The Eye of Shiva: Momentariness, Pt. 2

Let’s dive back in.

Last time, I talked about the momentariness of objects by looking at a single object from it’s own perspective, as it were.

That shows us something but it’s not the way we experience objects and it’s not the way our world works.

Let’s look at it from our perspective instead. When you examine your experience on a moment-to-moment basis, it’s very hard to find either discrete, delineated objects or events.

Like right now, for example, I would say that I’m looking at my laptop. But if I were to freeze time and isolate one moment, what I’d get isn’t an experience of “seeing a laptop” but more:

·      Seeing a 180-degree field of vision occupied by shapes and colors

·      Feeling my butt on the chair and my arms on the table

·      Hearing some frequency of sound combined from several sources

·      Sense of “I am,” identification as the subject of perceptions

Etc.

It's not like I have a karma that gives me "seeing laptop" over time, another one that gives me "feeling laptop" over time, another one for "seeing wall behind laptop..." It's one karmic seed that gives the whole moment in one capsule.

The mind can only have one object at a time, so it can only plant or experience a single karma at any given moment.

So the way we experience reality is like a mandala built from the senses, radiating out from the core I-consciousness.

Within this mandala, there is all the sense data that you are receiving at this cross-section slice of time. This includes everything that is in your mind at that moment, your knowledge, your personality and your memories.

The next moment is a different slice of time. There’s a different mind, a different set of objects, a memory that now includes the imprint of the moment before. It’s a different universe. The one before it is gone.

Like every object in it, the whole universe is blinking in and out of existence.

Our perception of time is our observation of changes in these universe-mandalas, like the flow of frames in a movie. When it seems like you’re interacting with an individual object, you’re dipping into a certain point in the sense data of a set of universes.

We run into the same idea in Kashmir Shaivism.

The tantric yoga of medieval Kashmir teaches of two sides of divinity, two polarities within the oneness of the Ultimate. One is the transcendent, unmanifest, beyond form, beyond change, pure consciousness, silence and stillness. The other is the immanent, the manifestation, the infinite flow of forms and energy, the pulse of life, the illusion.

In this tradition, visarga means (among other things) the emissional power of Shiva – the power that brings pure consciousness into manifestation.

The blueprint of the universe, its DNA, is contained unmanifested within the divine consciousness. By the will of God – ichha shakti, the energy which is closest to pure consciouness – it’s pushed outwards. The divine emanates down from the most abstract to the most particular, material details of the world.

As soon as the forms reach a state of total separation, they are drawn back into Shiva.

This happens in every moment. With every blink of an eye, the universe is created and uncreated.

Creation is not something that happened once, way back when. It’s at the core of every moment of existence. If you look at creation in Kashmir Shaivism or the Book of Genesis, the creation of the world actually describes the structure of a human being, from consciousness to the physical body.

So visarga creates the universe – and the illusion – in a burst of energy away from Shiva. The same energy then brings all of manifestation back into Shiva.

This vibration between form and formlessness is spanda, the Heart of Shiva.

It is constant contraction and expansion.

In the contraction, the infinite possibilities condense into finite specificities. The eyes open to the outside world, the world of forms is created and consciousness is lost in the dream.

In the expansion, the eyes close to the outside world and open to the inner reality. The world disappears and the eye of wisdom opens. Consciousness awakens to itself.

The universe takes form and dissolves back into the void at every moment. Like a wheel that spins so fast it looks like the spokes aren’t moving, this vibration blurs into a dynamic stillness.

So again, our reality is like an infinite series of universes, with no duration in time, each one arising and dissolving into the next within our consciousness.

But there’s a very natural question we have to confront: if the universe, all objects and the personal self, are momentary, why do we have an experience of a stable reality?

Why do we see more or less the same universe from moment to moment? Why don’t objects constantly shift form? Why do I feel like I’ve been more or less the same person for my whole life, and I don’t randomly change identities?

There are three angles I invite you to consider.

1. There is no continuity

There isn’t always continuity. It’s not a fact of the universe.

Having a stable individual identity moving forward in linear time is a certain type of experience, a certain karma.

We don’t always have it. Objects, events and sense of identity have less stability in dreams, and even less in the Bardo.

We pass through sudden breaks like the transitions between states of consciousness – from waking to dream to deep sleep – or at the moment of death, the moment of birth, or the dissolution of the individual into cosmic consciousness.

There are states in meditation where time is different, where past and future fall into the singularity of pure being.

These experiences of non-continuity are just as real as the experience of continuity you’re in now.

2. Continuity is a projection within the present

Where is our experience of past, present and future? Like everything else, in the present.

Where is the past?

It only exists within memory and the shape of the world as it is now. What we perceive as the past is what your karma has manifested as your memory in this moment. And this changes all the time.

Have you ever learned something that completely changed what you knew about your childhood, or history?

Before you learned it, those memories were what happened. After, your memories are tinted forever and you have a new past living in your head. So which is real? Which version really happened?

Infinite possibilities for the future and for the past because both are in the present moment – our karma causes a certain possibility to ripen at a given moment, including what happened before that moment

There are infinite possibilities for how the future could play out and infinite possibilities for how the past could have played out – because it’s in the present. At any given moment, we experience one version of reality and not another because of what karma ripens then. And that karma includes our memories, it includes the past of that version of reality.

I’ll go more into this in the next momentariness post.

It does seem though that each moment-universe has a certain frequency, the combined energy of everything inside it. This resonates with other possible moment-universes of similar shape and attracts them to either side of it, so you get a movie that makes sense even though it’s made of tons of separate frames.

3. If you’re reading this, you have continuity karma

In the Abhidharma, you have a birth karma, a body karma, that only allows a certain set of karma to manifest within your lifetime.

