Introduction and Chapter 1

Apertif

The Buddha’s ‘bodhi’ was the revelation that any measure of time contains all time -- any enclosure of locale contains all space. Attendant to this sublime personal experience was the understanding that such was the case for any entity existing in the various realms comprising ‘samsara,’ the experience of the phenomenal world -- the burning ecstasies of ‘Bhavachakra,’ the wheel of life and death. This is a remarkable assertion. Larger than any thought we’re likely to entertain in the next 10 minutes. Whoever we are and whatever our station, the prince once known as Siddhartha proclaims the vast diameters of cosmos to be projected from an interior depth of our mind. In the Hindu world from which he took his departure, these realms were known as ‘mayakosas.’

The mayakosas were metaphysically equivalent to the strictures of caste. On the lowest level were the base components of materiality, the annamayakosa. When these were assembled to constitute living form, one had taken breath in the pranamayakosa. When living organisms became capable of thought they had crossed another threshold to the manomayakosa. The succeeding levels of the vijnamayakosa and the anandamayakosa comprise psychologies the West would classify as paranormal. A metaphysical barrier beyond which subordinates could not venture separated each realm. The Buddha’s vision was the witness of a ‘Tathagata.’ one who had ‘thus come’ and who had seen with clarity ‘tathata’, or suchness — a vision from the distance of ‘paramita.’ the yonder shore. From this vantage there were no distinctions of caste and no barriers between the mayakosas. Each completely comprised the others. Each embodied the totality of existence. The ‘maya’ or illusion of mind was that anything was only a part -- and not the resplendent whole. This is the heart of a revelation that the ‘World Enlightened One’ spent his remaining five decades attempting to impart. It is also the heart of the Tautological Paradigm. We shall find clues of it suggested in the world’s wisdom literature. We will attempt to investigate the fundamental assumptions that inhibit our access to a similar witness. We will, with a little patience, completely alter everything we once believed about the nature of our lives. This vision suggests that we are more than simply a character in the human comedy. We are assuredly that, but also playwright, cast and crew. We’ll probably need to read a page or two more before we put in for a raise.

Generally we separate ourselves into greater hierarchies of caste than those for which we have censured Indian society. Whatever our station it is of given social moment. It is also personally apprehended. In the first instance our ‘social others’ dictate a judgment of class and distinction. In the second instance we are free to abide by their assessment or adopt a measurement of our own. We are of a prejudice that would give an equal status to any belief or evaluation. One of the guiding premises of our thesis is that little will be gained in the disputation of any status -- one might just as ably accept or reject any formulation. The insight that we desire to impart is ‘in addition to’ those views to which we presently subscribe and which dictate the living substance of our respective worlds. During the course of our inquiries we hope to understand the distance between our personal conjectures and the more celebrated depths our investigations shall seek to explore. We are each aware of our own evaluation and to the doubts we entertain. That the mundane moments of our lives may be equal to the totality of existence is where we may discover our responsibility for the world to be greater than we had otherwise supposed. At any moment the obviousness of this answer is disguised by a conceptual prejudice that believes that reality can only be intellectually surveyed. The ‘in addition to’ is in understanding the unity of any moment with that of every moment — the unity of a single soul with every soul. When we add the substance of the one to the expansion of the other, we find ourselves abiding at the intersection of each in the revelation of all.

The intimacy of that connection we shall approach ‘presently’ -- in the preliminary of presence:

Presence is that of which there can be no doubt. What presence ‘is’ will always be open to interpretation. But that it is, whatever or wherever it might be, is the fundamental ground in which we exist. To question whether or not any aspect of being is, in the very least, existent — subsumes that something exists. Doubt can only be attendant to a description of presence; that it is anything particular. We know of a certainty that we are, we believe that we were, and also that we will continue to be, but knowledge of what is, is only attendant to being as it is. What it was or will be can only be inferred by the insistence of memory in the first instance and by the imagination in the second. Presence never experiences a past or a future. Each of us is presently a thought. We exist only for its duration. Each of us is the thinker of that thought. That thought (even as memory) is only and always present. The supposed retreat of thought is only evidence of a differing perspective wherein passage is inferred and dimension is construed.

