Form, Space and Consciousness.

Thursday 02 Oct 2014

When I peer out into the night sky and wonder what it all means, I am struck not only by the mystery, but also by the beauty and magnificence of what I perceive. In these moments a literal truth or knowing is quite palpable in the stillness. It permeates deeply and I am left with a feeling of balance and contentment as I contemplate the wonder of it all and its connectedness to me.

It hasn’t always been like that for me. There was a time when the thought of living in a vast and empty Universe would engender fear and timidity. I needed to grasp something more tangible and understandable to hold on to and believe in. I had my family and friends, I had my culture and education, but all this did not even figure against the vastness of the Universe. I somehow knew I was vulnerable and easily manipulated, ripe to be caught up into idealistic ideas and trouble that tend to fertilise ill will! I would compensate by dreaming for power and identity.  I could easily get caught into being an ignorant critic or a champion of half-baked ideas and beliefs about religion or culture! The mystery of the Universe was a long way away then but my fear certainly drove me to these distractions.

Over the intervening years I became interested in Physics through the window of Astronomy.  Grand Unification Theory’s filled my mind as I grabbed onto ideas that might ease these deep fears that were still resonating. Beautiful ideas that seemed to be able to weave a fabric of understanding! Chaos Theory blended with the happenings inside the world’s particle accelerators! Relativity and the quest to unify it with the world of the Quantum! This knowledge was and is very powerful and helpful. Its purveyors and practitioners are clever and at times almost Sage like, but in the end I began to see that I was still using my intellect to escape the truth. I could see that this direction is not the pathway to freedom and truth. It is not a pathway to remove my ignorance and fear!

Relief came for me, when I realised that I had at hand the very best instrument to realise this elusive pathway to enlightenment.  This instrument is my own body and mind. The Buddha had said that everything that he understood could be seen in this “fathom long length of body and mind” and I began to see what he had meant. This body and mind is a self-reflective instrument that can see from the very beginning, to the end of space and time. It can discern and know all of the conditions that are known; from the most complicated all the way back to the most simple packet of pure consciousness. This body and mind does however need to be calibrated. We need to know our body and mind completely and this requires us to set up datum scales to anchor us accurately, in order to watch and calibrate minds movement as it drives our body through space and time. As we calibrate our minds closer and closer to the present moment, we can start to see and use pure consciousness as our fixed datum and this stream of energy will penetrate all the conditions of the Universe.

There is a well-worn pathway to pure consciousness for those with the eyes to see. This quest to develop our self-reflective ability allows the mind to be calibrated accurately and moreover it is repeatable.  It is not capricious. There are many teachers in the world that can show the pathway that leads to pure consciousness.  Further, there are multiple pathways that can lead to this same end, so that every human being can find a direction that best suits, but in the end, it is a pathway of letting go. It is a pathway that calls on us to let go of our views and opinions, our sacred ideas about Religions and Gods.  It necessarily requires us to attain a certain level of morality so we can unburden our minds and relax deeply in order to let go of ourselves. We need to be able to develop deep contentment with a balanced coherent energy that will eventually allow us to see past all of our doubts.

The process of developing coherent energy calls on us to completely accept our humanity. It is recognition that humanity exists and is created from our intellect and emotions, our “head and our heart”. A one dimensional intellectual pursuit for truth will never work and in the same vain an emotional pursuit will also fail. But, when these disparate energy’s come together, there is coherence, and it is this coherence that eventually removes our doubts and allows pure consciousness to come into view. It is only then that we have a true datum to calibrate our lives against.

With this datum of pure consciousness in place our body and mind becomes an instrument that can penetrate into all the conditions that exist. Nothing can escape to condition a relapse into confusion. We can see and appreciate how consciousness works to create the Universe. We can see our personal role in the process as we grasp onto the stream of consciousness that we all support. We can see our Karma and how we continue to grasp onto that mind stream even after we die. We see how this grasping conditions our rebirth. We see how the mind keeps all of this in place for lifetimes, but most importantly we see how fortunate we are to have this self-reflective human condition. A condition that can allow us to see and understand the Dukka (in Buddhist terms) or lack of peace we have and will continue to have, unless we become wise. We see how subtle it is and how ordinary instinct will never allow us to be free. We can be enlightened. We can know that enlightenment will extinguish all conditions, leaving only the peace of the unconditioned.

This process comes into place with what might be called Supra mindfulness. This Mindfulness is above and on top of everything. It is totally involved with pure consciousness while all the ordinary conditions are just playing out in their normal way.  Supra Mindfulness will notice when consciousness stops. When it knows this, it also knows that the ordinary conditions are just playing out in an unconditioned arena until they are finished.  Supra mindfulness knows that while there is no stream of consciousness these conditions will not be reborn. When the conditions finish the consciousness that contains them will also finish, because there is no space for the conditions to shape. All will extinguish, leaving only the peace of the unconditioned. There is nothing more to be realised or said.

INTERESTING PHOTOS COMPARING SIMILARITIES OF NEURAL
NETWORKS AND GALACTIC CLUSTER FILAMENTS

This Movie demonstrates how our Milky Way galaxy interacts with other galaxies to form our local super cluster "Laniakea". Laniakea is joined by filaments to other super clusters mediating the entire universe.