If you are born into human form, you will only experience physical karma that has to do with a human body. The karma of flying or breathing water will never ripen for you in this lifetime. That human karma persists until you die and then a new set of experiences will open up to you.

This definitely fits our experience, but how does it work? According to the higher schools, or this kind of quantum thing we’ve been developing here, you can’t talk about a karma that endures. There’s a turnover rate of one moment of mind.

The answer is that there must be karmas that cause similar karma to ripen and karmas that don’t cause similar karma to ripen.

In the Bardo, you experience karmas that don’t trigger similar karmas. The mind vacillates wildly between different forms and states, a new one every moment. Eventually one pops up that does have this special quality, a stabilizing karma that will funnel you into a continuous sequence of experiences, and bam rebirth.

Now you have a body. Maybe you’re human. Congratulations! The karma that makes you human causes more human karma to ripen, until one day you get a seed that doesn’t cause similar karma and that’s death. A break in your identity. Back to chaos for awhile.

Summing it up

I went all over the place here but here are the takeaways:

·      When you look at the momentariness of experience, there are no objects: only bubbles of timeless universe that arise and pass away at every moment

·      Kashmir Shaivism is real cool

·      Even though everything has only a momentary existence, you and everything in your world appear stable because part of the karma to be human is the karma to have a (mostly) stable experience.

Tune in next time for:

·      HOW TO CHANGE THE PAST

·      HOW MANY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF YOU ARE THERE

·      WHEN DID YOU BECOME ENLIGHTENED

·      ARE SOME OF YOUR PAST LIVES IN THE FUTURE?

·      IS THERE ONLY ONE MINDSTREAM???

·      SOME OPINIONS ON THE DASHA MAHAVIDYAS AND HOW BODHISATTVAS DO THINGS

When Yoga Turns You Into An Alien

I lost my keys.

I lost my sweater and my good bra. I lost my flip-flops.

I wrote notes to myself so I would remember things and I lost the notes.

I lost my temper too.

I left my wallet on Fire Island.

I leave a door open and the cats get into the room they’re not supposed to go into. My spell check app doesn’t work and I send an article full of typos to my boss. My boyfriend asks me to help with some errands and, somehow, I mess up every single one. “Floaty yogini,” he says in dismay.

I’m sorry to everyone who’s suffered from my negligence. Believe me, no matter how frustrated you are with my inability to hold onto things, stick to a schedule or follow basic directions, I am twice as frustrated at least.

I wasn’t always like this. That’s what I envision myself shouting as I plunge into an abyss of missed deadlines, lost items, bad decisions and stunning miscommunications.

The fact is that my connection to the material world, always a bit tenuous, has faded in the past few months, and my spiritual practice has a lot to do with it.

It hurts me to say this, because I would never want to say anything that might discourage people from practicing yoga and meditation. I’ve heard many spiritual teachers promise that meditation won’t make you weird and spacey, I think mostly not to scare people off, because it really can make you weird and spacey. At least for a while.

At least for a while, you might feel like your whole life is falling apart. You might feel like the light inside is shining stronger and stronger, and on the outside everything is slipping away.

It’s part of the path, I think. It’s from the same reason that meditative states sometimes feel like a very blissful type of dying.

Think of it like a movie projected onto a screen. Usually, we have our backs to the projector so we only see the image, all the different colors and shapes, and we don’t see the single beam of white light that they come from. In meditation, you turn around to look into the projector beam. The colors and shapes are there inside it, but you only see white.

Going deeper into meditation is a path of uncreation. Reversing the process of manifestation that generates our incarnated experience.

This is the 36 tattvas in Kashmir Shaivism, the branching path through which the divine descends into material reality and the human being ascends to the divine.

The pure “I am” splits into internal and external, the external splits again and again, more concrete with every movement away from the source. The Self identifies with its creation and becomes limited.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. You know this story already.

When you go back into the “I am” you are retracing these steps and erasing them behind you. The infinity of creation which emerged out of consciousness dissolves back into it.

It’s not the end. On the tantric path it’s not enough just to melt into oneness, you have to bring oneness into creation. This world is only samsara if you have a samsaric mind; if you have a divine mind, it is Shakti. The mountain peak, where you leave the world behind and fall into God, is one stop on the road, and from there you turn around.

But it’s a place we all have to go. We have to go alone and we must be prepared never to come back.

For now, I’m not able yet to transform this reality but I’m too bound to it to transcend it entirely. The dim lights of this world lose their color and blur together, but the bright light still seems so far away.

It’s like in the Torah, if you look at the story of the Israelites as the journey of the soul. We go out from Egypt, slavery to the ego, towards the Promised Land of enlightened consciousness. Between those two poles, there’s the desert. The vast open space. No markers, no path except what’s right in front of our eyes.

This is the space of spiritual development. Sometimes things seem more clear, sometimes less so.

Things are less clear for me right now. I walk around like a foreigner in the places most familiar to me, talking to people I’ve known for years and wondering, who are you?

I can’t bring myself to care about the things that most people care about. I meditate in the morning and everything comes together into a single point of clarity, and for the rest of the day I blunder around feeling like I just landed from another planet and I have a map from the wrong decade. I barely recognize my own life. Everything I try to do veers off in the wrong direction.

I see now that I can’t trust my own mind. My emotions do strange, crazy things and I’m not in control of them, I have no part in them except what I give to them. The sense of control over my life, the ability to manage things for myself, is a ripening of a certain karma. It’s a grace.

I’ve neglected and disregarded the material world in the past, and so now I experience the ripening of a different karma.

And that’s also a grace.

The times when things seem clear are more dangerous, I think. We’re in the desert here – if you see an oasis, good chance you’re heading for a mirage.

When you’re lost, you can be humble. You can be in that sacred space of bewilderment where everything is possible and all you can do is laugh.