Stalking The Strange Serpent

1

Stalking the Strange Serpent Death-throes of a seeker

Philip Davies January 2009 “Love is the sea of not-being, and there intellect drowns.” Rumi

2

CONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Introduction Reality – The True Home The Void The Plenum Bad Move? To Be or Not to Be? The One and the Paradox of Manifestation The Self and the Paradox of Consciousness Holograms and Fractals Concepts of Identity The Illusion of Continuity The Paradox of Identification – ‘Asmita’ I Think, Therefore I Am (I think) –aren’t I? Creation and ‘Maya’ Quantum physics The Bad News - Limitation Whose illusion? The Purusha Paradox The Divine Actor and the Paradox of Omnipotence The Good News – The Bluffing Serpent Mind the Big Bang! The Problem of Solipsism The Multi-player ‘Omega’ Game The Story so Far… The Divine Nescience Free Will – The Paradox of Choice Spiritual methods – The Paradox of Practice Who awakens? – The Paradox of Enlightenment The Divine Omniscience New Age confusion 1 – ‘Create Your Life!’ New Age confusion 2 – ‘Parallel Universes’ Ancient confusion 1 – ‘The Hierarchy in Creation’ Ancient confusion 2 – ‘The Hierarchy in Consciousness’ Uncoiling the Serpent - Liberation

3

1. Introduction 1.1 This essay is an exploration of our true nature, Reality, Consciousness and manifestation/creation. It is a personal overview that necessarily must leave out a mass of interesting detail in order to focus on the main structural elements. I dare say there is not a single original idea in it. If there is anything original it is in the synthesis of these ideas into my own overview (though many may have come to a similar view). I set it down on paper for two reasons: I have not come across a similar summary elsewhere, though there may be one; and because of the fun of making explicit ideas that have been floating around within me for years. I hope to make these ideas as clear as possible, not least for my own benefit. I hope I have avoided any abstruse or over-technical philosophical ideas or arguments, and hope that anyone with an interest in these matters could follow the account fairly easily. The ideas are presented concisely so their full impact may need some time for reflection, and perhaps some re-reading. They also form, I hope, one more or less integrated picture, so skipping over sections is not recommended! 1.2 I draw freely from the many metaphysical/philosophical traditions that I have trawled through over the years. Of these there are three or four which seem to me to be the most adequate, and to which we can refer to illustrate our points. Yet none are without their problems and paradoxes, and this is perhaps inevitable when dealing with ultimate matters. The net of understanding gets all tangled when it tries to capture its own threads.

4

1.3 It does not take much to tie the thinking process up in knots. Take the sentence – ‘This statement is false’. If that statement is false then its opposite must be true i.e. the statement is true. But if what it says is true then we are back with it being false. If it is true, it is false; and vice versa. We seem to be stuck with a contradiction, an inconsistency, whichever way we turn. This might seem a trite verbal conundrum but it is the most succinct example of a group of anomalies known as self-referential paradoxes. These have been a veritable ‘snake in the grass’ for some philosophical system builders, leading to, at best, some inconvenient re-working; at worst, a fatal poisoning. This kind of paradox will play a perhaps surprisingly central part in our account. 1.4 The metaphysical traditions are also never really complete, and this is perhaps also inevitable when dealing with ultimate matters. Mental understanding is a finite function and must miss much when trying to apprehend the infinite. There is a delightful result in mathematical logic known as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This shows that no matter how powerful a coherent theory is, there must always be truths (recognised as such by the theory) which can never be proved by the theory. This helps develops a healthy respect for the unknowable - something must always slip through the net of understanding. 1.5 Whilst bearing in mind, then, that we are perhaps bound to be prone to paradox and incompleteness, we can draw freely from some eastern traditions: – Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Sufism and the Samkhya system; and from the west we can look at the NeoPlatonism of Plotinus and, in passing, concepts from Kant, Descartes and Wittgenstein. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow truthseeker, John Jamieson, for help with clarity on the ideas in section 22, which draws on insights from his philosophical model, ‘The Omega Shift’. It is useful as well to bring simple analogies from modern scientific culture, and to look at parallels in Quantum physics. We can also look at some contemporary (‘New Age’) confusions arising from these concepts. If the ideas seem excessively abstract I would encourage a little persistence, as their ramifications (for those interested in ‘spiritual’ matters) become clearer the more account progresses.

2. Reality – the True Home In an age of hard-headed scientific materialism it can seem odd to link two such seemingly distinct concepts. ‘Reality’ – the ultimate stuff of the (physical) world - has a cold, objective ring to it; what has that to

5 do with me or my ‘true home’? For that is a notion that seems personal, warm and intimate. The link is Consciousness. The concept of ‘Consciousness’ is perhaps the most profound and inscrutable of all. Yet it alone can answer the needs of an inclusive account of Reality. For nothing is more immediate or intimate than our consciousness, the source of all our subjectivity. But as we shall see, it is much more than that. It is also transcendent, utterly beyond ‘me’, the changeless Source of the ‘external’ world. As such it is a notion that would satisfy the hardest of scientific heads seeking substantial objective permanence. It includes all ‘subjects’ and all ‘objects’ and is also beyond them all. We can perhaps say that these two concepts reflect different aspects of our nature. ‘Reality’ answers to our desire for the solid ground of complete understanding – clarity in the ‘head’, whilst the concept of ‘coming Home’ reflects the longing in the ‘heart’ for ultimate peace. Both head and heart are included in our nature as Consciousness.

3. The Void 3.1 We may as well start with nothing. To be truly at home, in the deepest sense, is surely to be profoundly happy; yet being ‘happy’ is actually very hard to describe. We continually project ideas about what happiness consists in, and actively pursue courses of action to obtain the right situations, circumstances, relations and objects that would seem to guarantee it. Yet experience reveals that there are no such situations etc. that can guarantee it. Conversely, in moments of true happiness the prevailing circumstances can seem incidental. There is nothing that one could point to, as it were, and say with any surety –‘this is (or creates) happiness’. Happiness is a no-thing, or nothing. 3.2 I remember once as a student staying up for two days and nights. When I finally lay down to sleep I was astonished at how much pure joy and happiness welled up from within. I remember contemplating that I had spent two days and nights running around pursuing happiness, basically, when all the happiness I could want was there as I entered the (temporary) oblivion of sleep. It was as if all the contents of my mental consciousness obscured a prior happiness that only started to show its face as all that content (and the sense of ‘me’) was being obliterated. It seemed as if I’d had a glance at something usually obscured by a veil of normal ‘wakefulness’, but which came into its own during sleep – hence the refreshing power of sleep. It seemed desirable, then, to be able to extend that glance and experience that happiness while somehow remaining conscious; not merely to have access to it during the unconsciousness of sleep.

6

3.3 It is probably because of a similar perspective that some traditions approach this matter negatively – to arrive at Reality/Home not by pursuing or attaining something; rather, by losing something, by a process of elimination of the covering veils. Christian mystics talk of the ‘Via Negativa’. These veils must include a host of concepts and a habitual ‘understanding’; and a host of limiting or painful feelings – suffering. One would arrive at Reality as the end of a process of elimination, a place empty of obscuring concepts and feelings. 3.4 So in terms of conceptual understanding we often see, in the various traditions, Reality described only negatively. We note the Vedantic maxim which describes Reality (‘Brahman’) as ‘Neti, Neti’ – ‘not this, not this’; or in Plotinus’ philosophy where Reality (the ‘One’) is strictly indescribable and can only be referred to as ‘the not this’ (Enneads 5.5.6.13). There is a pithy Sufi aphorism – “As a matter of fact, it is not so”. We may also note the Christian mystic classic work which says that we must pass through a ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. There is also the remarkable Sutra in Kashmir Shaivism – ‘[conceptual] Knowledge is bondage’ - (‘Jnanam Bandhaha’, Shiva Sutras I.2). 3.5 In terms of the veils constituted by painful feelings, we see the emphasis in Buddhism on the cessation of suffering (which is regarded as the sole justification for doing metaphysics). The beautiful Buddhist teaching known as ‘The Chain of Dependent Origination’ outlines the resolving of each factor in suffering, as the links in the chain of its causation successively come to an end. At the endpoint of this process of ‘emptying out’ we reach the cessation of suffering and an absorption in bliss – the state of Nirvana. 3.6 Perhaps the concept that best synthesises the ‘emptying out’ of both aspects (conceptual understanding and suffering), is the Yogic one of ‘Nirvikalpa Samadhi’ as outlined in Samkhya philosophy; in particular the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. ‘Nirvikalpa Samadhi’ is considered the highest realisation of Reality, reached by the complete and permanent cessation of all agitation, suffering and ignorance. Typically this means the suspension of all mental/emotional functioning that could obscure the prior Reality/Consciousness /Happiness – ‘SatChitAnanda’ that is our true Home. This ‘suspension’ is the purpose and end of the yogic discipline and its various stages.

7

3.7 All this description of ‘cessation’ or ‘suspension’ and ‘nonconceptualisation’ does leave one feeling that Reality is a kind of Void or ultimate emptiness. Indeed it is precisely characterised as such by the Buddhist description of it as ‘Shunya’ – emptiness, or a Void, ‘Shunyata’. It is also mind-boggling – for the Void is not any kind of ‘thing’ or place. In that sense it does not ‘exist’. 3.8 Depending upon one’s temperament or experience this may or may not seem satisfying. If one has had a pretty hard time of things, one may relish the Void as I relished sleep in my example above. If life is a living hell and there seems no way it can be redeemed, the Void sounds pretty appealing. If one is generally having a good time, one may feel differently. One may ask – ‘does everything have to end in order for Reality to be recognised, to be able to go Home?’

4. The Plenum 4.1 And so we must look to the other side of this coin. It is just as possible, after all, to use a positive term – to intuit the presence of a quality rather than simply assert the absence of its opposite. The Shaivite philosopher Ksemaraja equates the complete absence of agitation or suffering with the positive quality ‘Ananda’ – bliss/love/happiness. By extension to other qualities Reality is thus full of: (higher) Knowledge/Consciousness – known as ‘Chiti’ (absence of ignorance or inert confusion or dullness); Freedom – known as ‘Svatantrya’ (absence of constraint or limitation or boundary); Power – known as ‘Shakti’ (absence of powerlessness or weakness); and so on.

8

4.2 The system of Kashmir Shaivism is pre-eminent in describing Reality as a Plenum – absolutely and perfectly full and complete (‘Purna’), lacking nothing. In particular, it emphasises the numerous powers, or ‘shaktis’, that give potency to this fullness or Plenum. It contains all possibilities and the powers to actualise them. But at the same time it is not bound by being any particular thing or object, nor any particular self or subject. In it there is no conflict, because there are no objects to collide, nor subjects who may be in disharmony. It is one and indivisible for there is nothing to divide it. So it seems we have a picture of Reality as simultaneously Void and Plenum – perfect pristine infinite emptiness, yet brim full, vibrant and alive. It is also our true nature, our original nature, as the Buddhists have it. Sounds pretty good – in fact the Platonic systems refer to it as ‘The Good’.

5. Bad Move? 5.1 If Reality/Home is so Good then, why, one may ask, was there ever a journey away (even if only apparently)? Why did Reality create something apparently ‘other’? How did this happen? These two questions are, of course, among the ultimate metaphysical questions. In religious terms – ‘Why and how did God create the universe?’ For there seems to be quite a lot of work to do, to reconcile the consequences of this move away from Home, with the nature of the Reality that initiated it. As Douglas Adams has put it: “The story so far: In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

9 As regards the ‘How?’ this will be looked at below in sections 8 onwards. 5.2 As to the ‘Why?’ there are two traditional kinds of answers. The first kind of answer is that something was gained by the ‘move away’ and the ‘return’. Perhaps it is most beautifully expressed in the poetry of T.S. Eliot: (Four Quartets, Little Gidding)

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” The crucial line is the final one. The journey away and the return arouse a Knowledge or Recognition (even appreciation) of Reality. As the old adage has it – ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til you lose it’. The Sufis have a traditional saying – ‘I was a Hidden Treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the World.’ In a truly wonderful account of his own realisation, Dr. Franklin Merrell -Wolff (‘Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object’) uses the analogy of health. A totally healthy body can go unnoticed –whereas returning to health from sickness can lead to an appreciation of health that was not there formerly. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son is a human drama that can act as a literary analogy of these ideas. As appealing as these ideas are, from a strictly metaphysical point of view they are fatally flawed. For the simple reason that they all imply some lack of knowledge or appreciation of Reality in the ‘first place’. A lack that is remedied by undergoing the journey. But there is no such lack in the Plenum. 5.3 The other kind of answer is that it is simply in the nature of Reality to express itself in a creation. It is brim full of creativity, and it would be unnatural for it not to create. In some commentaries on the Shiva Sutras of Kashmir Shaivism it is stated that if Reality (known as ‘Paramashiva’ in this system) did not express itself in creation then it would not be the vibrant, alive Consciousness that it is, but rather something inert, ‘like a jar’ ! In Plotinus’ system it is simply in the superabundant nature of the One to create:

“This, we may say, is the first act of generation: the One, perfect because it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were, and its superabundance makes something other than itself.” This seems more straight-forward, but there can be objections here that are more subtle and force one to delve more deeply. One way into this is noting a remark made by one modern commentator on Kashmir

10 Shaivism – ‘Just as an artist cannot contain his delight within himself, but pours it out into a song, or a poem, even so Paramashiva pours out the delightful wonder of His splendour into manifestation ’ (Jaideva Singh –The Shiva Sutras Intro vii). 5.4 One may ask here whether there is any compulsion involved in creation or manifestation. Not external compulsion obviously, but one internal, as it were, to Paramashiva Himself – He must follow his own nature? On the face of it the absolute freedom (‘svatantrya’) of Paramashiva would imply not – He is not bound by His own creativity, not forced to act merely because He can. But then we haven’t answered our question, merely pushed it back further. We may now ask – ‘if Paramashiva is not forced to exercise His creative power, then why did He?’ The reply might be that it is not merely an incidental quality of Paramashiva that He might be creative, but an essential part of His identity – He would not be what He is if He didn’t manifest. 5.5 But is there anything essential about Paramashiva? Does He possess an ‘essence’ with which He is bound to be identical? Is He, like all other objects, bound by the Law of Identity (For all ‘A’, ‘A=A’)? Or does His absolute freedom (‘svatantrya’) grant Him freedom from even Himself? In order to answer this we must determine whether, in the final analysis, Paramashiva or Reality is a kind of ‘Self’ at all. It is to this arcane question we must now turn, before leaving the question ‘Why?’, and before venturing into the ‘How?’ of manifestation.

6. To Be or Not to Be? 6.1 To help us navigate this rarefied atmosphere it may prove fruitful to backtrack somewhat, and take another look at how we got to this question. In section 3 we noticed that the happiness of our true Home cannot consist in anything objective, and I gave the example of the joy experienced in the oblivion of sleep. I noted in passing that this temporary oblivion included the loss of the sense of ‘me’ or ‘self’ (at least in the case of deep dreamless sleep). This happens to us all every twenty four hours, though out of a lazy linguistic habit and/or lack of inquiry we, upon waking, ascribe ownership of the deep sleep to one’s waking self and say ‘I slept’. By an extension of the logic of the case of deep sleep, some traditions outline that in the journey to the permanent peace of our true Home, there needs to be a permanent loss of the ‘me’, since the ‘me’ is not our true nature. The Buddhist goal of ‘Nirvana’ actually means, in translation, ‘snuffing out’ or ‘extinguishing’. In the Void or ‘Shunya’ there is no room for a self. Similarly the Sufi mystical tradition talks of ‘Fana’ or ‘annihilation’, which must happen before ‘Baqa’ or abiding in God.

