TheAppleCore
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2007
- Messages
- 5,510
I will tell you the most shocking and beautiful revelation of my life. But firstly, a clear distinction must be made between reality and imagination.
We all acknowledge that the past is unchangeable. That the history books have already been written, and we can't rewrite them. Well, the future is identical to the past, except that it exists later, rather than earlier. The present is just an arbitrary line that we decide to draw, which slices reality into two halves, the past and the future. Where exactly we draw the line depends on when we do it - "now" is a word that refers to the point in time at which it is spoken / written. But there are innumerable "nows", because you create one every time you think in terms of past, present, and future. We are, peculiarly, accustomed to thinking that just one of them is special - whichever "now" coincides with our thinking is considered, by that very thinking, to be different. In other words, we think that the frame of reference from which we contemplate reality is special. We think that this frame of reference marks the boundary between the past, which is unchangeable, and the future, which we imagine we can influence.
Well, this is an illusion. The future is entirely continuous with the past, like a tree's branches are continuous with its trunk. Both the future and the past exist in the same, entirely definite, entirely immovable sense. Essentially, the future has already happened - just as a tree is a three-dimensional object, the giant process which involves the entire history of the cosmos and its entire destiny, is one enormous four-dimensional object, the fourth dimension of course being time. The reason we feel that there is a certain ambiguity in the future, has to do with the fact that we can't remember the future, only the past. Because cause-and-effect is a forward progression, not backward, the past is able to imprint itself in our minds. So, the past is illuminated by memory, but the future is dark to our gaze. And just because we can't clearly see the future, we incorrectly assume that the future can exist as any number of possibilities. But, if we could see the future just as well as the past, we would see only one reality, not a multitude of options.
So, all of the possible paths that we think we can take, and all of the hypothetical actions we think we can perform, are simply figments of the imagination. The one, singular path we actually take, and the actions we DO perform, are reality. This is the important distinction between reality and imagination.
Now then, I'll let you in on a very interesting secret about reality. Reality is governed by the principles of nature. And nature loves you. Reality is, by definition, a process which loves itself. The incomprehensible infinitude of cosmic wiggles that led stardust to assemble into YOUR body, was nature giving you the gift of life. Christians have made the same observation:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
I'm certainly not trying to sell anyone on Christianity, which has its flaws, to say the least. But there are some important truths that exist at the core of the religion, and the loving nature of reality is one of them, which is interpreted as "God's love" in this case. Taoism also observes the same fact, through a different cultural lens:
The great Tao flows everywhere,
to the left and to the right,
All things depend upon it to exist,
and it does not abandon them.
To its accomplishments it lays no claim.
It loves and nourishes all things,
but does not lord it over them.
-- Lao Tzu
Here, Tao refers to a principle of nature - a pattern that can be seen in the way the natural world behaves. Like the pattern by which objects fall toward the earth, due to the principle of gravity. Tao can be seen as a kind of gravitational force, that exerts its pull on everything. Except, instead of pulling things down toward the ground, the Tao pulls things toward the joyous gift of life. In this way, we are loved by the Tao. The Christian concept of "God" is really just an anthropomorphic (human-like) representation of this force of nature, by drawing an analogy between nature and some kind of supreme being. However, the essence of God and Tao are one. They are two perspectives on one reality.
But you don't really have to take my word, Lao Tzu's word, or the Bible's word for it. You can witness it for yourself. To do this, you have to understand the human ego. Here, the word "ego" is what you refer to when you say "I", as in "I sat down", or "I told a lie". It is the agent of conscious action, which forms your self-identity. And it evolved into the human genome, because it served an important purpose. It allows us to, in a sense, cut ourselves off from nature, in order to protect the physical organism. This is useful, because while nature is an agent of life, it is also an agent of death, and so at times it threatens the body, such as when the laws of chemistry cause a fire to rage through a home. In this case, the ego separates the body from the fire by commanding the body to flee.
But for the very reason that the ego stifles nature, it ultimately works against us, because it resists the loving flow of the cosmos. In other words, although we can prolong death by artificially interrupting the natural order, it is ultimately in our best interest to accept and surrender to death, because the natural order is loving, whether it appears in the form of birth or death. When your body dies, you don't really die, because you are something that exists beyond your body - you are eternal (you are Brahman). And, although death appears to be the cessation of life, in actuality it is simply a life process, like the beating heart. Birth and death are like the breath of the eternal self - inhale, exhale...
