What's this all about?

It would be a waste of your time and mine

if I didn't have something new to write about.

Long ago I decided I would take my education

into my own hands because I found out that what I thought I knew,

what I had been taught

wasn't what knowledge of the deep kind is about.

WILLIAM JAMES

"Out of what is in itselt an indistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction (sunyata), or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade. Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things. But what are things? Nothing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sensible qualities, which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and dignity."

The first thing I really knew was that I didn't really know.

To know, as the poet E Browning puts it,

Well I had better cite her completely

"There is an inmost centre in us all,
where truth abides in fulness,
and, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.
And to know rather consists in opening out a way
whence the imprisoned splendor may escape
than in affecting entry for a light supposed to be without."

Knowledge is not just what we can

shovel in, but ultimately what we can dig out.

To know is to express

one's self.

It turns out, I have found,

that the supreme quest

each of us are destined to attain

is to be what we are. We do not have to go somewhere else. We do not have to listen to anyone else. We don't have to be anything else. We don't have to find any other time

I-hsüan
A Sermon

Reverend Sirs, time is precious. Don't make the mistake of following others in desperately studying meditation or the Path, learning words or phrases, seeking after the Buddha or patriarchs or good friends. Followers of the Path, you have only one father and one mother. What else do you want? Look into yourselves . An ancient sage said that Yajna-datta thought he had lost his head [and sought after it], but when his seeking mind was stopped he realized that he had never lost it.

Now, you may already know this,

so what can I offer that is new?

What we are is not what "they" say we are.

The problem

and there is a real big problem

has to do with our languaging.

Our language is not the reality

"The word is not the thing"

ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." [TDOP Huxley 23]

So whenever we talk about reality

using words of course

we are not saying the truth

except for the word word.

But we can come to believe that the words are real

after all they are all we got

and start to act as if they are real

that makes them real

That is the illusion

maya

Some go farther

And act/believe that they are ALL that is real

that is the delusion

KEN WILBER

Bergson was also aware of the spurios reality of "things" because, - as he himself pointed out - thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and, as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.

Einstein says we are part of the Whole

Plotinus says that when there is no distinction there is no difference

The Bible says "When one is with the Lord

They are the same spirit"

Schroedinger cites the Tat vat ami

Eckhardt says we don't stand apart

Besant says

We may whisper I am he

Ken Wilber

HOW BIG IS OUR UMBRELLA?

And when we pause from all this research, and put theory temporarily to rest, and when we relax into the primordial ground of our own intrinsic awareness, what will we find therein? When the joy of the robin sings on a clear morning dawn, where is our consciousness then? When the sunlight beams from the glory of a snow-capped mountain, where is consciousness then? In the place that time forgot, in this eternal moment without date or duration, in the secret cave of the heart where time touches eternity and space cries out for infinity, when the raindrop pulses on the temple roof, and announces the beauty of the divine with every single beat, when the moonlight reflects in a simple dewdrop to remind us who and what we are, and when in the entire universe there is nothing but the sound of a lonely waterfall somewhere in the mists, gently calling your name-where is consciousness then?

This is not new, but the way this one works

is that it is our concepts that tear reality apart

and play a cruel joke on some of us. Reality is Now.

And the process of creating a concept (thinking about)

takes time.

This removes us from the Now.

Feelings of separateness

are real

GOETHE
"My friend, all theory is gray, and the Golden tree of life is green."

Here is the new part. When we remove ourselves from the Now, and enter the conceptual dimension. we necessarily use the tools of this domain of things. The tools of the Now are different. The tools of the Now are relationships - interactionings. For it is the relationships, the interactionings, the what things are doing to eachother that are common to eachother.

What's Happening...

So when the tools of the concept declare an impossible unity, they are right!

So who is the joke on?

A survey of the literature focusing on the fundamental principles of relationships reveals an intriguing if not surprising story. It's difficult for me to say it right now, but it seems that no single person tells the whole story of relationships. Most often a single person has a single idea along with a vested interest. But when they all taken into consideration, they are not competing ideas, but complementary concepts. They are like the facets of a diamond.

ERWIN SCHROEDINGER

"Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet so simple and so clear: "Tat tvam asi.", this is you...and not merely "someday" but today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over, for eternally and always there is only now, and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

When we see parts, the parts are only parts that we see. Seeing parts does not prove that parts are all there is to see.

And one more thing, you can argue about God all you want, you can say there is no God, or you can say there is only your God, but the fact of the matter is that there is a unseen kind of energy in some other unseeable dimension that is non-local (it's effects are simultaneous) and is nearly infinite in scope and potential. It is the source of all the energies of the fields, accounts for synchronicity and above unity energies. Call it whatever you want, it is a lot more than we can even imagine. We are all interconnected by an unseen field "like islands in a pond" which is the source of all matter and the ground of the Universe.

ERWIN LASZLO

New Concepts of Matter, Life & Mind
Advances in the new sciences suggest a further modification of this assumption about the nature of reality. In light of what scientists are beginning to glimpse regarding the nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality. The things we know as matter (and that scientists know as mass, with its associated properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. In the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter- generating energy field.

now, time to come back to earth

To here and now.

MURRAY GELL-MANN

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavoir of the whole."

JANTSCH:

In a true system...not all macroscopic properties follow from the properties of components and combinations. Macroscopic properties often do not result from static structures, but from dynamic interactions playing both within the system and between the system and its environment...A human being falling in love -- perhaps only once in a lifetime -- changes the life of the community of which he or she is a part. Such considerations already hint at the fact that a systemic view of necessity leads to a dynamic perspective. Quite generally, a system becomes observable and definable as a system through its interactions. (The Self-Organizing Universe." p24)

-FRITJOF CAPRA

The Turning Point

The systems view looks at the world in terms of relationships and integration. Systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller units. Instead of concentrating on basic building blocks or basic substances, the systems approach emphasizes basic principles of organization. Every organism- from the smallest bacterium through the wide range or plants and animals to humans is an integrated whole and thus a living system. ...But systems are not confined to individual organisms and their parts. The same aspects of wholeness are exhibited by social systems- such as an anthill, a beehive, or a human family- and by ecosystems that consist of a variety of organisms and inanimate matter in mutual interaction. What is preserved in a wilderness area is not individual trees or organisms but a complex web of relationships between them.

All these natural systems are wholes whose specfic structures arise from the interactions and interdependence of their parts. The activity of systems involves a process known as transaction- the simultaneous and mutually interdependent interaction between multiple components."

THEORY

GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
"Compared to the analytical procedure of classical science with resolution into component elements and one-way or linear causality as basic category, the investigation of organized wholes of many variables requires new categories of interaction, transaction, organization, teleology..."
"These considerations lead to the postulate of a new scientific discipline which we call general system theory. It's subject matter is formulation of principles that are valid for "systems" in general, whatever the nature of the component elements and the relations or "forces" between them...
"General system theory, therefore, is a general science of wholeness"...
The meaning of the somewhat mystical expression, "The whole is more that the sum of its parts" is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explanable from the characteristics of the isolated parts. "