11

6.2 In the Vedantic and Shaivite traditions though, as there is a loss of the habitual sense of self there can be an awakening to a deeper or ‘higher’ Self or Atman. Although being continually anchored in the Atman, the unenlightened are unaware of this due to exclusive identification with a habitual ‘self’ or ego. The journey Home thus does indeed involve a loss (of false identification) but this is replaced by the revelation of a more expanded ‘higher’ Self. In the end this process reveals that the Highest Self or Atman is identical with Reality or Brahman, and we have the famous Great Statements (Mahavakyas) of Vedanta: “Atman is Brahman”, “I am That”, “That am I”, “I am Brahman” etc. In Kashmir Shaivism the highest Reality or Paramashiva is conceived as the highest Experient or Subject/Self (cf. Spanda-Karikas verse 3). 6.3 So we have two seemingly parallel tracks in our journey Home: firstly, a ‘via Negativa’ which strips away all that is false and leaves us in the perfect primordial Void (though ‘we’ are not there to sully it!); and, secondly, a path of expansion revealing higher states of being that culminate in the Plenum which is a perfectly full, ultimate Self. Are these two tracks not just two different perspectives on the same journey, as has been implied above in our Void/Plenum equivalence? It would seem so - except for one vital difference: is the end destination a Self or a not-Self? This question forms the great, centuries-old debate between the Void-loving Buddhists (whose foundational principle is ‘The Doctrine of Anatman’ – No-Self), and the Plenum-loving Shaivites for whom Paramashiva is the Highest Experient or Self, the be-all and end-all of all selves and their objects. Perhaps the most powerful exposition of the ‘Doctrine of Anatman’ can be found in The Buddhist ‘Diamond’ Sutra (see section XVII – No-one Attains Transcendental Wisdom, or section III – The Real Teaching of the Great Way). The Shaivite position is best summarised in the ‘Pratyabhijnahrdayam’. 6.4 The Vedantic tradition is more ambiguous on this matter. Many of the Vedantic Upanishads talk of Brahman as a Supreme Self which is identical with Atman – the ‘Higher’ Self in Man. But there is also a distinction between ‘Saguna’ (‘with qualities’) Brahman, and ‘Nirguna’ (‘without qualities’) Brahman; the latter seems to be a version of The Void, though it is unclear as to whether this still constitutes a ‘Self’. 6.5 Both Buddhist and Shaivite traditions think that the other represents a lower or more limited vision than its own. For the Buddhist, the Shaivites are stuck when they identify with a supreme Self or

12 Paramashiva, (see section IX of the Diamond Sutra), whereas in Reality this Self arises spontaneously from an infinitely vast ground of non-Being or Void, which is pre-eminently prior. Whereas for the Shaivite, the Void is merely the supreme Self during a period of inactivity. As one commentator has put it: “In the meditation on the Void, since there is the absence of objectivity, to conclude that there is the cessation of the Self is sheer delusion.” (Ramakantha) 6.6 My own view is that neither the Buddhist nor the Shaivite traditions are wholly adequate here, and that their Self/No-Self positions are two halves of a dialectic that requires a higher synthesis. A synthesis that is hard to find in any of the metaphysical traditions - with good reason, because we have to strictly go beyond language and logic, and the result can seem incoherent. As Nisargadatta Maharaj has put it: “The boundary of being and non-being is intellect-boggling, because it is here that the intellect subsides.”

Notwithstanding this, I have come across three accounts which seem to approach this territory. Two are mentioned above: the first is the metaphysics of Plotinus; and the second a near-contemporary experiential account by Dr. Wolff. We can use both these writings to elucidate our synthesis, and in the process address our question as to the ‘Why?’ and ‘How? of manifestation/creation. [The third account is an esoteric Sufi teaching concerning the ‘chambers of the Heart’, which we will examine at the end in section 33.]

13

7. The One 7.1 Plotinus’ writings on Reality, which he refers to as the ‘One’ are amongst the most beautiful in all philosophy, illuminating and darkly paradoxical. He writes of the One generating Being and manifestation - it is the inexhaustible Source. Like the endless energy of a spring that ever replenishes itself, it is the engine of all creation.

7.2 In writing about the question as to why the One created or manifested, he denies that the One did so in conformity with His nature or essence or Being - for He is beyond Being. He is the root Principle that generated Being. But He is not non-Being, for that is merely the absence of Being – The Void. He is the root Principle that makes possible non-Being. [In these sentences we have said “He is…. ” – but this is inadequate since He is never the subject of the verb ‘To Be’ - so we can only use language paradoxically here]. In Enneads VI.8.19 we have:

14 “Seeing the One as it really is we lay aside all reasoning about it… none would dare to talk of it as ‘happening to Be’, or indeed be able to utter a word. With all his courage he would stand astounded…So are we to understand the Beyond-Being hinted at darkly by the ancients: it is not merely that He generated Being, but that He is subject neither to Being nor to Himself; His Being is not His Principle, rather He is the prior Principle to Being and not for Himself did He make it; producing it He left it outside of Himself: He had no need of Being, who brought it to Be. Thus His making of Being is not an action ‘in accordance with his Being’ ... “ Since He is not subject even to Himself he is not bound by the logical Law of Self-identity mentioned above in section 5. Since He has no need of even His own being, he is wholly transcendent; as Nisargadatta has said “The Highest is useless to the Highest.”

7.3 We can perhaps approach it positively by saying that if the One can be ‘considered’ as both the Void and the Plenum, then in Itself prior to such considering it is the Principle at the root of both, beyond both. A simple objective analogy used by Dr. Klein can be useful here: imagine you own a beautiful wall-hanging that has hung on the wall in your lounge for a long time. One day, without your knowing, it is taken down to be cleaned. You come home and look over to where it normally hangs; what you notice is not the wall – rather you notice the absence of the hanging. The hanging represents the Plenum of Being; its absence is the Void of non-Being. The One is the wall. The wall is neither the hanging nor its absence; nor is it something entirely disconnected with either, for when you notice the absence of the hanging what you see is the wall. You only ‘see’ the wall when the hanging is absent, so in a way the absence (the Void) seems ‘nearer’ to the wall (The One) than does the hanging (The Plenum). But ultimately

15 the wall it is not limited by whether it happens to support the hanging or not – that is incidental to its being the wall. So even the Void/Plenum is incidental to The One. So we can approach the One negatively by employing Nagarjuna’s famous four-fold negation – in this context it would be: “Neither Being nor not-Being, nor both, nor neither.” When considered subjectively we can say that all sense of identity finds its roots in the Plenum, whereas in the Void all identity is dissolved. The One is what makes both possible. It is clear then that the One is never in itself any kind of subject or object, and has no intrinsic subjective identity. It is just as much a No-One, as the One. 7.4 Dr. Wolff provides a beautiful experiential account wherein his habitual sense of self was entirely left behind as he expanded infinitely to experience himself as the Plenum – a Nirvanic, blissful Self beyond the clutches of space, time, karma and (small) selfhood. It was in this blissful state of liberation, which he considered as the ultimate goal, that a further, unexpected revelation occurred. Beyond the blissful supreme Self was a deeper Reality he referred to as the ‘High Indifference’ (without the usual negative connotations of that word). This was a Reality that did not need the Bliss or a Self, which Self was then seen as a condition balancing the pain of limitation and ignorant unconsciousness. Beyond the need of this balancing condition was a place of perfect Equilibrium that was not a Self and had no need of bliss or liberation, though was the Source of both: “ ..although I find the Self to be an element of consciousness of more fundamental importance than Time, Space or individual experience, yet in the end it, also, is reduced to a derivative position in a more ultimate Reality. So my outlook must deviate from those that represent the Self as the final Reality. In certain fundamental respects, at least, the formulation must accord with the Anatmic Doctrine of Buddha…” 7.5 Dr. Wolff is careful not to say that in all respects did his outlook accord with the ‘Anatman’ doctrine. Doubtless this was out of need to distance his outlook from purely that of a Buddhist Void. He also goes on to say that no philosophic system does it full justice. Maybe this was due to ignorance of the depth and subtlety of Plotinus’ vision of the One, or a misinterpretation of it (there are many). In any case, although he doesn’t mention it, the Plotinian One seems to me to occupy that place of perfect Equilibrium beyond the pairs of opposites.

16

[There are also interesting parallels between Wolff’s philosophical/metaphysical ‘High Indifference’ and the religious/Christian mystical system of Meister Eckhart who writes of the ultimate Disinterest of the Godhood beyond God…] In short: my true nature is in and as the One. Free from all, free even from Myself, I dwell as the root of all Being and Non-Being, neither one nor the other, nor both nor neither. 7.6 Why then did manifestation happen? This can now be seen as an unanswerable question, since there is no material left with which to furnish an explanation. There are no considerations external to Myself as The One (any such have not yet come into being); nor is there any internal essence or nature to compel. In a sense the question is invalid since to ask for an explanation for the existence of something is to ask to know the other factors which caused it. But here there are no other factors; we are at the Root of all roots. We cannot even say it is Self-caused, for there is no Self yet. We can only throw the question back and ask ‘Why not?’

17 7.7 As regards the ‘How?’ we face a certain tricky logical problem. For the One is an indivisible unity - if it were diverse or complex it could not be the root principle, but would be composite in some way. In this indivisible unity there is no ‘otherness’, there are no ‘others’. But manifestation is an apparent ‘other’, the Void/Plenum arises from its root source, the One; and from that arising follow the all the manifold ‘others’ in creation. Plotinus’ answer here seems quite artful (one commentator regards it as a stroke of philosophic genius): The One is all indivisible unity, with no trace of ‘otherness’; the ‘otherness’ does not belong to the One, but to the ‘others’. The apparent otherness of manifestation is part of manifestation, not part of the One. In a sense then, the One recognises no manifestation, it recognises only Itself. 7.8 But this answer leads us to a self-referential paradox: if the ‘otherness’ required to bring manifestation into being has its’ source in manifestation, then prior to manifestation how did it all start? It’s no good asking the One – it would reply ‘what manifestation?’ So right at the beginning of the process of manifestation we have a mind-boggling loop: manifestation seems to have kick-started itself, boot-strapped itself into being, for it supplied the sense of ‘otherness’ needed to begin its own process. This is the Paradox of Manifestation. The One, as source, provided the energy for this, made it possible; but is otherwise non-implicated.

18

As with our question ‘Why?’, so with our question ‘How?’: there is no material to furnish an explanation of how manifestation occurs outside of manifestation itself. So to seek such an explanation is, in the end, meaningless. Finally, we can only say ‘It happens’. Having addressed that, (or rather having failed to), we may now turn to somewhere where something may usefully be said: the fullness of the Plenum, the fountain of Being from which springs the rest of the process of manifestation. Here the Kashmir Shaivite tradition proves pre-eminent (with a little help from concepts in Quantum mechanics, virtual reality, computing and other concepts in Physics). We leave the inscrutable One and the fathomless Void of Non-Being behind and examine the Plenum of Being and its Powers.

8. The Self and The Paradox of Consciousness 8.1 The Plenum of Being with all its Powers or ‘Shaktis’ is not quite yet a (The) Self. Though traditionally replete with Being/Bliss/Consciousness – known as ‘Sat/chit/ananda’, we need here to make a distinction between Awareness and Consciousness. We can use ‘Awareness’ to refer to the primal potential or capacity for sentience/knowledge. When this potential is not actually in use, Awareness is without object (on an individual level this could be deep sleep). When it is in use, i.e. has an object, we can refer to it as Consciousness. We may then ask - ‘the Plenum may be replete with Awareness, but how can we talk of Consciousness when there are as yet no objects?’ The answer is that Awareness becomes its own ‘object’. The first Consciousness is Awareness of (its own source) Awareness. This reflexive act of primal Awareness manifests as the first field of Consciousness we may call The Self. It is often visualised as a ‘space’ or ‘akasha’ - an infinite space without boundary that nonetheless ‘contains’ ItSelf. 8.2 It is worth reflecting a while on this reflexivity which is built into the very notion of a self. It is no exaggeration to say that centuries of philosophical inquiry have focussed on the nature of self/soul/identity, and always the mind gets giddy as it uncovers a self-referential paradox at the root of things here. It is possible to conceive of elementary forms of awareness that do not involve a notion of self –e.g. we imagine many primitive forms of life to be in such a category. There may be primitive cognition of immediate objects in the environment which lead to responses necessary for survival. But when it comes to being a ‘self’ there is necessary reflexive action of awareness: being aware not only of objects, but also

19 of that situation: aware of itself being aware of those objects. Now here we have a strange situation: we have (1) awareness of - an object; then (2) awareness of - being aware of an object; but then if this is the situation, there must be awareness of that as well; so we have (3) awareness of –being aware of being aware of an object; and so on. By its very nature awareness seems to generate an infinite regress: we never arrive at a fixed ‘subject’ [Technically we call this a ‘recursion’, when each term of a series is generated by its predecessor – we shall see this again in 9.2]. 8.3 We can envisage this infinite regress of awareness as a spiral, with a centre being the object, with the awareness of it, (and awareness of awareness etc. of it) spiralling out without limit, without a fixed ‘subject’ to terminate it. Now in the situation we are contemplating, namely the beginnings of manifestation, there is no ‘other’ object. So at the centre of the spiral is only the spiral itself. This means that the spiral spirals in without limit as well. So we have no outer or inner termination of the spiral, no ultimate ‘subject’ or ‘object’, only the infinite potential of awareness itself. 8.4 But then something mysterious and paradoxical happens. It is as if awareness provides its own termination of the infinite spiral: it becomes its own subject/object. Just as mathematicians say: “parallel lines ‘meet’ at infinity”; so what happens here is that the spiral spirals in and out to the same infinity, where they ‘meet’ as one, in the same infinite space. Or another way of putting it is that the ‘ends’ of the spiral meet to form what is, ultimately, a loop.

