CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXISTENCE - I The One Being is the noumenon of all the noumena which we know must underlie phenomena, and give them whatever shadow of reality they possess, but which we have not the senses or the intellect to cognize at present. The impalpable atoms of gold scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are not only present there but that they alone give his quartz any appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. But the miner knows what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Maya which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the Eye of Dangma toward the essence of things in which no Maya can have any influence. It is here that the teachings of esoteric philosophy in relation to the Nidanas and the Four Truths become of the greatest importance; but they are secret . . . The Secret Doctrine, i 45 In order to comprehend consciousness from the standpoint of the cosmos as a whole, consciousness must refer to that which exists even before a cosmos comes into being. It is that which subsists and persists during the epochal manifestation of a cosmos, as well as that which endures after the dissolution of the cosmos. By analogy of the macrocosm to the microcosm, the full consciousness of an individual must be regarded as an unbroken stream that existed before any particular form. That stream persists during all the vicissitudes experienced in and through vestures occupied in relation to others ensouled by other sparks of the Central Spiritual Sun. If that stream of consciousness is unborn and undying, unbroken and ever existing, it must also be unmodified by all that is experienced through involvement in a form, and must therefore subsist after the dissolution. Consideration of the nature of primordial consciousness is essentially the recognition of changelessness in a world of change. That which is entirely changeless is beginningless and endless, unconditionally eternal. The eternity of pure consciousness transcends the vast, though specific, sense of eternity referred to in the Stanzas of Dzyan, which speak of the Seven Eternities comprising a Maha-Kalpa. This vast cycle, encompassing the entire evolution of the terrestrial chain of globes, is but a wink in the Eye of Self-Existence. The absolute eternity of consciousness persists throughout all the manifold involvements of variety and interaction, of flux and reflux, in the variegated forms and vestures of cosmic manifestation. Even to begin to contemplate this unbroken consciousness and to consider the meaning of manifestation in the light of such an eternal reality is something the human mind is scarcely prepared to do. When confronted with such a prospect, the mind, which tends to be conditioned by sense-experience, by memories and by anticipations, immediately begins to reflect the succession and variety of changes. As the mind is itself part of Nature and part of matter in the deepest sense, it encounters profound obstacles to the ceaseless contemplation of the changeless SAT. By itself the mind cannot generate a principle of continuity. It can only do this by negation or abstraction. Even employing the via negativa or neti, neti, negating all that is embodied and involved in events in space and time, the mind must use language that participates in the relationality of whatever exists in space-time. By abstraction, by attempting to leap beyond that language, it is also fundamentally involved in speaking in terms of an experience, but which cannot be easily rendered into the language of relationality in space-time. That language, therefore, tends to be paradoxical. It is difficult to talk about absolute metaphysical darkness when human beings are almost constantly conditioned by the contrast of light and shade, or day and night, which by extrapolation they may apply on the cosmic plane. To transcend all this and to talk of absolute darkness is in effect to talk of No Thing. Metaphysical darkness is the eternal matrix in which sources of light appear and disappear. It is that to which nothing is added to make light, and that which need not be subtracted from light to make darkness. It is the noumenon of both phenomenal light and darkness, remaining in the perception of even an intuitive human being nothing more than a gray impalpable twilight. This persistent obscurity and lack of clarity will arise again and again, so long as one attempts to contemplate consciousness from the standpoint of that which is immanent and involved in vestures, that which uses language and is constantly employed to identify and reidentify, to compare and contrast objects. Yet it is possible through meditation to penetrate within ourselves beyond the veil of concepts to a deeper sense of being which is beginningless and endless, unmodified by the mind. It is possible to experience oneself in relation to that which has no frame of reference in terms of space and time, no images that refer to existing or possible objects. To rise to this level of imageless consciousness requires unremitting perseverance because one must put aside innumerable layers and levels of language and thought. To understand this is to recognize in relation to the mind that which intuitive contemporary physicists have begun to understand about the many-layered and many-levelled structure of space. Mathematically, one can generate a multidimensional space; employing what is now known as quantum physics, one can generate