. He, or his kind, were also likely to have been the first to share the religions, philosophy of the time back and forth from East to West.

So, I did do the laundry. And, that Tea, I can report, I think, there is none sweeter than that taken from the empty cup.

Ruminations on Encounter with Mandukya Upanishad and Karika of Guadapada with Sankara's Commentary

Nagarjuna - To convey through concepts what lies beyond concepts and conventional entities is the skillfulness of the wise

Zen proverb - There is nothing more that can be said for enlightenment than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for seeing the moon.

A renunciation is the first order. This one does not claim wisdom nor seek salutation. Wisdom arises of its own accord along with Truth, Beauty, Love. Salutation is a special case of vacuity.

Its almost as if the world system, the Sun and Planets, hurtling through space come upon a giant Star and are captured thereby. We enter upon a new orbit and begin learning to cope. Everything has changed. The old paradigm immediately set aside. Everything is new under this new Sun. And, this new Sun is the Mandukya Upanishad.

An initial conundrum to be dealt with is transcendence versus immanence. Transcendent. Distinguished from immanent. Extra cosmic creator, God or not.

How is a creator who withdraws to make room that the created sentient life forms can be co-creator not extra cosmic, transcendent? Illusion is surely involved here and is to be somehow addressed.

The Mandukya Upanishad (MU) stresses foremost that all is one, that the manifold is an illusion like the imagination of a rope appearing as a snake. Only the rope is real and the illusion of the snake while depending on the rope is illusionary, requiring ideation. Non duality is the True nature of the Ultimate Reality whom the MU names Brahman. So, all is Brahman who is like the rope in the example. Simple enough. A child could understand.

So, it follows that the transcendent is the immanent because of non-duality; the implied duality is an illusion. If this is understood as an idea, concept, that too would be an illusion. Further follows that one should simply set aside all such ideation. But we are curious, and to some, such considerations lead to the sublime. A quote from MU III-18 helps in this regard. "As non-duality is the ultimate Reality, therefore duality is said to be its effect." In other words duality might be said to serve the purpose of non-duality. I equivocate because, strictly, it might also be said there is no purpose; purpose being a product of our insistent anthropomorphism. That is, we insist man be the measure of all things. If it is then it is in relation to homo sapiens.

God doesn't withdraw, as such, only appears to, or is only thought to by some. How can there be withdrawal if all is one? If there is any withdrawal it is into his creation. He appears to assume a separate identity, like the rope becoming a snake. If or when the created realizes his true nature can status as co-creator emerge. So, the transcendent reaches an understanding of its true nature as immanence. Illusion drops away along with duality and only the Ultimate Reality remains. Note, however, the MU says there is no creation and by the same, I guess, no creator. It just is, and I am that or, that am I! While the Christian God says "I am that I am." The Truth is somewhere close. That statement is surely intended to convey the sense that language has limits, that concepts are useless when trying to explain the sublime.

I'm attempting to resolve seeming conflict of Rabbinical philosophy with that of the MU. The idea of man as co-creator is, of course, Rabbinical.

A quibble on knowing. MU III-33: "Knowledge is essence of thought." So when mind disappears on realization of Ultimate Realtiy, i.e., Brahman, thought does likewise disappear? And the object of knowledge falls away, too, as the known, the knowing, the knower "become one and the same." My scheme is somewhat different. The MU conflates understanding and knowledge. I think knowledge leads to understanding and when understanding does arise therein is the known, knowing, knower merged, and duality falls away. "Brahman which is of the nature of one homogeneous mass of eternal consciousness, does not depend upon another instrument of knowledge (for its illumination)." Further, this one might know, or think so, but when understanding arises this one is no longer there. Illumination only occurs in non-duality, knowing in duality; Knower needs an object (to know). It also requires action. When known, knowing, and knower merge then understanding arises. That's my note on epistemology.