20

So primal Awareness becomes Consciousness – an infinite Self that is its own object. Now generally in a subject/object relation consciousness is ascribed to the subject of the relation. But since here the subject is the object, we then have the loop: the consciousness of the subject is the subject of the consciousness. Then when we ask how did this whole situation arise we have a chicken– and-egg situation; worse than that, for here the chicken that produced the egg came out of the same egg that it produced. This is the Paradox of Consciousness. In one way this can be regarded as a parallel loop that kick-started manifestation as a whole (addressed above in the previous section), though reflected here, a stage ‘later’ in the process, as the rise of the Consciousness that is The Self. 8.5 One is reminded here of the ancient symbol of the Ouroborous – the primal serpent that curls back in a loop eating (being sustained by) its own tail. Taken as a symbol of infinity and wholeness, it is regarded by Plato as an image of the first, perfectly self-sustaining being in creation: “The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was selfsufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything.” (Plato, ‘Timaeus’ 33.1)

21

8.6 An analogy used in Kashmir Shaivism can be used to illustrate this further. The power of Awareness is likened to the energy of light, the power to illuminate. This power is referred to as ‘Prakasha’. That which is illuminated or revealed/recognised by the light is referred to as ‘Vimarsha’. It is the nature of light to illumine all, including its own source: when you turn on a light-bulb in an otherwise empty, darkened room the content of the room is revealed, and this content is the light-bulb that is the source of the light. The illumination of the room is ‘Prakasha’; the recognition of the light-bulb is ‘Vimarsha’. Awareness is both Prakasha and Vimarsha. But our simple analogy breaks down when we consider the situation at the beginning of manifestation where the Light and its source are one and the same. It is as if the light-bulb was created by light - the light that it itself produced…

8.7 The Consciousness that is the Self has boot-strapped itself into being – the Paradox of Consciousness. As Hofstadter has said (“The Mind’s I” p.283): “There is a loop lurking here, one that bears a lot of investigation…a primal loop deeply implicated in the plot of consciousness”. [Perhaps no other philosopher has investigated the necessary reflexivity of Consciousness more than Kant - in particular the Transcendental Deduction sections in the Transcendental Analytic of his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. The denseness of his argument is made more transparent in P.F. Strawson’s excellent study, ‘The Bounds of Sense’]. The question as to why exactly this boot-strapping occurs may not be quite as unanswerable as in our questions relating to the first Paradox of Manifestation in section 7. For the plenum is full of qualities with which to furnish an answer. In particular, it

22 seems in the very nature, ‘svarupa’ of Awareness to be aware, and so to become its own object – there is an essence being expressed here. 8.8 So the primal Power of Awareness in the Plenum becomes its own object, and generates The Self: Consciousness functioning as both the subject and its only object in an undivided unity. Nor is there even any real differentiation. The apparent differentiation of subject and object is a ‘virtual’ polarisation, reflecting the reflexivity of one and the same Self. Continuing our analogy of Awareness as light or energy, we could consider this unified field of Consciousness as an emanation from, or vibration in, the Plenum of Being. This vibration is known as ‘Spanda’ in Kashmir Shaivism, where it plays a central role. It is a term that emphasises the infinite aliveness of this unified field.

8.9 There is a play going on here as The Self contemplates its powers (shaktis) appearing as different aspects of the subject/object polarisation or complementarity in the undivided unity. This is the realm of the ‘Mahavakyas’ (Great Statements), where the supreme ‘I’ contemplates its identity with the Plenum of Being –‘That’ or ‘Brahman’. In Shaivism this playground is organised into five principles or ‘Tattvas’ as each aspect is explored: Shiva Tattva – I Am (I as Consciousness – Chiti) Shakti Tattva – I Am (‘Amness’ the Bliss of Being – Ananda) Sadashiva Tattva – I Am That (the power Will – Iccha) Ishvara Tattva – I Am That’] (power of Knowledge – Jnana) Shuddha Vidya Tattva – I Am That (power of Action – Kriya)

23

We can make a distinction between the ‘manifestation’ of these Tattvas, and the ‘creation’ which is generated subsequently. ‘Manifestation’ is outside time (eternal), whereas ‘creation’ is not. All of these Tattvas can be thought of in the Shaivism of the SpandaKarikas as particular modalities of one fundamental vibration ‘Spanda’ - which is the well-spring of, and power (‘spanda-shakti’) behind, creation. Before we go on to look at the subsequent creation, (section 14 onwards) it will be useful to look at some concepts in physics and logic which will furnish the explanation with some useful analogies or metaphors. This may seem a detour, but it is worth it, to be flesh out some of the more abstract notions.

9. Fractals and Holograms 9.1 As we have said, in the unified field of Consciousness that is the Self, there is no division or differentiation – so there is a sameness or equality (‘samata’) prevailing. There is a concept in physics – that of ‘self-similarity’ which works well here. A system, process or object exhibits self-similarity if any part of it has the same properties as the whole, and if the properties of the whole are found in every part. In Vedanta there is an old adage that “The Self is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, and whose centre is everywhere”. This partially captures that idea: ‘centres everywhere’ means that there are no pre-eminent points in the field of the Self – all are equally ‘where it’s at’, all points are at the hub; ‘circumference nowhere’ means that nothing is peripheral. Another example might be that each point in the field of the Self exhibits the same subject/object virtual polarity: just as the north/south polarised magnetic field of a magnet reestablishes itself in each part when a magnet is divided. The ancient alchemists realised that this property of self-similarity is one essential to creation, and this led to the formulation of their famous maxim: ‘As

24 above, so below’. In the Shiva Sutras also we find the same concept (III.14): ‘As here, so elsewhere’. Or in other terms: ‘The microcosm is the macrocosm’. 9.2 There are two systems exhibiting the property of self-similarity that can act as useful models for the process of creation as a whole: fractals and holograms. Fractals are beautiful, complex patterns that are generated by recursive mathematical formulae; this means that each successive term in the formula is generated by the application of the same rule to preceding terms. At each level of complexity of the pattern the same rule is exhibited, and this can go on indefinitely: one can ‘zoom’ in or out without limit on such a pattern and the ‘same’ configurations appear: infinitely various applications of the same underlying recursion:

9.3 Holograms are wonderful ‘light-recordings’ of objects. They can project ‘virtual’ objects in space. A beam of coherent light (laser) is shone onto a recording medium – this is the ‘reference’ beam. Another beam of light shines on the object – the ‘illumination’ beam. Light from this beam reflects off the object creating a diffraction pattern of light, the wavefront of which then meets that of the reference beam; here there is an interaction which creates an ‘interference’ pattern that is recorded on the recording medium. If you take the original object away and then shine the reference beam again onto the recording

25 medium, a pattern of light is projected into space that has the same configuration as the original diffraction pattern reflected by the object. A ‘virtual object’ – the hologram - just like the original, ‘appears’ in, and can be viewed in, 3D space just like the original object. The remarkable thing is that the holographic image exhibits the property of self-similarity: if the recording medium is broken up, each part of it contains the image of the whole object. It is like a ‘window’ on a virtual object – if much of the window is blocked off, the whole object can still be seen through the little that is left unblocked. 9.4 We can apply this analogy already to the manifestation of the Self in the Plenum. The reference beam is ‘Prakasha’; the illumination beam is ‘Vimarsha’. Here both the object and the recording medium is Awareness itself (for there is no other here): cf. Pratyabhijnahrdayam 2 – ‘…Chiti Shakti projects the universe on its own screen’. The ‘virtual object’ projected here is none other than that aspect of Awareness that is aware of itself as its own ‘object’ – i.e. The Self. The self-similarity of the hologram is the equality (samata) that prevails across the space of the Self. Light interferes with Itself to create ‘objects’ of light. There are echoes here of Mohammed’s ‘Light’ prayer, which has the line: “O Light of all light. Thy light is praised by all light.” Or the ‘light’ Sura of the Koran where creation is ‘Light upon light’.

We will meet this hologram analogy again later on in the process of creation as well, for the process is recursive. Before we get to that though, there is one concept, or rather set of concepts, that becomes crucial for further exploration of this process - that of ‘Identity’. This is another inscrutable notion that has generated centuries of

26 philosophical argument. For our purposes we need to have some minimal, workable clarity about what we mean by ‘identity’, in relation to subjects and objects.

10.Concepts of Identity 10.1 On the face of it, ‘Identity’ seems like a redundant concept. Why, for example, would one ever need to say of two things, that they were identical? If they are two separate things they can’t be identical, else they wouldn’t be two. On the other hand, if ‘they’ aren’t two, but one, why would that ever need to be asserted? What does it tell you of a thing to say that it is identical with itself? Maybe there is some profound point that led Bishop Butler to famously say: “Everything is what it is, and not some other thing”. Perhaps he intuited the dark Reality of the One - which, as we have seen, is not bound by this ‘Law’ - and was repelled by it… 10.2 However there are good practical applications for the notion, and I outline here three notions of identity and their uses: (i) Numerical Identity (ii) Qualitative Identity (iii) Functional Identity Numerical Identity: There is a descriptive phrase for a heavenly body – ‘The morning star’. This phrase was coined to refer to the star that is the most clearly seen low in the sky early in the morning. There was another phrase – ‘The Evening Star’ - coined for the parallel reason. Now it so happens that both these phrases refer to the same object – the planet Venus; this may not have been known to those who first coined the phrases. For them it is an important piece of information to realise the truth of the statement of identity: ‘The Morning Star is the Evening Star”. This is the strictest form of identity. It is not an assertion of two things that they are identical. It is an assertion of two descriptions, that they refer to numerically (the same) one object. Qualitative Identity: This is a looser form of identity. One might say of two billiard balls that they need to be identical, in order to play the game properly. Here the (numerically) two objects share precisely the same qualities or properties and are thus said to be identical. This is perhaps the most common use of the term ‘identical’. Functional Identity: This is a yet looser form of identity. Two things might be for practical purposes considered ‘identical’ even though numerically two, and somewhat different in their qualities, if they happen to fulfil the same function: e.g. ‘Both Peace treaties were signed by the same official – the President of the United States’. This

27 might be true even though the President who signed one treaty might be a different person (numerically and qualitatively) to the one who signed the other. Many of the ‘problems’ of identity can be traced to a confusion over these different types or degrees of identity. To illustrate this best (and because it leads into the topic of the next section) we need look no further than the famous, philosophical conundrum known as ‘Hume’s broom’. The Scottish philosopher David Hume tells the story (I paraphrase and summarise) of how one evening, as he left his gentleman’s club, he saw the porter sweeping up with large, pristinelooking broom. A dialogue ensued: DH: Good evening, my man. I see you are doing a spot of cleaning and you certainly have the tool for the job! P: Yes sir, it’s been my favourite broom for the past twenty years! DH: (astonished) …my goodness that broom is in remarkably good condition considering its twenty years… P: Yes, sir - I look after it well… DH: You must do… P: Yes, sir – I give the broom a new head every other year. DH: Oh well, that changes the picture…still the broomstick has fared well… P: Yes, sir – in the years that I don’t give it a new head, I give it a new broomstick. DH: Oh come, my man, you can hardly say then that you’ve had the same broom for twenty years – it’s a different one every two years! Then follows a philosophical dialogue (for the porter is no mean metaphysician) where the problem is discussed as to exactly how many parts of a thing can be changed whilst still being the ‘same’ thing. A car does not become a different car just because the tyres are changed etc. The porter comes off better in the dialogue and Hume leaves confused and in a bad mood. 10.3 Using our (above discussed) concepts of identity, we could say that the porter has confused functional and numerical identity. We could say there is functional identity here – it has remained ‘the club’s broom’, used in the same way, living in the same cupboard etc. But it is not the numerically same physical object – not one particle of it is shared by the ‘club’s broom’ of two years ago. We could say here that the porter is subject to an ‘illusion of continuity’. He has been misled into thinking that because there is a continuity of function, that there has been numerical identity. [Of course he is not really so misled, but uses his apparent confusion to lure Hume into a discussion on the topic of the criteria of numerical identity – a thorny one, as Hume discovers, to his chagrin]. We shall find this phenomenon of ‘the illusion of continuity’ a very useful one in the following sections and

28 we can usefully explore other instances of it, together with an associated one – ‘reification’.

11. The Illusion of Continuity 11.1 If we cast a stone into a lake we see ripples extending out in concentric circles. If we stand on the shore we see a wave coming towards us. It’s very tempting to think of this as a body of water moving closer. But this is an illusion – there is no body of water moving from the centre of the ripples out to the periphery and the shore. The water stays more or less where it is, but moves up and down due to the disturbance created by the stone. This up and down motion in turn disturbs the water adjacent, and this disturbance spreads out equally in all directions, hence its circular shape. The eye catches the ‘top’, the ‘up’ of each up and down movement, and as each successively adjacent body of water comes ‘up’, rapidly and continuously, seems to see a ‘wave’ travelling horizontally – coming closer. A surfer talks of riding the ‘same’ wave from off-shore right onto the beach. But there is no ‘same wave’ in the sense of one body of water travelling in to the shore. The wave that crashes on the beach is made of more or less the same water that was always hanging around the beach. 11.2 It is important to note that, as in any mirage, it is not the eye that is deluded. What is seen is seen. It is the way the mind conceptualises and understands what the eye has seen that contains the error. The error here is to assume a substantially enduring, numerically identical ‘thing’, where there is only a continuous ‘process’. This is allied to the process of ‘reification’ whereby something abstract is considered a concrete thing. When I was a student at Oxford I was asked by an American tourist who was wandering around the colleges – “I’ve seen some lovely colleges and libraries, but where is the University?” He was upset when I told him that the university is only an idea. [A synonym for ‘reify’ is ‘hypostasize’. It is interesting to note that the noun ‘hypostasis’ has come to mean ‘foundational principle’. Indeed Plotinus used it as his term for the successive creative principles, analogous to the Shaivite ‘Tattvas’. Metaphysicians need a keen sense of reality: a ‘supporting principle’ may not be a substantial, concrete reality, but a will o’ the wisp of an idea.] 11.3 Three more examples will serve our further discussion well: I am sure we have all enjoyed whirling a ‘sparkler’ (firework) on a dark night and seen it trace a ‘circle’ of light in the air. Of course there is no circle; there is only the burning point of the sparkler being revolved at high speed. Due to the speed and continuity of the motion of the

29 point, the illusion arises of a complete circle with a boundary, an inside and outside.

11.4 The continuity that gives rise to the illusion of a ‘thing’ does not even have to be a real continuity – by the same error, a discontinuous phenomenon can seem continuous. There can be levels within the illusion. A string of small ‘fairy lights’ in a festive display can give rise to a delightful illusion: if each light is momentarily turned on, and then off just as the adjacent one is turned on (and so on) it can seem as if a point of light is travelling ‘along’ the string. Focus on the light and the illusion of motion is sustained. Focus on one bulb and see it switch on and off, the illusion vanishes. Combining that with our previous example, we could imagine a string of lights curled in circle, and turned on in the way just described, only very fast. First we see a complete circle of light; then as the speed reduces we realise – ‘there is no circle of light, it was just a point of light moving in a circular path’. If it goes slower still, or if we adjust our focus, we could realise – ‘there is no single moving point of light, there are many static lights which are mostly off, but each flash momentarily at just the right time to create the illusion.’ This nested set of illusions is the kind of structure we will encounter in our look at the process of creation. 11.5 Perhaps the most common example of our continuity illusion is one we encounter everyday on our T.V. screens. The moving image is in fact a series of still images (frames) that are projected onto the screen

30 at a fast rate – usually 24 frames in every second. We can’t help but track ‘objects’ and ‘characters’ in the screen where there are only really lifeless, coloured images. We identify with the ‘characters’ and experience all manner of emotions as the dramas are played out; but there is no-one there – it is all a play of light. 11.6 In our last, similar, example (from Nisargadatta) we imagine a moist pen-point moving over a (big) sheet of paper. The ink used fades very fast, but not so fast that shapes cannot be made out. The shapes are recognised as letters; which group to form words, which collect into sentences; which describe characters in scenes. The characters grow, learn, fall in love, fight wars, amass and lose fortunes, and experience all the dramas imaginable. But none of it ever happened. There was only a moving moist pen-point that knows nothing except the joy of doodling.

11.7 These illusions have arisen because of a misapprehension concerning the nature of the object(s). There is also a set of illusions concerning a misapprehension of the subject. These in a way are more beguiling; we are looking here not at the illusory nature of the perceived, but illusions in regard to the nature of the perceiver. Again, due to an apparent continuity of thoughts and perceptions, (whereas in fact

31 these may be discontinuous, though arising rapidly) there may appear to be a thread or ‘story’ that can furnish a memory: i.e. there can be the illusion of an enduring identical subject of these experiences. It may be that there is an apparent unity among these perceptions (what Kant called the ‘synthetic unity of apperception’) and that this is so compelling that an act of reification of a supposed ‘subject’ occurs: that the unity of perception is taken to be a perception of a unity – a ‘self’ or subject.

