Heavenly Night Falls Heavily

We are standing under, not understanding a tremendous mass in a clear black sky.  Every pinpoint of sky is inhabited with bright heavenly bodies, mostly invisible, disappearing into the unfathomable distance by simple rules of perspective.  With mechanical eyes to see, we know this for a certainty.  Though Beauty grants that the sky is sprinkled with shining diamonds, unmistakably, it still appears absolutely carbon-black to us.  We the people, all of us, no matter what we claim to believe, no matter our affiliations or our learning, no matter our accomplishments, our success or failure, and never mind our government by us, for us, we are all surrounded and shot through with this unmistakably black hole, this empty space, which is as heavy as heavy can possibly be.  We take for granted that it is what it is.  It seems real, and it is, but only by definition.  It isn’t necessarily so, as such.  This seems a contradiction.  The coherence of a wave of language breaks and spreads thin on this shore.  Realize that the real estate is wetted by it, the stone eroded by it, broken to tiny shards, the grains of sand on which we stand, but it means very little.  After all, what is real?  We cannot adequately answer this question with language.  So, take the real for granted; but do not take it to heart. 

When we interrupt negative dreams by waking to the real world, we are continually surprised and relieved to learn that our fearful state was pointless because we were safely sleeping in our beds, all along.  Though this is a poetic metaphor for it, our material situation is emotionally identical to this, spiritually identical to this dreaming/waking dichotomy.  But disregard the Buddha, whom they claim is the awakened one.  Whether he is awakened or not, we do not know it.  So, we cannot knowledgeably claim this for ourselves or anyone else. 

Our human life carries a vast mass of material weight, a universal order mingled with random chaos, most of it cloaked by blinding darkness and carrying eons of millennia of inertia forward into an invisible future.  I say forward, but truly, we travel backwards.  If you doubt it, consider this: we cannot see the future, but we see the past.  So, we travel through time facing backwards, apparently seeing where we have been, not necessarily where we are going.  In addition, in fact, we have no reason to call our movement in the material cosmos forward.  Our absolute direction of movement in the expanding space is impossible to determine.  We hurtle on, despite.  Even most of the light in the universe is invisible to us.  But we stand proud, ignoring our ignorance by which we are bent, stooped by the stark, backbreaking dark, the ether being the densest element of all.  And even though it is perfectly clear, it appears as black as black can be.  

And our death looms within it, huddling near to us for warmth.  We feel its cold breath on our faces.  It makes us painfully aware of what we do not know, and our unknown is frightening.  So, we invent a sunlit view from the mountain top as if on a clear day we could see eternity.  Charitably, I believe our stories are constructed from hopeful, honest good will and intention.   Composed from metaphors, our myths are lies we use to tell the unknown truth of our lives.  But they fall far short of telling the truth of our deaths.  Near death experiences are almost exclusively positive, though they belie many of our high hopes of certainty in faith.  But we can take solace in the fact that they also belie many of our fears.  Though these experiences only give us a glimpse through the slightly ajar door into an antechamber of whatever awaits us beyond the waiting room we live in, (while we pass time by reading dog-eared magazines, which don’t belong to us or watch the television without control of the remote while it’s set on a channel we didn’t choose) these near-death glimpses are hints that reveal the temporary nature of our cares and anxieties, which contribute needlessly to loads of unnecessary pain.  We do it all to ourselves and to each other.  We take ourselves and each other so seriously, though it amounts to preposterous pomposity and pretense.  Our spirits know it.    

Our Halloween is obvious to them.  We don our costumes to play roles in society, which are so much fantasy and role-playing pretending to importance.  We provide consequences to one another to shape behavior with rewards and flattery, insults, verbal abuse and assaults, threats, punishments from corporal to capital, restrictions of freedom, deprivations, chastisements, ostracism, manipulations ad infinitum, all because we are certain that it is necessary, unavoidable.  And it all amounts to a tremendously tragic farce. 

The positive intentions of our metaphorical stories have sadly become supplanted by will to power.  The road to hell is literally paved with these good intentions.  But take heart.  Though all roads may lead to Rome, which is bad enough, thankfully, they never actually reach hell.  We can take solace in the beautiful truth: the conscious universe endorses none of our endeavors to control one another.  Fear not.  There is nothing there in the dark that is not there in the flickering florescent light.  And in fact, the dark is suffused with authentic light.  Touch the zero point energy.  But don’t try to lean on the empty space.  Take shelter in its unseen dimensions, but don’t assume parallel universes.  Feel the warmth of that invisible light, and take comfort from it.  See with that eye that is always open, even in our restless slumber.  Believe.  But know that is what you are doing.