Authors, commentators of MU are fond of quoting the Bhagavad Gita (BG) and the BG posits a deity devotion to whom is held in the highest regard. Krsna tells Arjuna that those following the path of devotion to the Lord (Krsna) are dearer to him than any others, those that, for instance, follow the path of knowledge, renunciation, ritual, and so forth. Yet the authors (commentators) of the MU decry such as mere ideation, as failure, because duality inheres in such beliefs. The MU clearly states there is no extra-cosmic God. True. All is one, or, as the Upanishad puts it, all is Brahman. However, to construe that as positing an extra-cosmic God is perhaps not a fatal mistake. There are great mysteries to be confronted and the greatest might be that there is an extra cosmic God which transcendent is all the same immanent. Jesus, recall, is said to be the "Word" made flesh. So, across the world the reality is put forth that God, the "Word", manifests as man, as a created being. You know, we make the God we want out of our intention, thoughts, worship. So how could one not hold that God is infinitely malleable? And, we are so welcome by the One that however we approach matters not. What matters is the approach, the worship. Alone.

Being in the world requires skill, crafts. Development of these is an endless discovery. None are cast in concrete. Every person is unique. All these meditative crafts are aids to stopping sensory input. Stopping sensory input the mind, that which continuously processes the input, ceases. What's left? Consciousness? Being itself? In deep sleep something similar happens. Note that on quiescence of the mind only the seeds of deeds remain. We know this because they reassert themselves on reengagement of the mind with the instruments of sensory input.

Yes, only the One, Brahman, is truly real; but creatures need a personal touch, thus Krsna, the Great Lord of the BG, and Jesus, "God", for the Christians, and so forth. The MU calls devotional people simple minded. (But, according to MU III-17, "Advaita alone harmonizes all other doctrines and theories.") - Advaita is non-duality.  I am with those called simple minded, believing in devotion to the Lord, surrender to God. If deluded in that perhaps I do not fully realize that all it is is Brahman's self seeking, self love, self realizing. I am Brahman. An ideation, the snake, so to speak, declaring it is the rope, a device by which, if you will, the divine creative spirit has self experience. I was taught this. But. Love of the Lord could be construed to mean Brahman loves Brahman. More ideation. I know. Some will look on this as nonsensical but there's not much to be done about it but follow one's own true nature. One with the Universal Truth I must go where it leads. I'm taught the best way to do that is simply to yield.

I said this was a rumination.

Surrender to God IS The Ultimate Reality. Who surrenders? To whom? Circular? Yes!!!

Always keep in mind Irwin Lieb's teaching that there is only one individual and that is the entire cosmos. So consider that with the formula that on this life's journey we are bound to arrive where we began and know the place for the first time. (Lieb was a teacher of mine and the sentiment about the journey is from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding.)

Pristine Bliss therein abides for the taking!!

No! Brahman does not love Brahman. That implies duality. There is no loving, really, there is no Brahman. Its an imagination, ideation, a construct based on duality. If only Brahman is, then enough said. All else is futile and designed to feed the ego, the false sense of self.

Brahman goes Poof! As all illusions must; for, when attachment arises wisdom is shut out. It's said, in that regard, that one must kill the Buddha to know the Buddha. (Desani taught this.) To kill the Buddha means to drop the attachment, the duality. One can never concede only the rope has any claim on existence, and that ephemeral at best. One might consider that to claim existence at all requires duality. Who says what exists? One might also claim that the very use of language, symbols, is to assume duality. So, the snake in the rope is the first illusion that points to a more fundamental illusion, the rope itself. As co-creators we are in the business of supplying rope.

I don't know, understand, but how concluding the Ultimate Reality itself is an illusion. You know, part of this "tale told  by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Words fail this test, biggly.

Think about Zen and Archery. "It" shoots. The teacher declares on success of the student. The student at that moment no longer exists, as such. The shot falls like a leaf giving way to an accumulation of snow.

There is here a great truth but it is not amenable to discursive thinking.

Aum!

I should have just done the laundry as drink tea from this empty cup.