11.8 The field of perceptions ‘creates’ a sense of self, and then this ‘self’ takes itself to be the source, or at least owner, of these perceptions – and we have a ‘lower-level’ version of the same loop that we saw in section 8.2 Here the self produces the perceptions that ‘create’ the self. It could be regarded as an example of mistaking a functional identity - the intermittent stuff of a ‘story-line’, for a numerical one – an identical, enduring substantial self.

32

11.9 This act of ‘taking itself to be the apparent ‘unity’ (falsely identifying with it) gives a further vital twist to the illusion – a twist lacking in a mere misapprehension of an object. For here the perceiver is no longer an unaffected witness to an illusory light-show, but is deeply implicated in a tragicomedy revolving around a case of mistaken identity. These kind of illusions involving false self-identification, which we can loosely group under the title of ‘Asmita’ (a term for them used in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali), form a vital part in the creative process, as we shall see; for the presumed ‘subject’ can go on to make further reifications and false self-identifications of its own.

12. The Paradox of Identification – ‘Asmita’ 12.1 In the Yoga Sutras, ‘Asmita’ is the second of the chain of five ‘kleshas’ or painful afflictions, that the truth-seeker tries to free him/herself from. [It forms a parallel to the aforementioned Buddhist ‘Chain of Dependent Origination’]. The first is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s true nature. Because of this primal ignorance as to who or what one is, there arises the impulse to identify with something in the field of consciousness in the hope, as it were, that it feels like the ‘true’ self.

33 12.2 This impulse is ‘Asmita’ and is bound to fail, ultimately – any such ‘identification’ is false since one’s true nature is not in the field of consciousness, but prior to it, as its source. Having once succumbed to ‘Asmita’, though, there is a problem: nothing in the field of consciousness is permanent. All is at the very least transient - if not directly under threat. (This is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism). So this gives rise to the third ‘klesha’, ‘Raga’ – ‘attraction’: one is compelled to be attracted to anything that appears to affirm or bolster one’s (false) identity. And inevitably, then the fourth ‘klesha’, ‘Dvesha’ – ‘aversion’: one is compelled to be averse to anything that appears to deny or threaten one’s (false) identity. This all culminates in the fifth ‘klesha’ –‘Abhinivesha’: blind clinging to life, and fear of death. 12.3 These five ‘kleshas’ pretty much sum up, beautifully (and horribly), the whole of the playing out of the human drama. All of ‘history’ is the playing out of dramas, wars and conflicts fuelled by identifications with one’s Empire, Nation, Tribe, Race, Community, Family, Class, Status, Wealth, Sex, etc, etc – all of them false. A modern parable might be the wonderful tragedy of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ concerning a young and gifted man of no wealth or social standing. It starts with the tiniest of random details (that accursed doodler!): he gets lent a smart jacket so that he can blend in at a high-class event. He doesn’t notice that the jacket bears the crest of a prestigious university (that he had never attended). Someone at the event assumes the jacket is his, that he had indeed attended the university – a mistake that our Mr. Ripley does not rectify, for fear of being shown up. This is the beginning of a long drama involving further mistaken identities and false impersonations, love, disillusionment and, finally, murder and mayhem. At the end our anti-hero, regretting the whole experience, confesses (to his final victim): ‘ …you see, I thought it would be better to be a fake somebody, than a real nobody’. 12.4 Some false identification may be conscious and deliberate, like an actor identifying with his role (or as in the case of Mr. Ripley). But in most it is not – it is unconsciously taken as an essential ingredient in one’s identity. In fact, one’s assumed identity is a product of ‘Asmita’. This distinction between conscious and unconscious ‘asmita’ has important consequences, as we shall see later. To give two simplistic examples of unconscious ‘asmita’: an ardent patriot may be genuinely convinced that in his true nature he is English or French or whatever. In war, one’s over-identification with being (say) English can eclipse one’s deeper identity as human, and lead one to perpetrate horrors on one’s fellow (non-English) humans. In a nightmare one may assume the identity of someone in awful circumstances and feel genuine distress as long as the dream lasts. On awakening from the dream

34 the identity of the waking subject is re-asserted - the false identification with dream character (an object in the field of consciousness) is shattered along with its dream world all its associated suffering. The point here is that while the false identification persists, the original identity of the subject is eclipsed. This is particularly so in the case of unconscious ‘asmita’; whereas in conscious identification (say an actor playing a role), the sense of the original subject is not so eclipsed. 12.5 What most people consider their ‘normal’ identity may very well be a case of unconscious ‘asmita’, an identity having the status of a dreamcharacter. It is as if there is an unstoppable tendency for the subject to identify itself with whatever appears as the most predominant and persisting object in its field of consciousness. (How could someone born and brought up in a tribe not end up with tribal membership as a defining characteristic of their identity?) There is nothing inherently negative about this: many of the assumed roles are joyful. In any case it is a pre-requisite of playing a role in the drama of conscious creation. Having said that, it is important to reiterate its illusory nature: ‘Asmita’ casts a veil of distortion over the whole field of consciousness in which it is operating. Nothing (including the subject) is seen for what it truly is; rather, it is perceived through the filters of ‘Raga-Dvesha’. In the classic Vedantic example: due to fear, born of ignorance, a rope is mistaken for a serpent…and many consequences follow.

12.6 It is worth reiterating the formal structure of what is happening in ‘Asmita’: In a field of consciousness with subject and object(s) there arises a false identification of the subject with an object in its field; if this happens unconsciously it seems that the original identity of the subject is eclipsed. This is a ‘loop in consciousness’: there is an infolding (involution) of the consciousness of the subject which loops onto an object in its own field, which is then taken to be a new (false) subject. This paradoxical ability of consciousness to usurp its own subjective pole we can call the Paradox of Identification. 12.7 We can also see how there is a structural similarity between our two sets of illusions: that of the presumed identity of an ‘object’ (due to the apparent ‘continuity’ of a process); and the presumed identity of a subject (due to the continuity, predominance and persistence of some of the content in the field of consciousness). In fact these two kinds of illusion are aspects of one underlying process of reification in creation, as we shall see.

35 Before we resume the account of the creative process (for which we needed these concepts), it is worth looking briefly at the case ‘par excellence’ of philosophic ‘asmita’. It illustrates perfectly, as a microcosm, the clash between modern ‘rationalist’ philosophy, and the ancient metaphysics (East and West).

13. I Think, Therefore I Am (I think) – aren’t I? 13.1 One of the most seminal texts in eastern philosophy is the ‘Yoga Sutras’ - its author, Patanjali, is often referred to as the ‘Founder of Yoga’. One of the most seminal texts in modern western philosophy is ‘Meditations’ by Rene Descartes, who is often referred to as the ‘Father of modern philosophy’. The very kernel of the Yoga Sutras consists in its sutras 2, 3 and 4, which I paraphrase (for the purposes of comparison): 2. Yoga is the stilling of the ‘experiences’ of the mind-stuff. 3. For then the subject rests in its true nature. 4. Otherwise, there is identification with the ‘experiences’ of the mindstuff. The very kernel of Descartes’ ‘Meditations’ is: “I ‘experience’, therefore I am”. [Descartes’ dictum is famously ‘Cogito ergo Sum’, usually translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’. However in the text it is clear that his use of ‘cogito’ goes beyond what we narrowly mean by ‘thinking’, to include perception and conception as a whole – in short, ‘experience’. Patanjali’s term ‘vritti’, usually translated as ‘modification’ (of the mind-stuff), is likewise unpacked in the text to include all perception, thinking, sleep – in short, ‘experience’.] 13.2 Yoga is the cure for Avidya and Asmita. If the subject is falsely identified with an object in its field, then the solution is to ‘still’ (i.e. allow to subside and disappear) all the objects. The spell will then be broken as the subject realises that it IS when all objects are not, so it cannot be an object. Descartes on the other hand, in his quest for absolute certainty, allows himself to doubt the truth of any of his experiences, but rests on (for him) the bedrock of the fact that, true or not, ‘experiencing’ is going on. Therefore ‘experiencing’, ‘cogito’, is my very nature – I experience, so I am.

36 (He then, via a tortuous and invalid ‘ontological’ argument, firstly proves God’s existence: my concept of God is so perfect that to say ‘He doesn’t exist’ would be a contradiction – ergo, He does; and secondly, shows that since God is the good guy that He is, He wouldn’t let all my experiencing be delusional, therefore it isn’t; so I’m back home safe and sound.) One can see straight away here that ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ is, quite precisely and exactly, the very essence of Sutra 4 – identification with the ‘experiences’ of the mind-stuff. In short what for Descartes is the foundational principle of his philosophy, is for Patanjali the very definition of Ignorance.

[This could be seen as perfectly summing up the centuries-old contrast (though now fading rapidly) between western and eastern culture. In the modern west, truth is to be found by thinking and experiencing (theorising and experimentation). In the east, Truth is to be found by tracing experience and thought back to its Source, beyond thought and prior to experience.]

14. Creation and Maya 14.1 We are now in a position to resume our account of the creative process that we left off at the end of section 8. By that point we had described the Plenum and its shaktis and outlined the first five tattvas wherein The Self contemplates aspects of its true nature or Being. These contemplations form the substance of the ‘Mahavakyas’ – variations on ‘I am That’. There is no real duality in ‘I’ and ‘That’ for they are both Consciousness. In the language of perception we could say there was a primal ‘perceiving’ without a separate ‘perceiver’ or ‘perceived’. This perceiving was perceiving only perceiving – only itself. Though there was no division, there was a subtle polarisation or complementarity, for that is the paradoxical nature of Consciousness: Awareness aware of itself, able to focus on itself as

37 object, and by implication as subject of that object. This infinitely rapid change of ‘focus’ sets up an ‘oscillation’ between subject and object, a primary powerful vibration - ‘Spanda-shakti’. [The medium in which this vibration occurs has been called ‘Chiti’ – the ‘substance’ of pure Consciousness, as it were]. 14.2 In the fifth Shuddha Vidya Tattva this Spanda-shakti takes on the form of Kriya-shakti - the unlimited power to Act (see 8.9). Then a miracle/disaster occurs: the Spanda-shakti vibrates with such intensity that each pole of its oscillation - I am That - appears to take on an existence of its own: A two-fold process of reification occurs. The intensity of vibration at the subjective pole gives it such a magnetic, predominant attraction that there arises the illusion that it exists independently, together with the tendency for consciousness to identify with it – an illusion of Asmita, false identification. Simultaneously, the rapid oscillation at the objective pole gives rise to the appearance (reification) of an independent objective ‘world’ – just as a ‘circles of light’ could appear, though there were only moving points of light, or series of momentary flashes, in our example above – an illusion of continuity. This two-fold principle of reification/asmita we can call ‘Maya’. We now have a duality, a division of Consciousness into independent subject and object. 14.3 We can introduce one more term from Kashmir Shaivism to help get a descriptive handle here. The independent, separate subject can be called ‘Purusha’ and the independent object(s), the ‘world’. As Purusha and the world arise due to Maya this represents a different mode of the vibration of Spanda-shakti, a ‘denser’ mode, if you will. The Self appears as a self (purusha), its substance Chiti (pure Consciousness) becomes ‘Chitta’ (the mind). Though duality has ‘arisen’, the underlying unity of The Self has, of course, not been shattered – merely concealed, in a way: just as it’s not possible to see the rope whilst seeing the ‘serpent’, though the rope is always there. Whilst seeing the ‘serpent’ though, this concealment means that the sense of the original identity (as The Self) is eclipsed (as in 12.4). 14.4 There is another important principle at work here: because of the underlying, unbroken unity, each Purusha perfectly complements its world (just as, when a cell divides, each new cell shares the same genetic information as the other and the original). There is a vital sutra (I shall label these VS1 etc.) in the Pratyabhijnahrdayam that deals with this:

38 VS1: “The universe is manifold because of the differentiation of reciprocally adapted, complementary subjects and objects.” (Pratyabhijnahrdayam 3). So we must speak not so much of the Purusha (self) and the ‘world’ of object(s), rather of the Purusha and its’ world. This principle of complementarity is perhaps best imaged in the ancient, Chinese icon of yin and yang:

The black and white serpents are inextricably entwined as the black contains within it the ‘seed’ (small circle) of the white, and vice versa. So there is something ‘objective’ about every subject: namely, that it is ‘reified’; there is something ‘subjective’ about every object: namely, that it is always ‘object’ to some subject. 14.5 But there is a very important non-symmetry here also that needs delving into. The two-fold illusion that is Maya contains nonsymmetry as there is only reification of the object, but reification and actual identification with the subject. The Self takes itself to be Purusha (the reified subject), and because of that Purusha is conscious of (reified) objects, the ‘world’. The world appears in the consciousness of Purusha, though conceived (reified) as separate. For The Self prior to identification there is no ‘world’. There is a (timeless!)

39 ‘order’ here: the first reification to arise is that of the subject, together with the false identification. This gives rise to the second reification, that of the world of objects. However, one cannot happen without the other – a subject needs its complementary object(s). So the Purusha arises, and within it, its world of objects. 14.6 The principle of complementarity means that whatever the predominant quality of vibration is implicated in the identification with the Purusha, that same quality will predominate in that Purushas ‘world’. For example a Purusha that vibrates with a modality of ‘power’, will perceive its ‘world’ principally in terms of relations of power– so a Hitler or a Caesar will see their worlds in terms of power-politics. A Purusha that results from vibration in an aesthetic ‘sound’ modality, will manifest as a Mozart living in, and creating, a world of beautiful sounds. Consciousness identified as being a dog will see its world as being comprised of dog-members of its (or a rivals’) pack, and things which may or may not be dog-food.

40 14.7 There is another vital sutra in the Pratyabhijnahrdayam which encapsulates, this process, in terms of the substance of The Self, ‘chiti’ (pure consciousness), and that of Purusha, ‘chitta’ (mind): VS2: “Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes the mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived” (Pratyabhijnahrdayam 5) This formulation is excellent because it reminds us that we are talking of one underlying substance, chiti, that ‘becomes’ chitta. ‘Contraction in accordance with the object perceived’ is another perspective on the appearance of the duality of subject and object. ‘Chiti’ is pure consciousness, the substance of The Self, and ‘Chitta’ is the mind, or the subject, and its ‘world’ is the objective pole that the subject is ‘in accord’ with, i.e. is complementing. It is all a process in ‘chiti’, pure consciousness. The power of ‘chiti’, ‘chiti-shakti’, is an aspect of the primary vibration, spanda-shakti, and so therefore is chitta. Chitta is merely spanda-shakti vibrating in a ‘denser’ mode, as we mentioned above. 14.8 So from the perspective of spanda-shakti nothing has really occurred, nothing has been ‘created’ or produced. It may seem so because of Maya-shakti. But Maya-shakti is also just an aspect of spandashakti. It is all a play of spanda-shakti. So, we have yet another truly vital sutra, from a commentary on the Spanda-Karikas: VS3: “In reality nothing arises, nothing subsides, only the divine spanda-shakti which, though free of succession (time), appears in different aspects as if arising, and as if subsiding.” (Ksemaraj, commentary on Spanda-Karikas. I) These sutras, taken together, answer the old metaphysical question as to whether the creation is real or merely an appearance. The answer is that it is both. It has real being for it is spanda-shakti, the vibration of, not different from, Being. It is an appearance, because in reality, nothing arises. Anything less than both these taken together would be an incomplete picture. The old metaphysical question poses a false dichotomy – it is not ‘either/or’. Perhaps we can find a Buddhist ‘middle’ way here and use a modern concept: ‘creation’ is real and unreal, or both, or neither – it is ‘virtual’. It is from this embracing of both sides of a false dichotomy that we also get the foundational teaching of Buddhism in the Heart Sutra: ‘form is emptiness, and emptiness is form’.