models which allow, at any given time, myriads of possible worlds in reference to any single atom, electron or photon. There is thus a host of parallel pathways that can be, but are not, taken owing to the probabilistic curves that apply to the quanta of light and atoms. So too with consciousness. It is possible to use the mind to abstract away altogether from what actually exists. Yet at the same time, one may preserve a sense of being; the absence of a framework need not cause one to dissolve away and altogether lose ones sense of self-existence. To think in these ways is to begin to draw upon the metaphysically profound and purifying potential of space. At the simplest level, one may, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, see the heavens as the great cleanser and purifier of consciousness. An uninformed eye sees the sky as bare space. But many people are by now aware from contemporary astrophysics that space is not totally empty, that there is matter and radiation in all the spaces between the galaxies. It is empty only by reference to the familiar space of the world of objects. Turning the idea over in the mind again, one might ask why the night sky, seemingly so empty, in fact suggests an indefinite extension in every direction, provides an intimation of a million galaxies. It seems as if there is at once some kind of structure and some kind of transcendence of all possible structures. To reflect upon these lines is to begin to approach the esoteric conception of space, which is neither a limitless void nor a conditioned fullness, but both. To persist in this thought is to raise fundamental questions about real being as opposed to embodied existence – about that which is within and without, omnipresent and invisible. By removing consciousness from its habitual confinement to narrow categories, such meditation will cleanse the mind. Meditation must go even deeper, however, in order to generate a notion of Absolute Abstract Space without reference to subjects or objects. The point must be reached where there is a dissolution of the sense of I in reference to a pristine sense of self-existence. The notion of an I cannot arise unless there is already a separation in consciousness between the self within and the self as embodied, between the self in contemplation and the self that is extended without. Anyone even remotely familiar with the persistently intrusive nature of I-consciousness during attempts at meditation, much less daily life, should understand the tremendous effort of abstraction, of imagination and of depth in meditation needed to reverse the false order of priority which immersion in the immanent world of space-time imposes upon the pure stream of unmodified consciousness. Ego-consciousness insists upon pronouncing this or that as real. It imposes its own polarized constructions on appearances, maintaining that that which is more real is dark or empty, and has to be discovered by removing perceptible layers. In fact, however, the opposite is true. Spiritually, what is real is what is unmodified, what can never be penetrated by analysis of the differentiated realm of space-time, of subjects and objects. From the standpoint of Spirit, everything that emerges is unreal because it is only a veil upon that which is hidden behind it, not in the manner of subtle phenomena veiled by grosser phenomena, but in the manner of noumena which transcend phenomena entirely. All phenomena, whether they seem subtle or mundane, are equally unreal. Their reality is at best a relative mode of existence, relative to the observer and to most sense-perceptions, relative to the concepts and the cogitations of individual subjects, relative to phases and states of evolving consciousness. Even more fundamental than the veil of concept is the veil of maya itself. Even to speak of maya is as mysterious and metaphysical as talking about blankness, Absolute Abstract Space, nothingness. The doctrine of maya is really a doctrine about time and causality, about consciousness and veiling, about the many-layered nature of space. When the contemporary physicist says that the universe is space and matter, this is but a dim reflection of the ancient idea that the universe is nirvana and maya. There is something mayavic about matter, but there is also something at the root of matter which is pure, homogeneous and eternal. There is noumenal substance beyond maya. There is also that about space which is beyond all possible dimensions. Even thinking of space as multidimensional does not reach to the soul of the concept. Even the mathematician who conceives of space as a collection of dimensionless points, each one the reduction of the circumference of a circle when its radius is zero, gets no closer. By imagining an infinite number of such points, one can generate a sort of metaphysical mapping of dimensionless points, which could be called space. It would be quite different from the metric space of the physicist, and much more abstract than the sense of visual space obtained by the casual watcher of the skies. But even this mathematical conception of space involves one in a mapping, in the snares of a rational mind, in conventional grooves, dependent upon the relativities of space-time and the shared experience in the world of contrasting objects and cogitating subjects. Hermes, February 1984 Raghavan Iyer
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 06:39:28 +0000
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