Explain that last line. A Chinese master was asked by what was likely an impertinent student once what to do after enlightenment. Appropriately, the teacher replied, "do the laundry".  That is, carry on as before. Nothing has really changed....except inwardly. Tea from an empty cup is a Zen Koan. Another would be "the sound of one hand clapping." Koans are intended to help break beyond concepts, that is, as precusor to realization of the non-dual Ultimate Reality, to still the mind. When mind is stilled it falls away.  Deep sleep is a precursor. When mind is stilled only illuminating consciousness remains. This is the aim of spiritual or meditative practices.

I'll revisit this later. But here is a caveat. There's no end of material easily had on the subject of the MU, and the Vedas, and the philosophical discussion proceeds ad infinitum. So? Well, give my words whatever gravity you will. It matters little. At least I'm not trying to sell. I'm not buying, either. Those that Sankara disparaged one should consider were contending for the attention, indeed, material support of those who dispensed favors to such people in those days. Nothing has changed in this regard. Egos were involved, too. People always want to sway others to their side; people want, seek, validation. Even the enlightened. Those most likely to have actualized their complete realization will probably be the most difficult to find, identify, however. This one, of course, has a reason to go this way which will remain hidden. I don't do this for myself. Today I came here to revert this post to draft but changed my mind. For the time being. I've updated this so many times I've lost count. And will likely continue. I've added a follow up post and would add that all my work here is more or less on the same theme, some old, some new, all mixed up in one potpourri.

Thoughts

Thoughts March 18, 2023

That condition in which knowing arises is the same as that which is its limit. So knowledge is bounded, is useless if not an impediment beyond that whence it arose. Beyond knowledge's limit another faculty is needed and that is understanding.

The desire to know is the desire to feel. This is akin to desire for an object. And. The desire of a thing is animalistic. So. Wanting enlightenment, release, salvation, is falling again into the snare of delusion. The way out is simply to yield.

There are doors that open only of themselves. You won't even know they are there and desire to find them only obscures. Seeking impedes.

Yes, "if you seek you will find, if you knock it shall be opened unto you." However, forcing the issue means that what is opened, what you find is an ephemera, an illusion. It is merely a projection of yourself, in other words.

The effulgence of the Ultimate Reality will sweep you away of its own accord, if you exercise patience. And you might be left bewildered but you will understand you have been owned!

The embrace of the Lord, the Light, is eternal Bliss!

No matter your view, there is always another to benevolently enhance it. But don't think there is only one outlook. If there were we would have a partial view. Imagine if there were only one science, say botany. Think about it.

Maybe the Lord is an equal opportunity redeemer.

When the Ultimate Reality is revealed knowledge ceases its activity. Or, rather, one who would realize this would be advised to inhibit knowledge's activity, its grasping. The instrument of knowledge, invariably connected with its employer and an object can act only in the plane of duality. With the negation of duality, the instrument of knowledge itself becomes ineffective.*

That is why knowledge should be used as a negator more than affirmer.

That is why simply yielding to the will of God is the only way to Truth.

And that brings me to this. That which can said to be eternal cannot be a member of the class of things or objects which all have in common the ability to be named, that is, delineated - which means limited, in a sense. Further, any naming results in a designation of said thing as being finite, as having the characteristic of coming into being, of persisting awhile, of passing away. So. When God is named he becomes something we own, something we know, something we think we understand. In other words, God becomes an idea, a thing, an object, when named. Though its not intended THAT becomes an illusion. The Truth escapes in our effort to hold it close. That's all.

* Mandukya Upanishad 1-7 Shankara's commentary

For Vivienne Louise Hinds

 On the occasion of a family outing a few days ago we were driving back to my place when the conversation turned religious. This is a rare thing. Three year old Vivienne - Vivi - sitting behind me asks "What is God?" Her mother, who is driving, makes an answer which doesn't satisfy Vivi who repeats the question. At my son's suggestion, I chime in but my words likewise do not suffice. I, of course, am very vague, I guess, to a three year old. Daughter-in-law gives the standard orthodox version. My answer is congruent - well somewhat. I didn't want to say, like her mother, that God was our heavenly father. So I said, basically, the whole of creation was the deity and that "he" was impossible to know.