41 14.9 Also it is here where our hologram analogy is useful again. For Chiti is the pure reference beam and the illumination beam. Chitta (the mind) is the diffraction pattern that interacts with it to create the interference pattern, which, when illuminated by chiti, projects the ‘virtual’ world of ‘virtual’ objects on its own screen. [Again cf. Pratyabhijnahrdayam 2 – ‘…Chiti Shakti projects the universe on its own screen’] The astute will have noticed another paradoxical loop here. For what is the original ‘object’ that reflects the diffraction pattern? Answer: it’s the same as the ‘virtual’ object projected. This loop is the objective analogue of the paradox concerning the subject of 12.6. Objects are ‘virtual’ - projected by consciousness; but the pattern used for the projection is a reflection of the object – i.e. objects create their own pattern of projection. The object pole of consciousness also infolds to loop onto the subject in the field of consciousness and imprints the pattern for its own projection. This also parallels exactly the Paradox of Manifestation, where the sense of ‘otherness’ needed is supplied by manifestation itself. Indeed, it is the same paradox reflected ‘lower’ down in the process of creation. This Paradox of Projection (we may call it) is the ‘objective’ counterpart to the ‘subjective’ Paradox of Identification (12.6).

42

15. Quantum Physics 15.1 Quantum theory was such a revolution in physics partly because it seemed to put consciousness centre stage in an account of physical reality. Up until then modern physics had been materialistic and objective. But the world of very small particles seemed not to play ball. While performing experiments to settle the old dispute as to whether light was made of particles (photons) or was wave-like, some startling results emerged: how it behaved seemed to depend on whether it was observed or measured. These particles lost their status as independently existing material things, but rather seemed to have only virtual or probabilistic existence; an existence that became actual and determinate only at a point of observation. Their indeterminate behaviour was described by ‘waves’ of probability (the Schrodinger wave equation) that ceased at the moment of their observation, when their behaviour became determinate; this was known as the ‘collapse of the wave function’. Prior to that, their behaviour could only be described indeterminately, within the parameters of the famous ‘uncertainty principle’ of Heisenberg. 15.2 Nor was this remarkable behaviour limited to the world of the very small. By a famous thought experiment called ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’, a situation was envisaged whereby indeterminate particle behaviour was linked to a large scale event – in this case whether a cat, in a box, had been poisoned or not, by a mechanism triggered by the particles behaviour. Since it was in principle impossible to determine its behaviour until it was observed, likewise it was now in principle meaningless to say either that the cat was dead, or that it was alive, until the box was opened and the situation observed.

43

The age-old philosophical problem as to whether something exists when not perceived was revived, with the issue being firmly settled on the side of Berkeley’s famous dictum: ‘to be is to be perceived’ – ‘esse est percipi’. This interpretation was widely resisted by more classically-minded physicists (including Einstein); they objected both to its probabilistic element (Einstein said ‘God does not play dice’) and for its central reliance on consciousness in the form of an observer. 15.3 However, the philosophically-minded were soon to notice parallels with Eastern thought (Capra’s ‘The Tao of Physics’ made this popular). We can see how these ideas tie in very nicely to our second vital sutra VS2: “Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes the mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived”. ‘Contracting in accordance with the object perceived’ becomes, in this context, a way of describing the ‘collapse of the wave function’. The formless, indeterminate play of Chiti becomes an observing mind, Chitta, at the point of its perception (observation) of its object. This parallel is all the more remarkable considering the wide gulf, historically and culturally, that exists between those who formulated these systems. 15.4 Bringing consciousness into a centre stage position in physical science gave rise to paradox – not surprising considering its otherwise objective and materialistic bias. The most striking of these (which has the by now familiar shape of a self-referential loop) is known as the ‘strong anthropic principle’ which states: ‘Matter must organise itself in such a way as to support life; life must evolve in such a way as to give rise to consciousness; for without consciousness to perceive it, nothing (including matter) can exist’.

44

Needless to say, many scientists have found such ideas abhorrent, and as a result there were different interpretations of quantum mechanics which developed to avoid these conclusions. The above interpretation is referred to as the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation, but there are others. 15.5 Perhaps the most notable stems from the work of Hugh Everett, who developed the ‘Many-Worlds interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. In brief, this does away with the need for an ‘observer’ to settle the issue as to whether Schrodinger’s Cat is dead or not, by saying that it is, in effect, both: the quantum event leads to both outcomes, each in its own world. At every quantum event there is a branching of reality into separate worlds – in this case a world with a dead cat, and another with a living one. There is no need of an ‘indeterminate’ cat waiting to be observed to find out if it is dead or not. 15.6 Whilst doing away with the need for consciousness to play such a central role - and thus restoring a more objective and materialistic stance for the physics - many thought the consequences even more fantastical, and Everett’s ideas were marginalised for quite a while. More recently they have been developed seriously, and popular culture has latched onto the idea in a big way, producing numerous tales and films involving ‘parallel worlds’ and the paradoxes of time travel. We shall have reason to visit the idea again later (section 29), but for now it is well to notice one important feature: Everett’s ‘many’ worlds were not ‘parallel’. There was in principle no way anything could ‘travel’ from ‘one to another’. A little thought will reveal that the very idea is meaningless in this context: a thing, or object of any sort, comes into existence as a result of previous quantum events in its world. A different world contains the different outcomes of those events and produces different things. The idea that one and the same thing could somehow inhabit more than one of the ‘many’ worlds contradicts the very point and meaning of the concept.

16. The Bad News - Limitation 16.1 To resume our account of the creative process: the two-fold illusion (reification and false identification) we have called Maya acts on The Self, giving rise to a division – a separation into Purusha and its world. This process - described above (section 14) - is truly a miraculous happening; but it is also a disaster. For with the rise of this duality there is an apparent fragmentation in the fullness of the plenum. All of the unbounded positive qualities of The Self become subject to limitation as there is an apparent loss of completeness (purna) or wholeness. This is of course the traditional Fall, the loss of

45 Paradise. The principle of Maya turns out to be the serpent in the Garden of Eden, seducing The Self with knowledge of duality - the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil – and thereby forgetting the primal unity. Falsely identifying with Purusha, It now inhabits the ‘world’ of the Purusha instead of the unity of the Eden of The Self. 16.2 In Kashmir Shaivism the five Tattvas that express the aspects of the unlimited powers or shaktis of The Self, give way to five corresponding Tattvas of limitation – the ‘Kanchukas’ - which limit the Consciousness, Bliss, Will, Knowledge and power to Act of The Self. These Kanchukas are bad news. For now, all the unbounded qualities of The Self will manifest only in a limited way: as qualities inherent in Purusha and projected by it as principles which create its objective world. In particular, the limitation with respect to Chit–shakti gives rise to the dimension of time, and that in respect of Ananda-shakti gives rise to the dimensions of space. Most importantly, the loss of wholeness leads to a limited Purusha subject to a spatially limited body, the decay of time, and all the fear this entails.

16.3 The traditions of Buddhism, Shaivism and Vedanta all differ in the detail and order of things here, but the gist is all the same: with the creation of space and time, Purusha projects the mental functions of intellect, ego-sense, and organising memory, which operate on the further projections of the senses, their (subtle) objects and their

46 (gross) material constituents. The Purusha functions as the pure ‘witnessing’ subject of its world, while all its projections (intellect, egosense etc) are the objective content of its world. We can recognise some of the functioning here from our previous discussion. The organising memory works on the data of the senses, with the concepts of the intellect, to create a unity of experience, that is reified as an ego-sense and as the ‘objects’ of the world. More on this in section 20. 16.4 It is important, it seems, not to underestimate the possible, apparent effect of this ‘Fall’. If Consciousness identifies as Purusha which then projects and identifies with the mental functions, and then the senses and ultimately as a gross perishable body, then the ‘subject’ can have the experience of being completely overwhelmed by the objective ‘world’; more than that, even devoured by it. The serpent not only seduces us into limitation, but it does so as a prelude to apparently consuming us entirely.

16.5 So we have a picture of a miraculous act of creation which is at the same time a disaster of limitation and apparent death. The various traditions have taken every possible stance in relation to this. There are pessimistic ones whose predominant theme, not surprisingly, is to want to undo the whole thing as an unnecessary evil. Buddhism, in some of its manifestations, comes under this category, as does Gnosticism, whose ‘creator god’ is an evil demiurge. The many ascetic traditions embody an attitude which is pessimistic in the sense that a wise person will have as little to do with the energies of creation as possible – these are manifest in the ‘monastic’ branches of most religions. 16.6 There is also the semi-pessimistic attitude that, although evil, the whole thing is somehow necessary. We have seen this before in section 5.2 The wise man learns to exercise great discernment and discrimination and eventually acquires the ‘pearl beyond price’ that is

47 Self-knowledge - all as a result of apparently being caught up in this process. This was a predominant theme in the classical Greek philosophies, and was central to Platonism and the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. 16.7 Some traditions seem to feel the need to make out that creation must be good because God, the source, is good. So we relish ‘all things bright and beautiful’ and change the subject when it comes to all that isn’t. Others, such as Kashmir Shaivism, positively delight in the creation that is an explosion of the joyful ‘spanda-shakti’ – though, it has to be said, it seems that only the adept yogis of the tradition can enjoy this vision – the rest are bound souls (‘samsarin’) deluded and devoured by their own serpent shaktis (cf. Pratyabhijnahrdayam 12). 16.8 Whatever the stance, one thing underlies it all: the apparent loss of wholeness compels the Purusha, willy-nilly, to seek its restoration. For there can be no true peace until the essential completeness and perfection is realised.

17. Whose Illusion? – The Purusha Paradox 17.1 Before we look at further ramifications of the creative process, we need to pause a little; for there is another paradoxical snake hidden in the grass here which needs to be exposed. The principle of Maya, it seems, is the cause of all the trouble. This principle is a two-fold reification and a false identification (‘asmita’) giving rise to the illusion of separation and the duality of Purusha and its world. But we need to look more closely here: for who or what exactly is the subject of this illusion? In section 14.3 we talked of the unity of the Self being concealed – but concealed from whom, or from what? Not The Self, surely: for it is the Consciousness of the plenum, full of knowledge, Jnana-shakti, and not tainted by any delusion. But not the Purusha either: for the Purusha is the product of the illusion, not its source. The Purusha is only an apparent, reified subject, and did not exist prior to the illusion. How did this illusion arise in the first place? 17.2 In section 14 we said that “The intensity of vibration at the subjective pole gives it such a magnetic, predominant attraction that there arises the illusion that it exists independently, together with the tendency for consciousness to identify with it – an illusion of Asmita, false identification”. But how could this illusion and this tendency arise – how can The Self, full of knowledge, fall for an illusion; how can there

48 be a tendency for The Self, replete with Bliss, to want to identify with some imaginary, lesser, apparent ‘other’?

17.3 When we looked at Asmita in section 12, we saw that it was the second of the five ‘kleshas’ or afflictions (in the Yoga Sutras) that the yogi is trying to overcome: “The first is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s true nature. Because of this primal ignorance as to who or what one is, there arises the impulse to identify with something in the field of consciousness in the hope, as it were, that it feels like the ‘true’ self.” But if it is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s true nature – that leads to Asmita, then how can this apply to The Self? We have merely pushed the question a stage further back. And so we uncover the age-old debate in the various schools of Vedanta, as to whether, and how, Avidya may have arisen in The Self, whose very nature precludes it. In short, how does Maya get a foothold to start with? [In the Samkhya tradition, where the Yoga Sutras are rooted, there is an easy answer, for that system is dualistic: there are two eternal principles – Consciousness and Matter (Prakriti). For any given Purusha the two principles can be entangled and the cause of this entanglement is Avidya, whose source is in Matter. The task of the yogi is to uproot this ignorance, disentangle the principles and remain free as Consciousness alone. This entanglement is a beginning-less appearance as there is an infinity of purushas to sustain it - though for any given one Purusha freedom from it is possible. But philosophers have rarely been happy with dualistic systems for long – there is always the desire to find some underlying unity.] 17.4 Even in non-dual (Advaita) texts we find the sages struggling to avoid confusion over this issue. We see, for example, in the ‘Atma Bodha’ of Shankara, where, after having said (in Sutra 25) that the Self undergoes no change, we find the text going on to say, nonetheless: “The Self regarding Itself as Purusha is overcome by fear, just like the man who regards a rope as a snake. The Self regains fearlessness by realising that It is not a Purusha, but the Supreme Self.” (Sutra 26) But of course to talk of The Self as becoming fearful and then regaining fearlessness is contradictory, especially in light of the previous Sutra 25. 17.5 We have a situation here where it is almost as if there is (1) The Self, (2) the Purusha and also (3) some third mysterious entity which can either identify as The Self, or as the Purusha. But if we allow a third entity we are poised on the edge of another infinite regress: for what is

49 that third entity when not identifying with either The Self or the Purusha? We will need a fourth something – something that can be either The Self or the Purusha or the third entity, when that third entity is not identifying as either (1) or (2)... and so on to a fifth, sixth etc. entity, without limit. 17.6 So there is no such easy answer for the more prevalent, avowedly monistic systems that we have been considering. Buddhism has more typically shied away from the question (likewise regarding Avidya as beginning-less) but exhorting the seeker to shun ‘abstract’ questions as to its origin, in favour of getting on with the business of uprooting it - and thereby bringing the suffering, consequent upon it, to an end. For a serious metaphysician though, this is an admission of defeat, and we can delve deeper before giving up! 17.7 The clearest and most eloquent refutation of the idea that Avidya lies mysteriously latent in The Self somehow (and ready to manifest Maya at some point) was made by Jnaneshwar in his “Nectar of SelfAwareness” - ‘Amritanubhav’, chapter 7, ‘Refutation of the Doctrine of Ignorance’. But in it he never really addresses the question as to the origin of ignorance, given, as he shows, it is not in The Self. He merely notices how peculiar ignorance is, because it can never be found – the minute one casts the light of consciousness on it, it vanishes as if it never were.

17.8 If instead, then, we try and push this ignorance onto the Purusha, we end up with another paradoxical loop: the illusion of Maya exists in

50 the consciousness of the Purusha – even though the Purusha is an illusory ‘subject’ created by Maya. This we may call the Purusha Paradox. Both Maya and the Purusha become products of each other. One contemporary teacher of Advaita, Dr. Klein, when talking of what a burden is created by identifying with what one is not, was asked: ‘a burden for whom?’ He answered ‘a burden for the burden itself…’ The illusion, it seems, is not even a real illusion; it is an illusory illusion. 17.9 When confronted with the choices of attributing the origin of Maya either: to The Self – which leads to direct contradiction with the nature of The Self; or, to the Purusha – which leads to a paradoxical loop, the Vedantic approach was to refuse both. Instead it was simply declared that Maya has no discernible origin – it is neither real nor unreal, and by its very nature ‘inscrutable’, ‘anirvacaniya’. Unfortunately this is not very illuminating, and amounts to a defeat with a technical-sounding term. Rather than accepting contradiction, or accommodating ourselves to another paradox, we might take a different approach. Instead of couching things in Vedantic terms, with its stress on ‘illusion’, we will take a different look at the same situation from a Kashmir Shaivite position, and see if that progresses the account.