So, you can demonstrate the love of nature by allowing it to flourish, by declining to artificially insert your ego into the process, which is akin to building a dam to stop the flow of water. This ego-death is achieved by liberation from desire (nirvana). When we desire nothing, we take a sort of passive stance, in which we are simply watching life occur, rather than actively participating, although our bodies are in motion as we walk, talk, and eat. And by declining to take action, we decline to wage war against the process of love. Silence the ego, and you may watch something truly magical begin to develop.
You can wield the power of accidental nature in any way you like. But my personal favorite demonstration of Tao / God is through a hobby of mine - video games. This is because, in video games, your success is literally quantified, by a score, which is clearly indicated. If, while playing a video game, I silence my ego, and decline to make any conscious efforts to win the game, I surrender my body to external forces. I am allowing my actions to be controlled purely by biological impulses, which exist not by my own doing, but by the evolution of mankind, and the entire cosmic history that predates life. And, to my amazement, I find that when my biology begins to play the game for me, my reflexes sharpen to the point that I am reacting to virtual enemy threats before my ego even becomes aware that they exist. My score rises dramatically. The same effect can be seen in any activity, and the ego can be silenced to achieve anything, from good artwork to good conversation.
However, in saying that the ego is separate from nature, and has the power to resist nature, I am only using a metaphor to illustrate the concept of cosmic love. In reality, your ego is a result of human evolution, so of course it is entirely natural, and it follows the principle of love just as well as anything else. Even your futile and painful attempts to indefinitely outrun death are ultimately a gift, to be cherished. In fact, even if you wanted to, you couldn't possibly dam the waters of love, because you ARE nothing more than a part of that rushing stream.
In other words, reality is perfect. It is ideal. What does it mean for something to be "ideal"? It means that, we cannot imagine something better. A bucket without any holes at all is the ideal bucket - we can imagine a bucket with one big hole, or two small holes, or any number of terrible leaky buckets, but none of them are superior to the bucket with no holes, therefore the bucket without holes is ideal. Reality is ideal, because even though you may think otherwise, you cannot imagine something better. You think, "if only my pains were to disappear, I'd be happier". This is not true, because pain and joy really are two sides of the same coin (yin-yang). The suffering that you lament is actually the happiness that you seek in disguise. If you were given the wisdom to understand exactly what you desire, and then the power to realize that desire, you would make the Earth, exactly as it is now.
And, truth be told, you did. You are not your body, nor your ego - you are God. You are Tao. You are the endless love of nature. Rejoice!
We all acknowledge that the past is unchangeable. That the history books have already been written, and we can't rewrite them. Well, the future is identical to the past, except that it exists later, rather than earlier. The present is just an arbitrary line that we decide to draw, which slices reality into two halves, the past and the future. Where exactly we draw the line depends on when we do it - "now" is a word that refers to the point in time at which it is spoken / written. But there are innumerable "nows", because you create one every time you think in terms of past, present, and future. We are, peculiarly, accustomed to thinking that just one of them is special - whichever "now" coincides with our thinking is considered, by that very thinking, to be different. In other words, we think that the frame of reference from which we contemplate reality is special. We think that this frame of reference marks the boundary between the past, which is unchangeable, and the future, which we imagine we can influence.
Well, this is an illusion. The future is entirely continuous with the past, like a tree's branches are continuous with its trunk. Both the future and the past exist in the same, entirely definite, entirely immovable sense. Essentially, the future has already happened - just as a tree is a three-dimensional object, the giant process which involves the entire history of the cosmos and its entire destiny, is one enormous four-dimensional object, the fourth dimension of course being time. The reason we feel that there is a certain ambiguity in the future, has to do with the fact that we can't remember the future, only the past. Because cause-and-effect is a forward progression, not backward, the past is able to imprint itself in our minds. So, the past is illuminated by memory, but the future is dark to our gaze. And just because we can't clearly see the future, we incorrectly assume that the future can exist as any number of possibilities. But, if we could see the future just as well as the past, we would see only one reality, not a multitude of options.
So, all of the possible paths that we think we can take, and all of the hypothetical actions we think we can perform, are simply figments of the imagination. The one, singular path we actually take, and the actions we DO perform, are reality. This is the important distinction between reality and imagination.
Now then, I'll let you in on a very interesting secret about reality. Reality is governed by the principles of nature. And nature loves you. Reality is, by definition, a process which loves itself. The incomprehensible infinitude of cosmic wiggles that led stardust to assemble into YOUR body, was nature giving you the gift of life. Christians have made the same observation:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
I'm certainly not trying to sell anyone on Christianity, which has its flaws, to say the least. But there are some important truths that exist at the core of the religion, and the loving nature of reality is one of them, which is interpreted as "God's love" in this case. Taoism also observes the same fact, through a different cultural lens:
The great Tao flows everywhere,
to the left and to the right,
All things depend upon it to exist,
and it does not abandon them.