But my purpose here is not to give details of the conversation. After thinking about it and making a note last night I just want to do a small spin off of my previous post about Sean Carroll. The operative word here is small. This is just a thought fleeting.

January 25, 2023 note:

There is no such thing as eternity except in the context of time. Likewise: No such thing as good except in the context of evil. Or - vice versa...(for all opposites).

Another view/way: God is context in which man makes sense as man is context wherein God makes sense. Or: "God" confers on man universality. "Man" confers on God individuality.

Likewise:

Time and eternity are each axiomatic of the other, etc. - as is true for Beauty, Truth, Love, Liberty, etc. To accept one the other must also be accepted. You must believe one to deny one. (Axiom)

Hopefully Vivi will find this along her way.

From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll

 The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. St. Augustine, Confessions

You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the  advantage. John von Newuann, to Claude Shannon

Sweet is by convention, bitter by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void. Democritus

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. Stephen Toulmin

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Thoughts on reading Sean Carroll, particularly his "From Eternity to Here." (2016)

December, 2022

In the interest of full disclosure I'll put out front that I am decidedly not of the same mind as scientists when it comes to empiricism. I have my own ideas about the proper place of science and its methods and they do not comport with that which is commonly accepted in today's world. I am skeptical about any claim of any kind as to the nature of the Real. To my way of thinking the predominate feature of the phenomenal Universe is silence. (According to the ancient Rabbis of Israel the likely reason for this is that God, having created man, found it necessary to "withdraw", in order to make room for his creation.) That needs to be respected and it might be true that it follows that the reason for that silence, if opened, might reveal an alternative to empirical approaches, to so called scientific proofs, that one might find overwhelmingly obvious. In short our methods, while disclaiming anthropocentrism, are yet just that...in so many words. Scientists, and their progenitors, are, some more obviously than others, difficult if not impossible to pry apart from their theories. That is what a real search for Truth, for Beauty even, entails at its very heart. This requires surrender not clinging to dogma, orthodoxy.

Obviously I will not be able to do justice to Carroll's work. Lack the capacity. Furthermore, and quite bluntly, science, I'm led to conclude - not from reading Carroll's book, or any scientific work, but through philosophical studies - is nothing but religion dressed up in esoteric formulas, theories, equations. So, if you are bound to faith in science, you won't like what follows. My interest is in unbinding and is characterized by an individual cupping his hands to receive that which is given, not in grasping at that which merely moves beyond. There are many ways of being in the world, beginning with the primitive and moving through phases - science is one - and culminating, perhaps, in the one true path. I don't know the way and claim its not truly knowable anyway. Understanding, however, is a bit different.

Science generalizes from small samples to the whole universe. For instance, Einstein's field equation(s) of General Relativity which purport to tell us that spacetime is a single "thing" and that it "controls" how bodies, energy, all the stuff in it, behaves, moves, and evolves while the same things determine the features of spacetime.

R_μν − ½Rg_μν = 8πGT_μν

For what its worth this is exactly how Carroll renders Einstein's field equation of general relativity. Searches for this on-line find the same except the value following the equal sign is shown divided by 4 to the 4th power. I don't know why and besides its beyond the scope of this report to get into the depths of this. Honestly, I don't have the expertise necessary to give a complete exegesis of the equation but will note its not really "one" equation it is a series of 16, of which this particular rendition is, I suppose, just enough to get started, a summary, if you like. These are differential equations measurimg rates of change and in one case, I understand, the rate of change of the rate of change.

Having said that I would make this further contribution for a little clarity:

"Einstein assumed that the universe was static and unchanging. He thought this was true because that was what astronomers at the time thought they saw when they looked out into their telescopes. A static universe would be unstable if gravity was only attractive. Every piece of matter would attract to every other and any slight imbalance in distribution would force the whole thing to eventually contract down into itself. Einstein added the cosmological constant to his equations (technically, he subtracted it from the scalar curvature) to hold back gravity so that his equations would have a solution that agreed with the static model."