18. The Divine Actor and the Paradox of Omnipotence 18.1 In section 14.3 we described the manifestation of the Purusha and its world as spanda-shakti vibrating in a ‘denser’ mode. And our vital sutra VS2 has ‘chiti’ becoming ‘chitta’ – the substance of The Self becomes the mind-stuff of Purusha, by contraction. In this formulation, looking as it were, from the ‘outside’, there appears no paradox. What about from ‘within’? Well, ‘chiti’ and ‘chitta’ (pure consciousness and mind) are both vibrations of consciousness – there is no mention of ignorance or unconsciousness. So if there is any false identification (asmita) involved, it must be conscious and deliberate, as it were. In section 12.3 we noted that in cases of conscious ‘asmita’ the original identity of the subject is not eclipsed, and we took the case of an actor as an example. However deeply involved an actor is in the role, he or she can snap out of acting at any instant – there is no real loss of the sense of one’s original identity. 18.2 In the Shiva Sutras it seems as if this is indeed the kind of process envisaged in the manifestation of Purusha and its world (‘chitta’, mind and its’ object). For we have both: ‘Atma Chittam’ - ‘the mind is a form of the Self’ (Shiva Sutras III.1) and

51 ‘Nartaka Atma’ - ‘the Self is an actor’

(Shiva Sutras III.9)

So there is no ‘ignorance’ (Avidya) in The Self, which would lead to a false identification (Asmita) as Purusha. Also in reality the ‘Kanchukas’ (16.2) do not represent the ‘bad news’ of a Fall, a real loss of fullness or perfection. It is rather a deliberate Self-limitation to take on a role, in order to act out a drama. However, in order to do justice to our actual experience, it is clear that the analogy with ordinary acting will not stretch far enough. For it seems that in the majority of cases the sense of the original identity is indeed eclipsed. Unlike a normal actor, we do not appear to have the ability to snap out of the role at will, in an instant. 18.3 It is as if, in order to make the drama really interesting, The Self hypnotises Itself into believing it actually is a limited, (potentially or actually) suffering purusha, in order to experience the full dramatic potential of its’ creation. It has to fall for Its’ own trick, in order to sell itself on Its’ own story.

In order to really feel the part of a finite purusha, subject to the limitations of the ‘Kanchukas’, the Self seems to deprive Itself of its’ ability to relinquish the role It has assigned to Itself. We may ask ‘but is this really possible?’ To which the answer must come –‘Of course, the Self has infinite power to act – Kriya-shakti!’ But here we have another loop forming when see that, in this situation, the infinite power to act is acting on Itself to curb Itself – with the consequence that It is no longer an infinite power…

52

18.4 So we arrive here at the well-known ‘Paradox of Omnipotence’, known in its’ childish, simple guise as a puzzle about God: ‘can God make stone so heavy even He can’t lift it?’ Whether we answer yes or no we always end up with a God who is not omnipotent: either He can’t lift the stone, or He can’t make it. Nor is this kind of paradox limited to God. In England the Parliament holds the right to enact legislation on any issue, anywhere. But it has to stop short on passing legislation that would bind future Parliaments. Even if it didn’t voluntarily do so, and tried to pass a law limiting a future Parliament, that future Parliament, being as potent as its predecessor, would simply repeal the original legislation. But if such a (future) act is specifically made illegal under the previous law, Parliament paradoxically undermines itself when exercising its supreme power now, in repealing it. To avoid this situation, Parliament never attempts to bind a future Parliament. We also see a similar paradox when a debating society, upholding the principles of democracy and free-speech, denies a platform to a speaker on the grounds that the speaker holds anti-democratic views that would threaten the society. In denying a platform in that way, of course, the society itself becomes anti-democratic, denying freespeech. In seeking to preserve itself, it self-destructs. 18.5 So it seems then, as if our Divine Actor takes an irreversible course of action when He deliberately limits Himself to perform His role. For once having done so, He forgets His real identity and thereby loses the ability to relinquish the role – for He no longer thinks that He is performing a role, but really is the limited Purusha, caught up in a real-life drama.

53 What this means is that, although perhaps setting out consciously and deliberately to play a role, it actually ends up being a case of unconscious ‘asmita’, after all; at least in the sense that the original subjects’ identity is eclipsed, and that the role cannot be relinquished at will; because it is not considered a ‘role’ at all – it is felt as the true identity. 18.6 Some of the force of this ‘paradox of omnipotence’ may seem mitigated by the fact that the parameters of the role are fixed in ‘advance’, as it were, by the Self, who is author and actor here. When the play is finished, the role dissolves and the Actor is left as He was. It is mitigated by remembering the illusory nature of time (one of the limiting Kanchukas): it’s not that first of all He knew Himself, then forgot Himself, and then recognised Himself again. Because, for The Self there is no ‘time’ – so there was no ‘time’ during which he was not omnipotent. For The Self, nothing happened (cf.VS3). There is a delightful Sufi tale wherein a powerful Sultan expresses doubt, to his Sufi advisor, about the account of the Prophet Mohammed being caught up in prayer in the ‘heavens’ for several days and nights, though when he returned, no time has passed. To illustrate how this could be true, the Sufi asks the Sultan to put his head in a big jar of water. On doing so all the Sultans’ surroundings disappear and he finds himself alone on a deserted beach. There then follows a sevenyear drama in which he desperately tries to sustain himself, meets up with other bedraggled travellers, marries, has a child who dies tragically; again and again he is reduced to miserable penury, and finally, hungry and thirsty, he pours his heart out to a stranger, since none of his habitual companions believe his crazy story of having once been a great Sultan. This stranger offers him a big jar of water to immerse his head in, to refresh himself. When he pulls his head out he finds himself back in his palace. Angry with the Sufi for using a magical power to curse him to seven years misery, he threatens to have him executed. But as a servant confirms, the Sufi replies that no time had elapsed – and the Sultan notices with astonishment that he is not hungry or thirsty and has not aged at all. All the grief of his experiences likewise vanishes like a mist. !8.7 Even though this reflection (that time is subject to consciousness and not vice versa) mitigates somewhat the effect of the ‘paradox of omnipotence’ it does so at the expense of raising again the previous paradox of the status of the Purusha (section 17). For, unlike our Sufi tale (where, despite the illusion of space and time involved, the Sultan retains a sense of identity throughout), we are dealing with a case where not only are the ‘surroundings’ (i.e. the ‘world’) radically new, but so also is its principle observer – the Purusha of that ‘world’. There is no apparent continuity of identity carried over from the Consciousness of The Self to the mind of the Purusha, in so far as the

54 Purusha is concerned; whereas from the point of view of The Self nothing happened. The Purusha is not a real identity that happens to be suffering from an external illusion. Being that Purusha of its ‘world’ is the illusion. And our unanswered question (the Purusha Paradox) remains – ‘whose illusion is it?’ When the Zen master asks the famous question (koan) ‘What was your Face before you were born?’ he confronts this paradox head-on. 18.8 So our approach to the arising of the Purusha and its’ ‘world’ as a deliberate role played by The Self as Divine Actor did not, then, release us from paradox. For we are confronted by the Paradox of Omnipotence, which is only mitigated by suggesting that The Self never really loses its’ omnipotence because the role it plays is brought about by the illusion of time. But then the Purusha Paradox reappears when we ask - ‘who is it, then, who is relatively limited and impotent?’ It is no good answering that it is the Purusha, because the Purusha only appears as an effect of the Self- limitation. A dream-character does not create the dream it is caught up in. 18.9 Perhaps we can see now why the ancient philosophers were so baffled by the inscrutable (‘anirvacaniya’) nature of Maya. For whichever way we turn we are confronted by paradox. If the arising of the Purusha and its world is somehow illusory we are faced with the Purusha Paradox. If it is a real drama played out by The Self we are faced with Paradox of Omnipotence. We shall be returning to these paradoxes in section 27 when we ‘reverse’ the process of creation in our consideration of ‘Enlightenment’.

19. The Good News – The Bluffing Serpent 19.1 In India there are second rate snake-charmers whose ‘dance’ with a deadly poisonous cobra is not as death-defying as it seems. For they have previously drawn the poison fang from the snake, rendering it harmless, despite its’ menacing appearance. Whatever attitude we take to the creative process as outlined above, it now appears that the ‘bad news’ of section 16 – the limitation of the Kanchukas – may not be so bad after all. For sections 17 and 18 now seem to show that any suffering involved in the creation process is either some kind of illusion, or some kind of role-playing act. Whichever of these it may be, it seems that the ‘sting’ has been taken out of the serpent of Maya, who seduced us out of Paradise. The serpent is playful, and if it seems menacing it is only to play out a drama. In reality, no harm can actually come from this snake.

55

It may be that under the illusory spell of Maya the appearance of suffering is taken for a reality; or that when The Self acts out its Self-limiting role with such conviction the suffering of the character played is felt as real. As the illusion dissolves, or as the play comes to an end, the perspective of The Self prevails; a perspective that knows no real suffering. 19.2 In Dr. Wolff’s remarkable account, he describes in detail the effect of the dissolution of his habitual, limited (purusha) sense of self, and how things now appeared from the perspective of the expansive space (‘akasha’) of The Self: “I remembered my former belief in the reality of suffering in the world. It had no more force than the memory of a dream. I saw that, in reality, there is no suffering anywhere, that there is no creature in need of an aiding hand. The essential consciousness and life of all beings are already in that State [of The Self], and both never had been, and could not be, divorced from it. The world field with all its

56 striving and pain, seemingly lasting through billions of years, actually is a dream occurring during a passing wink of sleep. I simply could not feel any need or duty that would call me back to action in the ‘world-field’. There was no question of departing from or deserting anybody or any duty, for I found myself so identical with all, that the last most infinitesimal element of distance was dissolved. I remembered that it had been said that there were offices of compassion to be performed in the world, but this idea had no reality in the State because none there was or ever could be who had need for ought, although those who were playing with the dream of life, in form, might delude themselves with imagining that a need existed. But I knew there was no reality in this dream.”

So if the ‘bad news’ of limitation is only a ‘dream occurring in a passing wink of sleep’, then in reality the snake of Maya is a toothless playmate, an accomplice to our world of make-believe. 19.3 If this is so, I can only reflect this back to the reader, and ask of all us ‘fallen angels’ who may feel excluded from the paradise of The Self: ‘Is our suffering really real, or is it merely play-acting, or a dream?’

57

20. Mind the Big Bang ! 20.1 By the end of section 16.3 we had very succinctly looked at the effects of Maya in giving rise to the Purusha, the witnessing subject, and its’ ‘world’ - the intellect, ego-sense, and organising memory, which operate on the further projections of the senses, their (subtle) objects and their (gross) material constituents. In our section 16.4 we rushed over important stages somewhat, in order to quickly see the logical and possibly grisly outcome of the process. We need to look at this a little more closely to see what is happening and in order to continue the story. For this we now need to re-introduce a principle we encountered in 9.1, which we now label as our vital sutra 4: VS4: “As above, so below; as here, so elsewhere”. We had previously the function of Maya acting on The Self to give rise (mysteriously and paradoxically) to the Purusha and its’ ‘world’. The awareness of The Self is apparently eclipsed and its’ Consciousness (chiti) contracts to become the mind (chitta) of Purusha. Because the awareness of The Self is eclipsed, the Purusha usurps its position, as it were, and acts as the apparent source of its creation. Now because of the first half of VS4, the situation replicates itself – the function of Maya acts on Purusha, to lead it to falsely identify with one of its own objects: Purusha identifies with the ego-sense (termed ‘ahamkara’) to create a ‘person’. The Purusha ‘forgets’ its’ position as pure subject, or ‘witness’ of its’ world, and identifies with the most predominant

58 ‘character’ that populates its’ ‘world’ – the ‘I’ or ego-sense. In that role it functions as the apparent primary ‘agent’ in its ‘world’, becoming a ‘doer’. This resultant ‘person’ can then go on to make further reifications and identifications of its own. It may heavily identify with its occupation, nationality etc (as outlined in 12.3). It may even become a novelist or film-maker or actor and identify (more temporarily) with a character of its own creation. Even film-goers may temporarily lose their habitual identity and be wrapped up in the fate of the ‘hero’, experiencing a whole gamut of emotions vicariously. 20.2 We need to generalise this principle to expand to infinite possibilities here. The Self has infinite potentiality, so when the function of Maya operates repeatedly (recursively), it can do so infinitely: a Purusha can project and then identify with an element of its own creation, which may then go on to do the same etc. without a finite limit. We have taken a few steps from The Self to Purusha to person to fictional character etc, but we can imagine an infinite ‘nesting’ of such identities and ‘worlds’ – we can generalise the term ‘purusha’ to cover them all – in an infinite hierarchy with no end: a ‘first generation’ purusha (and its ‘world’) manifesting in The Self, and projecting and identifying as a ‘second generation’ purusha etc on to an Nth generation purusha projecting an N+1 generation one, and so on, without limit. And we must imagine this happening at the speed of thought – i.e. instantaneously, to all intents and purposes. This is a veritable ‘big bang’ of consciousness manifesting purushas, (‘minds’, or ‘selves in worlds’) in an infinite, ‘vertical’ dimension: as above, so below.

59

20.3 In the second half of our VS4, namely, ‘as here, so elsewhere’, we have another consideration: although The Self is often imaged as an infinite ‘space’ (‘akasha’), it is also imaged as an infinitesimal point (‘bindu’) – a seed from which creation sprouts. These may seem, at first glance, very opposite images; but there is an equivalence here, which results in the property of ‘self-similarity’ we introduced in 9.1. In the arcane study of Transfinite Mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor (and communicated to him by God, or so he thought) it can be shown that there are as many points in infinite multi-dimensional space as there are on the shortest line one may care to specify. This counterintuitive result exemplifies the self-similarity of multi-dimensional space – the ‘continuum’: however large or small a ‘sample’ is taken from the continuum, its numerical ‘size’ is always the same. [This size is actually 2 to the power of ‫א‬, where ‫ א‬is the ‘infinite number’ of natural numbers. (I appreciate that this may be gobbledygook to many, and it can be safely passed over – or better, treated as an invitation to study the mind-expanding field of Transfinite Mathematics!)] This is an example of the remarkable ancient philosophical dictum of ‘the microcosm is the macrocosm’, which is simply another form of our VS4.

60

20.4 For our purposes it has significance, for it infinitely enriches the account of the creative process: so far, we have outlined how The Self, acted on by the function of Maya, manifests the Purusha and its ‘world’ – and have treated the matter in the singular. But the potency of The Self exists, in its entirety, in every ‘point’ (bindu) in its infinite field (‘akasha’). So there exists the possibility that every such ‘bindu’ also manifests a Purusha and its ‘world’. There is not just one first generation Purusha, but a possible infinity of them, each of which can project within itself infinitely further ‘nested’ generations, as outlined in the previous section. So we have a picture of a possible infinite number of first generation Purushas and ‘worlds’, projecting within themselves (in parallel, as it were) a further possible infinite number of ‘nested’ purushas and their ‘worlds’. So the ‘big bang’ of Consciousness extends not only in a ‘vertical’ dimension, but in all of the multi-dimensions of the space (‘akasha’) of The Self. So the pattern of Purushas is not only ‘nested’, but also ‘fractal’ – repeating itself recursively across all the multi-dimensions of the infinite space of The Self.