To its accomplishments it lays no claim.
It loves and nourishes all things,
but does not lord it over them.
-- Lao Tzu
Here, Tao refers to a principle of nature - a pattern that can be seen in the way the natural world behaves. Like the pattern by which objects fall toward the earth, due to the principle of gravity. Tao can be seen as a kind of gravitational force, that exerts its pull on everything. Except, instead of pulling things down toward the ground, the Tao pulls things toward the joyous gift of life. In this way, we are loved by the Tao. The Christian concept of "God" is really just an anthropomorphic (human-like) representation of this force of nature, by drawing an analogy between nature and some kind of supreme being. However, the essence of God and Tao are one. They are two perspectives on one reality.
But you don't really have to take my word, Lao Tzu's word, or the Bible's word for it. You can witness it for yourself. To do this, you have to understand the human ego. Here, the word "ego" is what you refer to when you say "I", as in "I sat down", or "I told a lie". It is the agent of conscious action, which forms your self-identity. And it evolved into the human genome, because it served an important purpose. It allows us to, in a sense, cut ourselves off from nature, in order to protect the physical organism. This is useful, because while nature is an agent of life, it is also an agent of death, and so at times it threatens the body, such as when the laws of chemistry cause a fire to rage through a home. In this case, the ego separates the body from the fire by commanding the body to flee.
But for the very reason that the ego stifles nature, it ultimately works against us, because it resists the loving flow of the cosmos. In other words, although we can prolong death by artificially interrupting the natural order, it is ultimately in our best interest to accept and surrender to death, because the natural order is loving, whether it appears in the form of birth or death. When your body dies, you don't really die, because you are something that exists beyond your body - you are eternal (you are Brahman). And, although death appears to be the cessation of life, in actuality it is simply a life process, like the beating heart. Birth and death are like the breath of the eternal self - inhale, exhale...
So, you can demonstrate the love of nature by allowing it to flourish, by declining to artificially insert your ego into the process, which is akin to building a dam to stop the flow of water. This ego-death is achieved by liberation from desire (nirvana). When we desire nothing, we take a sort of passive stance, in which we are simply watching life occur, rather than actively participating, although our bodies are in motion as we walk, talk, and eat. And by declining to take action, we decline to wage war against the process of love. Silence the ego, and you may watch something truly magical begin to develop.
You can wield the power of accidental nature in any way you like. But my personal favorite demonstration of Tao / God is through a hobby of mine - video games. This is because, in video games, your success is literally quantified, by a score, which is clearly indicated. If, while playing a video game, I silence my ego, and decline to make any conscious efforts to win the game, I surrender my body to external forces. I am allowing my actions to be controlled purely by biological impulses, which exist not by my own doing, but by the evolution of mankind, and the entire cosmic history that predates life. And, to my amazement, I find that when my biology begins to play the game for me, my reflexes sharpen to the point that I am reacting to virtual enemy threats before my ego even becomes aware that they exist. My score rises dramatically. The same effect can be seen in any activity, and the ego can be silenced to achieve anything, from good artwork to good conversation.
However, in saying that the ego is separate from nature, and has the power to resist nature, I am only using a metaphor to illustrate the concept of cosmic love. In reality, your ego is a result of human evolution, so of course it is entirely natural, and it follows the principle of love just as well as anything else. Even your futile and painful attempts to indefinitely outrun death are ultimately a gift, to be cherished. In fact, even if you wanted to, you couldn't possibly dam the waters of love, because you ARE nothing more than a part of that rushing stream.
In other words, reality is perfect. It is ideal. What does it mean for something to be "ideal"? It means that, we cannot imagine something better. A bucket without any holes at all is the ideal bucket - we can imagine a bucket with one big hole, or two small holes, or any number of terrible leaky buckets, but none of them are superior to the bucket with no holes, therefore the bucket without holes is ideal. Reality is ideal, because even though you may think otherwise, you cannot imagine something better. You think, "if only my pains were to disappear, I'd be happier". This is not true, because pain and joy really are two sides of the same coin (yin-yang). The suffering that you lament is actually the happiness that you seek in disguise. If you were given the wisdom to understand exactly what you desire, and then the power to realize that desire, you would make the Earth, exactly as it is now.
And, truth be told, you did. You are not your body, nor your ego - you are God. You are Tao. You are the endless love of nature. Rejoice!