What this means is not having obtained the results he wanted Albert Einstein rewrote the formula such that it's solution was more to his liking, prejudice. There was an orthodoxy, a scientific dogma he sought to accommodate. Science's immediate predecessor, religion, would burn offenders of the church's dogma at the stake. Science has moved beyond such extreme measures. Now there are more subtle punishments, ruined careers, and such. Carroll cites some of these in passing. Also noted are those scientists in the Elmer Gantry mold who delight in making headline getting claims about their discoveries, theories. Niehls Bohr comes to mind.  These don't hesitate a nano second to speculate but, to illustrate their dogma, a carry over from religion, they never consider that which they axiomatically reject, namely an agency, a creator, sustainer, destroyer; a qualitative immanence.

That said I'd note this formula occupies the middle ground between Newtonian physics and Quantum leaving aside the very long time we wasted, so to speak, in geocentrism  before it gave way to the heliocentric model. This kind of science is very speculative - I wish I had counted how many times Carroll fell back to "we don't know" statements or the like. Scientific theory is very much an unfinished work when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I'm concerned here, of course, with cosmology.

These various views are basically all mechanistic and none of them venture to risk saying what matter is, just how it behaves, that it works something like a machine; quantum theory being somewhat willing to leave that behind, focuses on waves or fields, but it still is called quantum "mechanics". But a wave or field is an ephemeral thing compared to solid bodies moving around in orbits. One can identify where such waves, fields might be found but only with limited precision. The thing about planets, and such, is that their place, path, can be identified with great precision, you know, good enough that we can fly a spaceship to the moon and land and return to earth.

Quantum mechanics is a step towards replacing Newtonian, classical physics which treats objects, masses, as definite in space time while quantum mechanics recognizes them as not so certain in their existence as to where they can be definitely said to be, especially at the micro level where they are wave functions rather than objects in the classical sense. So, yes, one can say with certain probability that a gross object can be found at so-and-so place but not so much with something like an electron which location is much less probable. We speak of electron clouds surrounding nuclei as a way of expressing this. Electrons can be said to be somewhere in that cloud. Think, how can one state precisely where a ripple on a pond is? It's there but its location is more ephemeral than say a tree along the street; though strictly they are both "waves" on the surface of reality. But this oscillation through spacetime for things on the atomic scale means location is not definite but still can be said to be with a certain probability here or there.

As we journey through the successive phases of our knowledge of science we realize these equations can't measure the Universe itself and are used instead to measure a small sample. Knowing how spacetime behaves in this sample along with that which is embedded therein, the bodies, their mass, energy, radiation, etc., we apply that to the Universe itself in the pattern "knowing this I know that."

Supposedly there are about a trillion stars in the Universe. (We count the number in a somewhat smaller area and apply that data to the whole, for instance.) The Universe is thought to be expanding at an increasing rate of speed. The "red shift" of very distant objects (supernova Ia stars) - these are exploding stars and are very bright so can be more readily observed at cosmological distances - is increasingly larger for these novae. That's how we know of the expansion. Note there's not enough explosive power from the "big bang" to account for this apparent acceleration. Gravity should slow the expansion down; so a mysterious force, "dark energy" is posited to account for the expansion of the Universe where one would think it would be impeded by gravitational attraction of all the mass. Dark energy, though thought to be rather weak - and which we haven't isolated, proved -  provides just enough extra push to the explosive force from the big bang to account for the observed acceleration.

Dark energy. So, a mysterious force or agency, is assumed to account for an unknown, perhaps unknowable circumstance. True, its not "outside" the known universe as they tend to think a "divine creative force" would be, or is thought to be by their assumed religious antagonists. One wonders if they appreciate this irony.  Dark energy is treated as a little understood constant that is used to account for an invisible magical force. They can make the numbers work so its plugged into their assumptions, theories. In religion, god is used as a constant in a similar sense, to account for the unknown, perhaps unknowable.