Time and extension are not attributes of presence but rather notions it enlists to define its world and establish thereby, its placement. Belief about presence is of different order than that of its experience. Belief posits an author who is writing these words and engenders the hope of a reader who will one day read them. An author writing and a reader reading are descriptions whose mystery is not, of necessity, penetrated by possessing appellation. When we come to understand that a description of any existent is co-existent, that is, equally endowed of presence, then we shall come to see that any description is as mysterious as the thing it purports to describe. To give things a history is to place them in time. To give things extension is to place them in space. These principles in tandem give us the familiarity of the world. Their dissolution reveals that world to be vaster and more intimate than we’ve heretofore suspected. The grid of space-time and the uncertainty of the quanta have brought a healthy unfamiliarity to the certainties once taken to be observable reality.

Reality is contextual. An electron is a quantum. A quantum can be construed to be either a particle or a wave depending on how we wish to set up our experiment. The certainty of the mechanical universe has been replaced with quantum probabilities and an Einsteinium clockworks that renders time as plastic as the expanding space in which it unfolds. At the heart of physics in the 20th century is an acknowledgment that reality is dependent on the context of any entity making the observation. After 2,500 years of western deliberation the objective world has been rendered as subjectively elusive as a musical phrase.

There is a dynamic between individuals who define an era and the way the era defines them. There is a larger context that enfolds them both and enfolds us even now. We will best be rewarded if we come to understand the parameters of the known before we conceive all parameters to reveal ultimately ourselves. A greater grasp of the one will more certainly illuminate what we take to be the other. "History is a nightmare," (1) from which Stephen Dedalus and all beings laden with consciousness are struggling to awake. Time is a battlefield on which its present survivors will not long endure. The history of thought, even as we think it, is a record of our grappling with meaning. Cultural consensus of what meaning might mean is an acknowledgment of paradigms.

We are most conscious of such patterns when we perceive a shift in the ground from which reality had been viewed. History records many such shifts in the light of seemingly incontrovertible knowledge whose failure necessitated the ensuing alterations In 1905 Einstein overturned the universe of Newton in a carpenter’s union hall in Zurich. The patent clerk who would alter our most basic certainties of time did so without ownership a watch. (1a). That this process has been continuous should give us pause in subscribing too profoundly to any conceptual model whose mutation in time is assured by all of which we have record. Reality is not something approached. It is always experienced, whatever definitions one’s hierarchies suppose. We shall not question the usefulness of believing the distinctions that make science and spiritual progress a possibility. Whatever level the mind of man ascends there will be a common terrain from which it has never departed. Something is ‘there’ - if we choose to think of it at a distance or ‘here’ - if we presume it to be a tad closer to home. In either locale it is the locus of the fundamental ‘mysterium’ and we stand before it at any waking moment. Why there is something rather than nothing is among the most basic of philosophic queries. The Buddhist has long been comfortable with contention that the something in question is a nothing in answer. That conviction will only be fathomable to adepts who have, on occasion, taken leave of those definitions, which seem to so resolutely structure our habit of the world.

The dismantling of these structures is undertaken by spiritual disciplines the mastery of which is measured in lifetimes -- it can also take place in the minutiae of an unexpected moment. We shall take a middle ground by reviewing some selected few who have preceded us in insight. We stand upon a shoreline yielding to immensities of sea. We only dimly intuit that a conflagration consumes the world in any apprehension of the brain. After commanding the elements of a tempest, Prospero acknowledged that "our little lives are surrounded by a great sleep" (2) and he, as well as he, who dreamed him, laid down his wand. Chuang Tsu dreamed he was a butterfly and wondered if perhaps the butterfly was dreaming Chuang Tsu. (3) Plato felt the passing of time was evidence of the world’s shadow reality and his mentor, Socrates, proclaimed that the only thing he knew was that he did not know. (4) Each of these we’ve been – others also each we are (or soon we’ll shortly be). We are each, as well, conclusively ourselves - reporters of time in the fiction of history.