What is the meaning of life?  It is meaningless to ask.  If it had only one meaning, we would all be lost.

peace

sarva

The Sun is Rising

The Sun is rising, so to speak, as it must, virtually by definition, this and every morning.  Although from my perspective it is artificially delayed by the warehouse outlet discount variety store between Her effulgent body and myself.  And it is understood, as it were, that the dawn is not as a result of the Sun’s movement but because the Earth continues His spiraling Sufi dance in orbit around His Source.  Although the Sun is not visible to me at this moment, the air is alight.  It is shining.  This glory is poorly understood by me, but not only by me.  It has been explained to me, and I still remember the first time it was so explained away, that the air absorbs certain frequencies of light and radiates others.  So, the sky is blue.  This explanation has been enhanced by later knowledge and experience.  For instance, the Sun fades colors in a predictable order, red first and leaving blue.  Still, the knowledge hardly suffices. 

As I understand it, the mix of molecules, which is the air, absorbs energy and remits it at certain frequencies or wavelengths in space, or in the form of corpuscles, (now known as photons, which may or may not have mass) or as waves, or as quantifiable quantum probabilities that exist in superposition but collapse on observation.  That is, the light remitted by the molecules may be particles or waves and may exist in a localized form or in superposition depending on whether there is an observer to hold the light to task, to force the issue.  This is, more or less, a scientific description, albeit abstracted by my artistic penchant and likely inaccurate in some respects due to my poor understanding.  Even so, it is a wonder, and the explanations hardly serve to dispel my wonder.  For this, I am grateful.  I suspect that no matter how deep the explanation might go, my wonder would still persist, redirected to the next thing not yet explained away.  And the last fact, that observation contributes to the light’s situation is telling, to me. 

The air is transparent but not perfectly so.  It is translucent.  As it happens, life requires light, and it is available to us because the nature of the air supports and facilitates life’s use of the light.  Or, life is what it is due to the nature of light and the translucent air, among infinitely many other factors, not least of which is the air. 

Perhaps these observations seem patently obvious, or it seems they miss the point, entirely.  Perhaps, cause and effect do not provide a complete picture of reality. 

I’m not minimizing the accomplishments of science.  It has taken millennia of civilization and centuries of science for people to approach the truth of the ubiquitous and apparently simple phenomenon of Sunshine, along with other realities of the interactions of light and matter.  I am saying that it is easy to conclude prematurely that one understands the reality because one can describe it. 

Love knows this is not so. 

There is silence in science; by which I mean there are some things about which science is rightfully silent, or it should be.  Love is one of those things.  To scientifically study the emotions that we all experience is at best a soft science full of uncertainty.  We can all be comfortable with that uncertainty because it doesn’t affect our experience, at all.  One can attribute proximal causes to our emotions, but we experience our idiomatic emotions regardless of whether or not cause and effect can be demonstrated to us.  Our own reasons are enough for us, and no matter whether they are very insightful or scientific, these reasons are as detailed and rational as they need to be for our own comfort. 

This is not to say that Love can even be reduced to an emotional state, far from it.  And at the risk of presenting what may seem at first blush to be a non sequitur, this is to say that we do not understand the way light and matter interact.  Science may provide material facts along with a rationale for how our emotions are created by them, including but not limited to an extremely complex internal chemical environment facilitating electrical potentials via ion exchange.  But this is preposterous.  To attribute the entirety of life to material causes makes no more sense than to say clothes make the man (incidentally, the emperor has none).  Science cannot possibly attribute an emotion to an internal chemical environment, no matter how complex, when it cannot begin to describe how light interacting with matter conditions our experience.  But if it could, that would suffice.  After all, we can only be light and matter.  Right? 

Wrong. 

In order to approach the truth of how light interacting with matter conditions our experience, one has to take a leap of faith of which science is not capable.  Science will never explain consciousness with its current, proof-driven, bootstrapping from-the-ground-up mindset.  In order to explain consciousness, science must give its devil his due.  That is, it must grant consciousness primacy and give up the preposterous view that matter could ever possibly create it.  Nothing else in our bodies is created by us, not the matter, not the light, and none of the properties of either of them.  And, if matter created consciousness, I think it would be obvious to us how matter and light interact, and it is not.

Still, the Sun is rising, so to speak.

peace,
sarva