The big bang model assumes the universe began in an exquisitely ordered condition of the lowest entropy, hot and dense. Carroll calls this a singularity, infinitely dense, zero size - size would have no meaning, but he says zero timespace came into existence at that event. Of course time has a direction much different than spatial directions. Carroll points out that any direction in space is about the same. The direction of time is always away from the past for which there are many illustrations. He writes that while the earth orients us in space, the big bang orients us in time. (Pg. 32) You'll never walk down a beach and have a sand castle materialize out of the chaotic surroundings; you'll never separate an omelet back into an egg, or coffee with cream back into its individual constituents. This is what it means when entropy is said to increase, when the arrow ot time is always toward the future - at least that is the simplistic view. Entropy is a measure of the disordliness of things in a closed system and can be said to explain why we remember the past and not the future. And, of course, its based on the second law of thermodynamics. Carroll says this is science's most important law. It states that the entropy of an isolated system either remains constant or increases with time.

Ludwig Boltzmann's formula for entropy is S = K log W and he defined it as "a measure of the number of particular microscopic arrangements of atoms that appear indistinguishable from a macroscopic perspective."  Further, "in an isolated system entropy tends to increase, because there are more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy."

Before the big bang there is no frame of reference. In fact it makes no sense to say "before". "At" the (infinitely?) exquisitely low entropy of the primordial egg, singularity, or whatnot, to spacetime emergence with the big bang - only then does "before" or "after" or "at" have a context in which to make sense. Only then is there a "then". Otherwise its from the standpoint of nowhen/nowhere. Its claimed the primordial egg whence the big bang is the lowest possible entropy, the highest possible order.

So, as John Archibald Wheeler noted, "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." Clever physicist, John Wheeler.

So the Universe goes from beginnings of very high order, like an egg, and proceeds to increasing disorder; and that disorder as it progresses is said to gain momentum. Interesting. Sort of like the birth of anything at all, isn't it? First the egg, then the incubation, then the birth, then the dissolution. "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dieing." the poet says. (Dylan) So, they invoke a chicken to illustrate the process but Carroll and cohorts are careful to be somewhat dismissive of any idea or principle construed as anthropic which I question because, after all, people - and chickens (fowlthropic?) - are made of atoms and such just like the rest of the observable universe.

Entropy increases eternally and it all ends with nothing but dead stars, galaxies, in a uniform distribution of high entropy, heat death for all that is. This seems to ignore the observation that everything that is is cyclical, a single exception being made for the whole thing taken as one. The final end is meaningless, purposeless, cold, lonely, Carroll writes. We might as well never have been.

Parity. Is the low entropy of the boundary condition of the big bang in parity with the high entropy of a dead universe? Were there a "big crunch" instead would that also be parity? This question comes to mind, but the answer is unknown.

Layers of complexity keep getting piled on while assuming averages of these states are adequate to their extrapolation to the whole. So they add complexities then simplify them to make them easy to work with, plug into their equations. After awhile the bewilderment grows into necessitating a kind of omniscience on the part of reaching an understanding. They claim this power at the same time admitting unknowns; they claim god like status where the deity is a statistician finagling the way through a mechanistic milieu. Mass and energy and all the various components are treated as things, manipulated like a game of marbles. Its called "physics" for a reason

One other thing to note early on would be science's attitude towards consciousness. Carroll thinks it is emergent. Carroll is especially hostile to the idea of a God outside the Universe and purports to be an atheist. This writer agrees with Carroll that its a primitive and unhelpful idea that "he" is outside; this notion dates back to Aristotle and before. This writer subscribes to the notion that Christianity errs in following the Aristotelian ideas surrounding the corruption of the world below compared to the perfection of the incorruptible regions above - heaven. I'd rather think of the divine creative force as immanent in nature. Carroll seems to give some credence to this notion.

Carroll brings Buddhist cosmology, if their is such a thing, to the table. He doesn't attribute this to Buddhism but it sounds like what I understand the Buddha said - I don't know which Buddha, however. Any how he (Buddha) made the claim that our experience of the world is separated into exquisitely brief slices of time; the world arises anew in each and they are not really connected in the way one would commonly think; this Buddha is said to have made the claim that nothing endures. Carroll puts that:

"So the world exists, and what is more, the world happens, again and again. In that sense, the world is like the different frames of a film reel - a film whose camera view includes the entire universe. (There are also, as far as we can tell, an infinite number of frames, infinitesimally separated."