20.5 To complete the picture here we need to see further ramifications of our VS4: within the infinite space (‘akasha’) of The Self an infinity of Purushas and worlds manifest. But ‘as above, so below’: each

61 Purusha is also its own space, each point within which can give rise to further manifestation; so, depending on the potency of the Purusha, it can project many purushas and their worlds within itself. The ‘nesting’ need not be strictly ‘linear’, but may contain any number of possible ‘branches’: a Purusha can project many parallel purushas and their ‘worlds’ within itself. An author can write a play with many characters and can identify with them all ‘simultaneously’ (or perhaps ‘in turn’ with the speed of thought as each character speaks his or her part).

20.6 There is not one ‘universe’ or world: there are as many universes as there are purushas – there can be infinitely many of these in each of the indefinitely many dimensions of the infinite Self. At every point in any ‘universe’ there exists the potentiality to manifest another. To really let this in is a mind-expanding exercise. The traditional metaphysics that best explores this infinitude is the remarkable work the Yoga Vasistha. Page after page of exploration of worlds within minds, within worlds of ‘higher’ minds etc without end, is a giddy delight. As an example the text describes a celestial being who visits a sage and describes her ‘world’ as existing in a rock, on a mountain, in a mountain range in the corner of some other ‘world’:

62 “O sage, that world of ours within that rock is just like your world out here! In our world, too, there are heaven and hell, gods and demons, the sun and the moon, the firmament and the stars, the mobile and the immobile creatures, hills and oceans, and the particles of dust that are known as living beings. The sage replies: ‘In the eternal space (dimension) of infinite consciousness, in the infinite play of the infinite, there are infinite minds and infinite worlds in them. In every one of them there are continents and mountains, villages and cities with houses inhabited by people who have their own time-scale and life span. When these purushas reach the end of the life span, if they are not enlightened, they continue to exist in infinite space, creating their own worlds. Within them are other people within whom are minds; within those minds are worlds in which there are more people, ad infinitum. This appearance has no beginning and no end; it is Brahman and Brahman alone. 0 Rama, in all these diverse objects there is nothing but pure Consciousness.’”

This possible infinite branching and complex ‘nesting’ of minds and worlds within other minds etc leads us to another important topic which addresses the possible relations of purushas to each other, and the old philosophical problem of solipsism.

21. The Problem of Solipsism 21.1 When reading much of the traditional metaphysics, whether it be Vedantic (Yogic), Shaivistic, Buddhist, or western (Neo) Platonism and its successors, there is a distinctly solipsistic flavour, which can be problematic: in all the talk of minds or purushas projecting worlds within themselves, there can be a problem with regard to the status of other beings who inhabit the projected ‘world’ – who are they, exactly? Do they only exist as projected ‘dream-characters’ of the purusha? It can seem as if the ‘others’ in my world do not have the same status as ‘I’ do. The metaphysical theory called ‘Solipsism’ establishes this as a principle: only ‘I’ really exist, all ‘others’ exist in so far as they appear in ‘my’ consciousness. As I am the consciousness in which ‘they’ all appear, I am, in that sense, ‘alone’. Just as The Self is, in reality, one indivisible space and therefore ‘Alone’. Indeed, the journey from ignorance to enlightenment, from false identification to realisation of The Self, has been famously called (by Plotinus) the ‘journey from the alone to the Alone’.

63

21.2 On the face of it the principle of solipsism is a flawed, hopelessly egocentric or narcissistic idea. If a person was to behave as though the whole world revolved around him or her alone, and that all other people were only subsidiary in some way, that behaviour would regarded as more-or-less crazy: anywhere from being marginally selfcentred to pathologically self-obsessed – variations on the conviction that ‘it’s all about me’. Speaking as if I alone exist, when I am in fact just one character in a world of characters, would be insane.

64

21.3 The difficulty comes when I consider that I am, it seems, not just one character: that character habitually referred to as ‘me’ is, after all, an object amongst other objects. Whereas the true ‘I’ is the subject of all those objects: the Purusha is a ‘witness’ of its ‘world’ (see 16.3). But because of the predominance of, and false identification with that object, the Purusha identifies as the ego-sense ‘ahamkara’ (see 20.1), resulting in that character or person being considered ‘me’. But when Purusha is not so identified, i.e. when realised as sole witness of the ‘world’, I could indeed be said to be ‘alone’. The principle of solipsism is wrong in so far as it says (while confusing the Purusha with the character), that only the character ‘me’ and its consciousness can be really said to exist; but it may seem to be right when it says that the Purusha is alone as sole witness of its ‘world’. Ultimately, of course, solipsism must be true where there are no ‘others’ at all – i.e. for The Self. 21.4 But we have to go further if we want to get to the bottom of this. The Purusha, as pure subject or witness of its ‘world’, may be said to be

65 prone to identify with a predominant object of its ‘world’ - the character ‘me’. But what is so special about that particular character that is identified with? If we are to truly escape solipsism (in the way in which it is wrong), our account must be able to treat all the characters that inhabit the ‘world’ equally; and not give pre-eminence to the ‘me’ in any way. Which opens up the following consideration: just as there is more to the ‘I’ than just being the character ‘me’ (for ‘I’ exist as witness to the ‘me’), then cannot the same be said for all the other characters? That is, may not each of the other characters in the ‘world’ also be a ‘me’ witnessed by a Purusha? If we are to escape solipsism completely we must feel compelled to answer ‘yes’ to this.

. 21.5 But here we run into a structural problem: for we have talked of all the characters in the world each having their own witnessing Purusha principle. But we have forgotten the fact that there is no such thing as ‘the world’. In sections 14.4 to 14.6 we saw that creation is an apparent division of the unified field of Consciousness (The Self) into a separate reified subject and its object – The Purusha and its ‘world’; and our VS1 (14.4) outlines the principle of complementarity. Indeed in the ramifications of this principle in section 14.6 we saw how the ‘world’ of the Purusha is uniquely its own ‘world’ - acting as a reflection of its own quality of vibration. Now if this principle is not to lead to a narcissistic solipsism on the level of the ‘character’, a further insight, and corresponding structural principle, will be needed. 21.6 Somehow we have to square the fact that, for me as Purusha, the world is uniquely ‘my world’, with the fact that there is nothing special about the character I predominantly identify with; and that all the other characters in ‘my world’ also each have a witnessing Purusha principle for whom the world is ‘their world’, which acts as a unique mirror reflecting back to them their energetic vibration; and that

66 somehow the character I predominantly identify with is, for the other Purushas, just one of the ‘other’ characters in ‘their world’. This seems like a tall order: we seem to need to have a common 3D ‘world’ in which all the characters can interact equally (without solipsistic bias), and yet have each characters’ witnessing Purusha principle only projecting its own unique world. This seems contradictory at first sight, but modern information technology can provide us with an analogy that will show how this is perhaps possible after all.

22. The Multi-player ‘Omega’ Game 22.1 One of the functions of Maya is to create ‘space’, which it does via one of the Self-limiting Kanchukas (16.2) (the ‘Niyati tattva). But the purpose of creating space is to act as a ‘stage’ on which the Divine Actor can play out the roles. For if there is to be only one role it would be a very limited drama indeed.

The illusion of a 3D spatial ‘world’ serves the purpose of providing common dimensions in which the multiple roles necessary for a good drama can interact. If we want to see beneath the illusion we need, at the same time, to hold onto the purpose it serves. There is a way in which the characters can have all that is necessary (equally and in common) for them to interact in their roles whilst still holding onto the fact that every Purusha projects its own unique ‘world’. 22.2 The modern analogy that helps to show the kind of structure needed is that of a multi-player computer game played over the internet. Each player (purusha) has his or her own monitor (‘world’). In the game played in the monitor there is one game-character (‘avatar’ is the term used) with which the player identifies and in whose interests the game-character acts (namely to win). Each monitor (‘world’) is different and the appearance of the game in that monitor can be tailor-made to suit each player – the scenes, background, choice (or construction) of avatar, level of difficulty etc can be uniquely suited to each player. So in the relevant sense each player creates his or her own game-world that reflects back his or her own tastes – the

67 purusha projects its ‘world’ according to VS1. However what makes it possible to play the game with other players is the deep programming of the game which is the same for all players; even though how that programming makes the game-worlds appear is different in each monitor according to the tastes of the player and the perspective of each ‘avatar’. What connects each ‘avatar’ is not their outer appearance in the game-world, but their ‘inner’ connection determined their positions in one and the same game program. It is the fact that all avatars and players are determined by this deep program equally that rescues the situation from the solipsism of any one player or ‘avatar’. But, coming out of the analogy now, what is the equivalent of the deep program of the game? What is the information source that coordinates all the purushas projecting their different characters in their different ‘worlds’ so that their interactions form one common drama? 22.3 Now this is where we have to remember the situation of ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ purushas that we saw in 20.5 above. For the information source needed to co-ordinate all the purushas and their characters lies in the fact that they must all be ‘nested’ in, as different ‘branches’ of, one over-arching Purusha. Ultimately the information source that determines all Purushas and their ‘worlds’ is The Infinite Self – but within that (zooming in on the fractal pattern, as it were) there are scenarios where, for example: one Purusha (say P) is projecting several other purushas (say p1, p2, p3) who are projecting characters (c1,c2,c3) in several separate ‘worlds’. The illusion is that the characters interact in one common ‘world’. The reality here is that each character c1, c2, c3 is projected by separate purushas p1, p2, p3 projecting their own ‘worlds’. The perfect and appropriate interaction between the purushas and their characters (required by VS1) is made possible by the fact that it is all projected by one over-arching Purusha P. This can be summed up with the following ‘Omega’ principle, which forms our final vital sutra. VS5: “When it appears that several beings interact in one world, it is really one being acting in several ‘worlds’” (Omega principle) 22.4 The above paragraphs of this section may seem rather abstract, so we can flesh out these principles in an example which may make things clearer. We can outline a three-level scenario, from the bottom up: “I am a warrior by nature: an aggressive personality in a powerful body, trained and equipped with vicious weapons. But my fate is a difficult one, for I have been commanded to defend an outlying city of our empire which is under attack by our enemies. But strangely we are short of reinforcements. The few of us who are here are facing a

68 daunting task in repelling so many. Doubtless my commanders know of my reputation, and have full faith in my prowess. I am determined not to let them down…” What our warrior doesn’t know is that he is a game-character in a computer war game being played on the internet by a businessman, in his office in his lunch-break. “I am businessman on my lunch-break playing my favourite game. I’ve never met the other player, though he logs on to the internet at the same time every lunch time so we can play. He has an aggressive, confident style, but can be hasty. I’m more careful and calculating. I’ve lured him into a trap by weakly defending one of my game-cities to act as a sacrifice. He will win the city, but it will divert him from my real attack happening elsewhere…things are looking good. I will have to continue this tomorrow though, as I have a business meeting now…” What our businessman doesn’t realise is that he does, in fact, know his opponent. The one who logs on every lunch time is not a ‘him’, but a ‘her’ – she is a businesswoman, and she will be present at the business meeting he is about to go to. [In her game she identifies with and controls the warrior-characters who are attacking the city]. During the business meeting he is his usual confident, brash self but the businesswoman, representing the other side, seems quite timid and hesitant. It is only much later that he realises that he was taken in by her appearance, because the fine detail of the agreement they came to unexpectedly gives the other side a distinct advantage… What both our business people don’t know is that they are both fictional characters in a novel - a novel whose author is keen to explore issues about how fantasy role-playing can interact with real life. Both the main characters are very different in their fantasy-role than they are in their real life. The businessman wins his game but loses out in the business deal – for the businesswoman it is the other way round… The ordered interaction of the warriors in their game-‘worlds’, and the business people in their ‘worlds’, is made possible by all being projections of the one author of the novel. (Omega principle). 22.5 So the author is the over-arching Purusha P, the business people are the purushas p1, p2, the game-warriors are the characters c1 etc. Only the author here can be a ‘solipsist’ – and only then in relation to the novel, not in the rest of his/her life outside writing. For the business people and for the game-warriors, interacting with their fellow-characters is their very raison-d’être – they exist to further the

69 plots on their respective levels. Notice also the role of ‘fate’ or ‘irony’ here: the warrior was created and placed deliberately to ‘fail’, in its own terms - as was the businessman, in business terms. But they both ‘succeeded’ in serving the aims of the author.

This clearly raises issues about Free Will – it seems that our poor warrior and businessman had no choice; they were doomed to ‘fail’ in their own terms from the outset. This is another age-old philosophical conundrum which we will address more fully below in section 26.

23. The Story So Far 23.1 Now is a good point to take a breath and review our account of creation (from section 14 on), for we have covered the salient structural points; and while there are very interesting considerations still to come, they will made against the back-drop of this structure. For that reason it is worth very briefly summarising our account of creation by simply stating in order the principles involved. Rather than putting them in the order they appeared in the above account (done for narrative reasons), we place them in the logical order of their application. “In reality nothing arises, nothing subsides, only the divine spandashakti which, though free of succession (time), appears in different aspects as if arising, and as if subsiding.” (VS3 14.8) “Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes the mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived” (VS2 14.7) “The universe is manifold because of the differentiation of reciprocally adapted, complementary subjects and objects.” (VS1 14.4) “As above, so below; as here, so elsewhere” (VS4 9.1, 20.1)

70 “When it appears that several beings interact in one world, it is really one being acting in several ‘worlds’” (VS5 22.3)

23.2 These five principles apply from the edge of manifestation onwards into the dualities of creation (section 14 onwards). The considerations we made up to 8.7 were exclusively to do with (timeless) manifestation and they will play a vital part again in our story before we are finished. For now though, we can explore further ramifications of our creation structure.

24. The Divine Nescience 24.1 In section 5.1 we quoted the author Douglas Adams. The characters in his story travel far and wide across galaxies, and at one point manage to track down God. God turns out to be a strange fellow living in a shack on a remote planet with only a cat for company. Much to one of the travellers distress, God turns out to be some kind of crazy solipsist who doesn’t even think that anything outside His shack exists. Far from taking responsibility for the Universe that He created, He doesn’t even know its there. Far from being the omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent Deity our traveller was hoping for, He seemed to know nothing, care nothing for power, and was necessarily indifferent to a universe that He didn’t know about…

71 There may be an element of truth to this fable, and it is worth looking briefly at the concept of ‘knowledge’ and considering what can meaningfully be ‘known’. 24.2 Whatever else may be involved in the concept of ‘knowledge’ it is clearly, at least, a relation between a conscious subject and an object in its field of consciousness. A subject perceives an object and, on the basis of that perception, forms concepts to categorise those perceptions into an orderly whole – ‘knowledge of the object’. In terms of our creation structure then, what can we say about the ‘knowledge’ of The Self? In 8.4 we outlined the rise of the Consciousness that is The Self, where it was described as a unified, polarised field that was its own subject and only object. So The Self knows only itSelf and that is All. That ‘knowing’ is its vibration spanda-shakti - and according to VS3 that is all there really is. For The Self there is no creation; true, The Self is brim full of Jnanashakti (tattva IV 8.4), which is the potential, or power, to ‘know’, but this is Self-directed, for there is no other object. The Self is our divine doodler (11.6) that knows nothing but the joy of doodling. So it seems that The Self is not a very good candidate for being God.

