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

Blink And You Miss It: An Introduction to Momentariness

Today I would like to talk about momentariness.

Actually, I always want to talk about momentariness. I just think it’s cool that Buddhist scholars and yogis knew we were living in a trippy quantum universe 1500 years ago.

Momentariness is one of the most interesting Buddhist doctrines for me. It seems almost too simple but once you start digging into it, it will take you into emptiness, universal consciousness, the quantum multiverse and a whole different way to look at the mindstream.

Let’s take any object, like a pot.

(“Consider any object, such as… oh, I don’t know, just pulling this one out of nowhere… A POT.” – Every Buddhist or Hindu philosopher ever. It’s always a pot.)

Take a look in your proverbial kitchen. Is the pot you bought last year the same as the one you have today?

The one from last year was fresh from Bed, Bath & Beyond. It didn’t have any stains or weird spots or burn marks on the bottom.

Your pot now? Not so much. Pot A (earlier pot) and Pot B (current pot) have different characteristics.

But whatever, you might say, it still works the same, it’s the same pot even if it has a few spots.

Ok, fine. So what if tomorrow it gets a hole in the bottom and you can’t boil water with it anymore? What if the handle falls off? What if you throw it out and it gets melted down as scrap metal and made into something else, or into a new pot? At what point does it cease to be the pot that you bought last year?

We tend to prescribe the existence of an object to its function and, to some degree, its characteristics. When the pot breaks or the pen runs out of ink, it’s not “really” a pot or a pen anymore. This is sort of the basis for the semi-realist take on momentariness put forward by the Gelugpa, especially Je Tsongkhapa and Khedrup Je, but I’ll get to that later.

Let’s go instead to how Dharmakirti – King of Logic and epistemologist extraordinaire – would view the momentariness of all specifically characterized phenomena.

But first, let’s divide all objects into two groups. This will become relevant, I promise. In Dharmakirti’s ontology you have:

·      Specifically characterized phenomena. These are real, individual objects like a pot (yes), a tree, a horse, etc. They are by nature impermanent and always changing.

·      Generally characterized phenomena. Conceptual concepts that don’t exist in any single, specific way, such as “animals,” “being strong,” “old men.” These are mental objects. They’re permanent. Are they real? Do they exist or not? WELL GEE THANKS FOR ASKING. Dharmakirti says no. They sort of blink in and out of existence in as far as they’re expressed in specifically characterized phenomena but they’re essentially fictional, just concepts that we use to organize our perceptions. This puts him in the antirealist camp. (Versus, for example, most Hindu schools which are realist, meaning they ascribe more reality to abstract concepts than individual manifestations. Buddhist antirealism that denies the reality of conceptual constructs in favor of discrete objects leads to a more universal antirealism once we see that these individual objects which we seem to interact with are actually, on our perceptual level, concepts.)

Anyway! We see these mind-concepts at work all the time, creating the commonsense reality that we usually experience.

The Sautrantika school provides the framework for a lot of Dharmakirti’s arguments when he’s not going full-on Yogacara. They show the mind creating solid objects and categories out of perceptions that are ontologically distinct in three ways. There’s a mixture of place, time and nature.

·      Place: you see a pot on your left and a pot on your right. You recognize that they both belong to the category “pot,” so they are kind of “the same thing.”

·      Time: you see one pot in the morning and the evening. You think of it as being the same object. (This is obviously the most important one for momentariness.)

·      Nature: you see a steel pot and a copper pot. Again, you recognize they both belong to the category of “pot,” have the same nature as being pots, and they’re basically the same thing to you.

So are they really different objects? With place and nature, it’s pretty clear that you’re dealing with two separate objects that get lumped into the same category. With the mixture of time… it sure looks like one pot.

Only from the macro view though – if you look at the pot from a microscopic/subatomic level, you’ll see that the particles are in constant motion. The molecules and atoms are vibrating. The electrons are doing their trippy little orbits and the quarks are doing whatever quarks do.

There’s always a level where you can find change. There’s always some difference between Pot At Moment A and Pot At Moment B.

You never step in the same river twice: the water is always flowing.

At this point it looks like momentariness is just another word for impermanence, and there’s definitely overlap between the two concepts. All phenomena have the nature of being momentary because they’re impermanent, changing from moment to moment. But we can go one step further.

In the lower schools, and our everyday sense of reality, being impermanent means an object is created, endures for sometime and then decays out of existence. It works in daily life but there are two problems with this.

First, it’s impossible to say when exactly a given object is created or destroyed. Going back to your pot, is it destroyed when it no longer functions? Technically, the object is still there.

Or, take a tree. A seed forms and detaches from a mother tree, falls to the ground, sprouts, sends down roots, sends up a little branch… at what point do we say the new tree comes into being?

The tree lives for a while, then it dies, falls over, starts to rot, eventually sinks into the ground and becomes a part of the soil around it. At what point does this tree cease to be?

You get the picture. This is how fuzzy it is for all physical objects if you look at them closely enough.

There’s another problem. If Pot At Moment A has a certain set of characteristics and Pot At Moment B has a different set, they must be separate objects. You can’t have a single thing with two sets of characteristics.

I already noted that the subatomic arrangement of an object would be different at two different times, but even if that weren’t the case, it would still be a different object. Time is also a dimension. Pot At Moment B is different from Pot At Moment A simply because it is at a different point in its timeline. It is, if you will, one moment farther from its creation and closer to its destruction.

It’s like the object blinks into being, endures for a moment and then blinks out again, replaced by an almost identical object which is one moment older.

Any object you perceive is actually a continuum of these momentary objects, an infinite collection of them, which our mind (running in a straight line along the time dimension) projects as a single, enduring object. An object that seems stable is actually like a film where all the frames are basically the same.

Objects do have the nature of arising, abiding and ceasing, but all three happen in a moment, every moment.

Time, meanwhile, is not moving at all. It’s a condition of the mind that functions once the changes in the objects (including our minds) are dramatic enough for us to perceive them.

This is momentariness in a nutshell. There are a lot of implications and a few problems, such as:

·      If objects have only a momentary existence, how do we have an experience of continuity?

·      How do these moments have any existence, because they must be infinitely small?

·      Since this is true for individual objects, what about the material world as a whole?

·      How does karma function here?

I hope to address these soon but this post is already approaching TL;DR and I have just so much to say about momentariness so I’ll leave it here for now.