Carroll continues, substituting a view not from nowhere but from nowhen:  "...when looking down from nowhen ...we don't see anything changing with time, because we are outside of time ourselves. Instead, we see all history at once - past, present, and future. It's like thinking of space and time as a book, which we could in principle open to any passage, [and view any page at random] rather than as a movie, where we are forced to watch events in sequence..."

What science aims at is a theory of everything. Thing. Is key here; materialistic. Now science does not purport to tell what matter is, just how it behaves. Carroll seems, in his epilogue, to make a concession, however small, to the notion that something is missing in the methods of science when he mentions natural theology. Further, he has left Caltech and now is on the faculty of John's Hopkins university in Maryland as a professor of  "Natural Philosophy, hearkening back to the days before science and philosophy split into distinct disciplines... I've always been interdisciplinary, between physics and philosophy and other things, and also always had an interest in reaching out to wider audiences. But there was inevitably tension with what I was supposed to be doing as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. My predilections don’t fit comfortably with the academic insistence on putting everyone into a silo and encouraging them to stay there." From his blog post, here. (His web site is here.) So, he left Caltech because, partially because, I guess, he wanted freedom to explore more widely the mindscape beyond physics and cosmology. I think he is a good man and appreciate this insight into his thinking. But I also appreciate that its tantalizing, and you get drawn in, attracted to the notion, as a scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, you might be the special one that actually puts forth a theory of everything that conflates Newtonian (classical) physics, special and general relativity of Einstein, and quantum physics and string theory and explain the arrow of time as it relates to the big bang, the death of Universe, in short, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. One who pays scant attention to all this might be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of such a discovery. Reading "From Eternity to Here" leaves one with the opposite notion - we've hardly begun this exciting discovery of a theory that explains all that is. We are also led to understand that the community of scientists have unshakeable faith in their enterprise and will some day achieve their aims.

But. What if the universe, what if being, existence, reality does not care or even take note of your prognostications? What does that leave you with? It leaves you with nothing. Which might be a something nothing but also might teach one that the discovery itself is the meaning and purpose that seems to elude us.

I certainly don't know and live with the realization that I actually can't know. One question that seems to point to a contradiction in the science is how can it be said that the earliest universe was characterized by extremely low entropy. (S _{inflation ≈ 10¹²} ) is the formula Carroll gives for the entropy at the inception of the big bang, the birth of the universe. But if the big bang did not happen at a place nor a time - these have no meaning, space and time being products of the big bang - how can it be said what entropy was when there was no spacetime? I don't think there can be entropy without spacetime. Take any condition you like, it depends on there being a place and a time, a framework.

Why multiverse and not universe? Carroll writes a lot about these; and others, too. Personal, speculative. "Creator" was not sure of outcome, so plant many seeds, allow several potentialities to eventuate in order to pick the best of the several. Or, is it like Darwin's natural selection at work? Also, Carroll is careful to say many scientists don't like this theory of a multiverse - he calls it, rather, a prediction, because its not falsifiable - it makes no predictions than can be proven/disproven. He also says the formulae can be tested and that science is a messy business.

The conundrums never cease. Carroll writes about opposing theories, for instance, quantum gravity could allow that "time never begins but stretches for all eternity".  This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which has time dependent on entropy increasing. Personally, again. I'd speculate, posit, that time is not quantitative but qualitative so its meaningless to say it begins, ends, is eternal. Perhaps Time can be better understood as being like, for instance, beauty, or truth, or liberty and other emergent phenomena. Maybe, going back to Democritus, time is by convention. At any rate we're not there yet though cosmologists seem to think a full theory of quantum gravity would be the Rosetta stone to this end. Final thought. If time is eternal why should we be surprised that a final theory of everything, a grand unifying theory, is attainable at all? Meaning, the discovery, the search is itself eternal.