2,000 years after Socrates’ crucifixion by hemlock, Descartes declared that the only thing he could not doubt was his doubting. Hume’s skepticism thrashed the possibility of even that single certainty. Philosophy had to wait until Kant proposed structures of mind that antedated empirical experience. As their precondition he proposed they were not doubtable candidates of the Scotsman’s skepticism. He took it on faith that there was correspondence between the phenomenon of his experience and the ‘nomenon’ that was ultimately its ground. Galileo in support of Copernicus (and the forgotten Aristarchus) found himself shackled before the inquisition. It had been obvious for untold millennia that the sun revolved around the earth. The Church was reluctant to revise a truth that was, as well, grounded in scripture. Every child learns that the contrary is true and every adult marvels at the ignorance that could have supposed otherwise. One of the little realized ironies of the 20th century is that Science has come to tell us that the former notion is no less correct than the one we currently take as gospel. Since Einstein, movement has come to be viewed in relative terms. If, as he suggests:

"Nature is such that it impossible to determine absolute motion by any experiment whatsoever."

(5)

–then we can just as ably assert that the sun goes round the earth. Our theory will be more complicated but our predictions of heavenly movement need be no less accurate. Any description of reality will always and only, be provisional – whomever we believe to make the assertions. The ostensibly real is only a presentation of the constructs of our instrumentation. Our sense organs and their organizational base in what we call mind dictates, quite ineluctably, the contours of what we take to be the world. The values we’re taught, the moral predicates of what we take to be the good or evil of our encounters, is the fruit of action and not the motivational concern of its execution. The desire to destroy the world is based on no less an affirmation than that which seeks to bind-up its wounds. In this regard, evil is as innocent as good. For any universe the end of its desire may not be the loftiest exponent of its action – but it is the only one by which we may assume meaning to its measure.

The ascendancy of the so-called ‘good,’ in Western thought is owing to the potency of a dream that arose by the waters of Babylon, during the reign of Cyrus, "King of kings;" six centuries before he with whom we generally associate that appellation. Returning from exile Jews would no longer hold Jehovah responsible for the thornier problems of existence. Thereafter these became the province of Angra Mainyu – Zoroaster’s dark knight of the Persian dawn. In the West he’s more familiarly known as Satan. By default he became the repository of our darker emotions, suppressed like unconscious currents coursing through the murky waters over which he is said to rule. Dualities sown from a single source are in their heart non-dual. The ultimate dichotomy in human thought is the cyclical movement of light and dark, suggestive of "being" in Eastern presentations and the adversarial progression, suggestive of "becoming" in the Occident. The one assumes a timeless unity and the other sees a unity only arising with the assumed elimination of the negative – the Yin of oriental thought. One never gets a feeling of the Yin’s equal status in western thought because it is a foregone conclusion that the light will be ascendant. Any inroads of the negative are only temporary forays. It still, however, remains unclear as to where the defeated dark is destined to go. Each supports and defines the other.

The end of time in Christian thought is not unlike its beginnings in the cosmological musing of 20th century’s astrophysicists. In the former case there is nothing to be said about conditions when time ends and in the latter there is nothing to be said about conditions before time begins. For the Christian, time ends with the elimination of the night. For the cosmologist, it begins with an explosion of light. In the one it’s difficult to pin down actual beginnings, there is a 4 or 5 billion year margin of error and in the other we’ve been anticipating the 2^nd coming at the conclusion of each of the last 20 centuries. Ironically the Christians are operating within a narrower margin of error. The physicists, however, become much more precise in chronology once time begins. The rabbit comes out of the hat at ‘ten to the minus forty-three’ seconds (10^-43). If you’re rusty on exponents, the universe’s first discernable event gets speedily under way one ten millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in the expansion of what is prosaically called a ‘dimensionless singularity.’ (8)

Now, although we speak of things beginning with a big bang, at this point in the expansion we are discussing a quantum ripple some hundred million, million, million times smaller than a proton — Big Bang indeed! Nonetheless, the energy quotient is of such magnitude that the four major forces can exchange bosons (9) of identical nature and hence can be said to be a single force in much the same way that the trinity can be spoken of as a single manifestation of one god. Once time and extension have been let out of their ‘dimensionless’ bag, Heraclietian change will be the undercurrent that will sweep the flotsam of observable reality down the corridors of cosmic history.

For ourselves, the events in the stream are of less compelling interest than the stream itself There would appear to be a privileged artificiality in our ability to make observations of events in a stream out of which we can not wade. Our attempts at description assume that we can indeed depart so as to determine what it is by our analysis of what it is not. What it is not is something that no one has ever experienced so we will never be in a position to determine whatever it might possibly be. Our only certainty is an intimacy of involvement.

Any isolated event of which we take stock embodies the presence of the stream as well as any independent event caught within its currents. A wave has little meaning outside the context of an ocean, but in what sense can its separation be realistically entertained? Events have the possibility of reportage when their context and defining limitations are accepted in the attempt of communication. Reality (what is going on conjunctive with any reported event) is the concurrence of all events. We can as little separate these events as we can remove an ocean from the earth.

Our supposed reality comes into being by a perception that sees one thing by the exclusion of others. These ‘others’ are no less as fundamental. To see the one thing it is, however, necessary to exclude the others. Language would have us believe that the one thing is therefore independent of the others. This independence is the basis of believing that time is sequential and that space is extensional. The ground of either belief is not nearly as secure as we might otherwise suppose.

That the world we ostensibly share is predicated on this foundation should not deter us from undermining it to reveal another that is no less obviously descriptive. This ‘other’ might allow us to view the grid of time and extension in a context that language has traditionally disguised.

The fundamental ground of any context is the total sweep of the cosmos.

This is the presence in the mind of any isolate we investigate.

This is the presence of mind at the ultimate. This is the presence of your mind.

This Bud’s for you.

Congruent with any moment of individual consciousness is the more pervasive (and pervasively disguised) ‘interdimensional unconscious.’ This second entity co-exists with any moment of the first. Our traditional placement is measured against a changing locale and fleeting temporality. The interdimensional unconscious is grounded in the totality of locale and the eternity of time. That the one mirrors the other is whereby the revelation of eternity is always attendant to any presentation of time, and the totality of space dimensionally present in the details of any locale. To view what we take to be other (other people, places or things) is to view exterior structure of our mind. We each abide in an isolation that is encompassed by totality. The totality is mind entertaining the illusion of distinction until arriving at that juncture where the distinctions are dissolved. In the chapters that follow we will approach many of the ways that this landscape has been surveyed. We are of the belief that nothing that can be conceptually entertained can take precedence over any other conceptual purview. We shall therefore stand accused of making an argument that is no argument at all. We accept our guilt and march with clear conscience to the scaffold. We shall request the fattest cigar at our accuser’s disposal and pray it will endure the length of our exposition. Being is never represented in anything less than a total presentation. To wonder why the world is anything particular is at once to be offered the answer in the clarity of what is surveyed. That answer is the intuition that even the most mundane moment of any being is supported by and reflective of -- the manifest of all being. Any moment of our being-in-the-world is a manifest of the world in our being. It is in this interconnection that the Buddha would proclaim:

"I and all beings on earth together attain enlightenment

at the same time."(10)

Those of us that feel less than enlightened may feel this presumptuous on the part of Mr. Shakyamuni. His revelation that your opinion and his presumption are essentially identical is whereby he would assert that there is little room for any seeming contention.

The Tautological Paradigm is the light by which any fragment is foundation —   a dimensionless singularity out of which the universe of time past and time future is strewn. As our hangman bides his time we shall reflect it is where we have always been, where we will always be —

it is where we are now.

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