In Carroll's epilogue to the book he gets philosophical. This makes a beautiful contrast to all that went before. Nature is universal; what happens here happens everywhere. "The entire universe is in a glass of wine." He quotes Richard Feynman. And, finally "True understanding leads you to places you didn't know you wanted to go." That is the heritage of the great men of science, Tycho Brae, Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, and my favorite, Eratosthenes of Cyrene who having taken note of the sun's light shining straight down a well on the summer solstice coupled with the angle of the sun's shadow in nearby Alexandria used that difference in angle to derive the Earth's circumference. I'm awestruck by that and Carroll's work, too. Reverence is in order.

G.V. Desani (and here) was my mentor. I'd like to bring his studies to bear here as a contrast in my thoughts on Sean Carroll's work, indeed, on Science itself, as, one may term it, a mode of being.  In particular I have in mind his experience with so called "Nadi" writers, ancient "seers" - that would be an Indian, more particularly, a Hindu phenomenon. Desani wrote about this in an essay, here; there are other writings of his that impinge on the Nadi Texts, but I'll concentrate on the one cited. First citation in that piece, on page 17* he defines science:

"One uses the word "science" mostly for that body of
knowledge which is gathered empirically from nature and by
observing man: and for that body of knowledge which is
found to be of service to man. According to this definition,the knowledge acquired through revelation (religious knowledge, for example) or intuitively divined knowledge (anything at all, including the mystical) would not be termed "science". There is an obvious conflict between the view of "reality" afforded by each of these sources of knowledge.

"If the above definition of "science" is accepted, then, for
all practical purposes, the Law of Causality (the relation of cause --"antecedent" -- and effect -- "consequent") must be accepted as scientifically valid. A thing, an event, is caused. A tree is from a seed: water boils from heat. For all practical purposes, all perceived consequences or effects are from antecedents or causes. That is -- in the sense in which we use the word science -- an accepted law of science."

In this article Desani confronts events he has experienced that contradict the Law of Causality. According to Desani the writers of the Nadi texts are humans who have overheard, had dictated to them, non-human, great beings; I suppose it would be correct to call them divine entities. They have perfect knowledge of all past and future and it has been demonstrated to Desani's satisfaction as outlined in his linked piece by that name. I'm not inclined to lay out his thoughts on the subject at this juncture but its clear that they couldn't run more counter to science and its methods, theories, equations. So, there is another world view antithetical to anything most of us have ever been exposed to. It deserves consideration and, in my opinion, is no more fantastic, unlikely, than the scientific claim that experience depends on affirmation by a conscious being for its being, or that observing photons actually determines how they behave, and mabye cats, too.

So, I'll leave it at that with this final thought. The immanence of a divine creative spirit, force, is as a quality, faculty, attribute, rather than a "person". Is consciousness a similar phenomenon, and if so can it be said that it is an emergent phenomenon, or is it immanent, too? Is it a "built in" quality that necessarily emerges? Is it always true that said emergence occurs along with the various concomitants of consciousness? Does Truth (a concomitant of consciousness) play a role in the Real? Perhaps it's a mere random fluctation. How would one know? Wrong question! It is what it is. You wouldn't know, you couldn't. Forbidden knowledge. The Real is no more accessible than the speed of light. You - one - can imagine -dream? - but it is ever just beyond one's grasp. So. Only mystery remains, only unsolved, unsolvable, puzzles. And you thought this would be easy. That is, just relax and it will come to you. Well! Not so fast, there. It's intended to be obscure, impossible, unsearchable. "G_d" withdrew to make room for man. Screaming conclusion: That withdrawal makes of man, sentient life anywhere/anywhen, co-creator. Put slightly differently, "G_d" descends into matter in order to (re-)emerge a fully self realized being. There's a bit of natural philosophy for you.

*The name of the .pdf is NADI_SHASTRI_3_GVD.PDF. A search of the site does not find it but its there, as of this writing, under the heading "Articles, Lectures, & Academic Papers" at: "The Nādi Shāstra," based on the first six columns of " 'Very High' and 'Very Low' ", The Illustrated Weekly of India and likely developed for inclusion in Desani's planned Rissala. This is a compilation of several of Desani's pieces about this subject.