72

24.3 Obviously the first dualistic subject/object relation where there are separate objects that may be ‘known’, occurs in the first generation of Purushas, who each project and ‘know’ the objects in their ‘worlds’. In that sense each Purusha is a ‘god’ of its ‘world’. This corresponds in a way to the creator god ‘Brahma’ in Hinduism – in which there may be many such Brahma creating ‘worlds’ in endless cycles. (‘Brahma’ is distinct from ‘Brahman’ who is The Self from whom all Brahma arise). So the Purushas can know their ‘worlds’. This of course applies to all purushas of whatever ‘generation’. 24.4 It is worth pausing to remember exactly what a Purusha is here: in 14.2 and 14.3 we outlined how the Purusha is an illusory, reified subject that appears to take on an independent existence. The Self takes itself to be Purusha (paradoxically, as we saw) in order, as it were, to be the subject of an objective ‘world’. In a sense then we can say that The Self knows ‘worlds’: but in order to do so, it identifies as the Purusha of the ‘world’ It wants to know. In a way we could say that the Purusha is the means by which The Self exercises its unbounded Jnana-shakti - its window of knowledge on a ‘world’. But also remember there is paradox here, for in identifying with Purusha it apparently ‘loses’ its identity as The Self. The same situation applies, of course, at any level of purusha. The over-arching Purusha identifies with its projected purushas in order to have access to their ‘worlds’ – at the cost of forgetting itself in the process. We can see then that at every level in the ‘downward’ process of creation there is the projection of a purusha that knows its ‘world’ just as its own source becomes unknown. 24.5 So, strictly speaking, The Self knows only ItSelf. The Purusha knows only its ‘world’ and no other. What of the Purushas’ knowledge of other Purushas? Here we have the curious situation that, although a Purusha can have knowledge of the next generation of purushas, projected by itself, it cannot in principle have any knowledge of ‘parallel’ Purushas of the same generation or of any of their projected purushas. For in 14.5 we showed how each Purusha projects its ‘world’ within itself, even though each ‘world’ is reified as ‘objective’. If same generation Purushas are both so doing, there is no way they can ever be objects to each other. Even though, because of VS4, they must in principle exist, they can never be known directly by each other. [This is an example of the kind of delightful, unknowable truth we referred to in 1.4]. In the Yoga Vasistha we have: ‘On account of the fact that the purusha is surrounded on all sides by the world that arises from it, the purushas do not see one another, do not understand one another.’

73

24.6 It is this fact of the Purushas’ mutually unknowable status that has made the problem of solipsism so hard to crack. ‘Parallel’ Purushas have the same kind of status as the ‘many worlds’ of Hugh Everett (15.5 and 15.6). We shall visit this again in section 28.3. For the moment it is worth noting that there seems as much, if not more, ‘unknowing’ in creation, as there is ‘knowing’: The One knows no manifestation; The Self knows nothing except ItSelf; the Purusha knows nothing except its ‘world’. So we can see why we noted (in 3.4) that the negative approach to reality involves letting go of ‘knowing’. Each Purusha and its ‘world’ is a little island of knowledge in the vast sea of the unknown.

25. The Illusion of Choice - The Paradox of Free Will 25.1 If there is not as much ‘knowledge’ in creation as one might at first suppose, what can we say of ‘freedom’? Do the Purushas (of what ever generation) or their projected characters have freedom of choice, or are their roles determined? At the end of 22.5 we had uncovered the seeds of contradiction or paradox: in our example we had, on the one hand, a businessman free to make choices (about the strategy in both his game and his business); on the other hand we saw that he is only a fictional character and that the choices he made were predetermined to serve the author’s plot – in that sense he seems not free at all. This seeming contradiction is the Paradox of Free Will.

74

25.2 What we have here is really a confusion of levels – similar to that as was partly implicated in the problem of solipsism (see 21.3). On the level of our businessman, there are apparent choices to be freely made. On the level of the novelist it is important to remember that the fictional character is just that – fictional - i.e. it doesn’t exist. It is not that the novelist is imposing a whole set of situations on some poor unsuspecting, pre-existent character, without his or her consent. The character only exists in the context of its situation. There is no question, ultimately, of such a character being either free or not free, for there is no-one there. Of course the novelist might also be an imaginary creation in the mind of another higher-level Purusha, so the same considerations apply. We can see, in general, that each Purusha/person/character, considered on its own level, has the freedom of apparent choices. Looked at from a higher level, it is not that the Purusha/person/character is ‘bound’ by its ‘story’ – for it only exists in the context of the ‘story’. We can also see here a pointer towards an answer to our question of 18.8, in the context of our Paradox of omnipotence, as to who it is that feels relatively limited and impotent - for it is no-one. This answer seems somewhat of a deflation, but its full import we will see at the end in section 33.

75 25.3 The Paradox of Free Will is also a confusion between subjective and objective perspectives on a person or character. Every person can be known objectively, from the ‘outside’. The greater the degree of such knowledge, the more it is tempting to think of that person as objectively determined – i.e. not free. For example, you may know someone very well and know that they have a strong liking for coffee. In a situation where they are offered a choice of coffee or tea, you may accurately predict that they will choose coffee every time. But that does not mean that that person, subjectively considered, from ‘inside’, has no freedom in the matter. Freedom of choice means freedom to follow one’s predilections, not a complete absence of them. To be bound means to be in a situation where one is constrained not to be able to follow them - e.g. when locked up in jail. It may be that those predilections have been created by conditioning, or placed there by the creator of that character – but the fact that they are there provides the character with the means to make the choice; without any predilections of any sort there would be complete indifference in any situation of choice. 25.4 Of course there may be more complex situations where there are competing impulses within one person – one may be addicted to coffee and simultaneously wish to be free of such addiction. The apparent choice is then on a deeper subjective level – the opposing impulses are ‘objects’ to be chosen between. But the apparent, or relative, freedom is still there. From a higher level the whole drama is just that – a fictional drama of conflicting interests, revolving around a fictional character dreamt up just in order to play it all out. Without the apparent ‘freedom’ of the character there would be no story to tell. Even if the role of the character is that in the story he is in jail, or in some other way not ‘free’, the dramatic value would be in how that situation is dealt with – in the apparent choices of attitude and so on. 25.5 Perhaps the reason why the notion of Free Will can be such a charged issue is in response to the problem of suffering, and the need for ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’. We can be repelled by the thought that we are mere puppets or pawns in another’s game, and bemoan a fate over which we have no control – especially if we suffer in the role. So Shakespeare complained in ‘King Lear’: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’.

76

Somehow we need to hold on to control by exercising our Free Will to determine our own destiny. Any binding conditions can be seen as the effects of ‘karma’ – which is the result of previous (good or bad) exercise of our Free Will. We are free to make choices to burn away our previous bad ‘karma’ and create our own life anew. We will consider this further in section 29. 25.6 For the moment it is enough to note our two perspectives: from the point of view of any Purusha/person/character there is relative or apparent choice at its own level. From the point of view of a higher Purusha there is no issue – for there is no-one there to be free or not. So either there is apparent freedom, or else the issue is irrelevant. But is there such a thing as Absolute Freedom? We can only say negatively at this point that, if there were such a thing, it would apply only to that which is never an object – either to itself, or to some projecting Purusha. We will consider this, also, in section 33.

77 For now we consider the situation of the suffering character and the rationale of him or her practising ‘spiritual methods’ to break the spell of illusion.

26. Spiritual Methods – The Paradox of Practice 26.1 In section 16 we saw how the bad news of limitation results in apparent loss of the wholeness of the plenum, and that this was the result of the operation of Maya. In section 14 we saw how Maya is a two-fold illusion – the reification of a supposed ‘subject’, plus a false identification with that ‘subject’ (which automatically projects its ‘world’). Since it seems desirable to undo the effects of Maya, and be restored to the plenum, it seems desirable to discover, or devise, methods to enable a dis-identification with the supposed ‘subject’ together with a seeing through of the illusion of continuity that gave rise to its reification in the first place. 26.2 Perhaps the first thing that needs to be emphasised is that, for the most part, there is most likely no need or even conscious desire to end the illusion at all. As well as an illusion it is also a game or role being played out; any dwelling on the question as to its ultimate reality is only likely to spoil the game – and for that reason is instinctively avoided.

78 26.3 Given that one does wish to seek the truth of the matter though, the outline consideration seems to be: any activity which ‘lightens’ the false identification and makes the illusion of continuity more seethrough needs to be followed; and conversely anything which strengthens the identification, or makes the illusion seem more solid or heavier, needs to be avoided. All the traditional injunctions to be virtuous and to avoid vice only have their justification in so far as they lead to this ‘lightness’. And in any case this is only to provide a favourable context in which the dispelling of the illusion is more likely, and is not an end in itself. Of all the plethora of religious and spiritual practices available, we need only focus on their underlying principles, and thereby pick out three over-lapping categories of practice. 26.4 The first category is based on considerations of energy. In 14.3 and 14.7 we noticed how the creative process involves energy vibrating in a ‘denser’ mode (‘chiti’ becoming ‘chitta’ in our VS2). So by reversing this process the mind becomes pure consciousness again. The serpent that seduced us away from paradise becomes the serpent ‘kundalini’ that takes us back. So we have a whole group of practices to ‘raise the energy/vibration’. Everything from virtuous living, physical ‘purity’, special diets (or drugs!), body and breathing exercises to chanting, mantra repetition and ‘kundalini’ work – all direct interventions in the energy levels of the physical and mental systems.

79 26.5 The second category is that of meditation. In our examples of the illusion of continuity (section 11) it was largely the speed of the underlying phenomena that gave rise to the illusion – the fast circling point of light, the fast 24 frames per second etc. So the rationale of meditation is to turn away from the distractions in the objective ‘world’. To meditate is to turn within and allow all the arising thoughts, images, memories and anticipations to slow down – ideally to attain an inner stillness. Not as an end in itself, but because it then becomes easier to see that there is no ‘subject’ or ‘self’ – merely the arising of thoughts and memories that display a certain apparent unity (cf. 11.7 and 11.8).

Here there is a possibility of seeing through the ‘gaps’ in the illusion and becoming aware of the underlying background of pure consciousness, ‘chiti’. So we have techniques of focussing on the still point at the end of each inhalation and exhalation, or on the thoughtfree space between thoughts, or on the gap between the waking and sleep states. These are all progressive techniques designed to culminate in an instantaneous Recognition of The Self at some point as the illusion of ‘self’ or ‘subject’ gradually or suddenly dissolves. 26.6 The third category is that of simply and directly using consciousness to investigate its own source and nature by inquiring ‘Who Am I?’

80 This is to confront the illusion of a separate ‘self’ head-on. ‘Who or what is the ‘self’ that wants to be free?’ Investigation might reveal the paradoxical loop of the ‘self’ (see 11.8). For the ‘self’ can never be ‘found’ as any kind of object: there is no ‘self’ apart from the questioning itself – there is no ‘thing’, only a functioning. With this recognition the illusion of separation may dissolve, and the loop unravel.

This seems the most direct approach for, in a sense, no preparation is needed. It doesn’t matter what energy level, ‘purity’ or stillness may or may not be attained; for the underlying reality is that a timeless, impersonal play of consciousness gives rise to the illusion of an enduring, time-bound, personal entity – the ‘self’; this illusion is sustained timelessly moment by moment, and can cease in a moment. This cessation in no way depends on the ‘qualities’ (of energy, purity, stillness etc) of the ‘self’ – how could it? For those ‘qualities’ are part of the illusion! 26.7 Now we may see that in all considerations of practice we are faced with this following Paradox of Practice: In 26.3 we noted that any activity that reinforces the false identification or makes the ‘self’ seem more solid should be avoided. But any practice undertaken to dispel the ‘self’ may only reinforce it – for who is it that is going to ‘practice’? If the idea is that by pursuing some practice one is somehow going to benefit thereby, all that is happening is that the circle of ‘self’-interest

81 is sustained. Whatever strategy is adopted by the ‘self’, with whatever outcome, there must be a simultaneous bolstering of the strategising ‘self’. One cannot dig one’s way out of a hole. Nor is ‘doing nothing’ any kind of solution; for the same reason – it bolsters the ‘doer’ of that ‘nothing’. If there is to be an awakening from the illusion of ‘self’, it must be in spite of, not because of, that ‘self’. (More on this in section 29). So this leads on to our next consideration – that of ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Awakening’: what is it and how does it happen?

27. Who Awakens? – The Paradox of Enlightenment 27.1 The naïve idea of ‘Awakening’ or ‘Enlightenment’ is that it is an event that happens to somebody – one might say: “Firstly I am asleep in ignorance and miserable, then something wonderful happens to me and I get ‘woken up’. Now I am ‘Enlightened’ and blissful, and my life is much better than before…” We have seen enough already in our account to realise that this naïve idea cannot hold – for we have seen that the very idea of a ‘me’ or an ‘I’ is precisely what is at stake. The seeking ‘self’ finds itself in the curious predicament of wanting to dissolve itself and yet still be around afterwards to enjoy the supposed benefits of such a dissolution.

82 27.2 Of course a real dissolution would hold no guarantees; it would be more of an unconditional leap into the unknown – a kind of suicide. Moreover, we have seen from the previous section that it couldn’t really be undertaken as a self-willed act. It would be more like a spontaneous assent to a process of dissolution that was happening anyway – because it would be seen that there is no point in resisting it, or in trying to go ‘back’. But from the point of view of our account of the creation process, is there any light that can shed on this leap into the unknown? 27.3 Our description of creation has outlined the idea that it is all a projection in Consciousness involving many reified ‘identities’ at perhaps infinitely many levels: The Self projects Purushas (and their ‘worlds’) who in turn project purushas etc, who project persons/characters in a mind-boggling, infinitely ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ explosion of Consciousness. This happens as a result of Maya: a two-fold illusion of reification and false identification. Now we saw how an essential feature of this ‘downward’ process of involution is that the false identification (asmita) involved is somehow ‘unconscious’ or automatic – see 12.4, 14.3 and 18.5. (The mysterious source of this ‘unconsciousness’ was fuel for the Paradoxes of Purusha and Omnipotence). If there is to be such a thing as ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’ it must consist in reversing this process, which means, in part, the elimination of the ‘unconscious’ element in creation thereby enabling an evolution - a seeing of it fully and consciously. What does this mean for our creation structure? 27.4 In section 18 we envisaged our divine author/actor who writes and then acts a part in a play; the crucial part of the paradox we encountered was that the author/actor forgets his true identity and loses himself entirely in the role. The Paradox of Omnipotence meant that the actor cannot snap out of the role at will; indeed it is not seen as a role at all – rather it seems one’s true identity. Obviously this illusion is dispelled at the end of the play when the role ends; then the author/actor comes out of his self-imposed ‘trance’, recognises his true identity and realises it was all make-believe. There remains the possibility, though, that the author/actor ‘comes to’ or awakens while the play is still going on. How this might happen is a mystery, since it cannot happen as a result of the efforts (or ‘practice’) of the character, as we saw in 26.7 with the Paradox of Practice. 27.5 Now, there are two different situations here: the first is where the author/actor is himself a Purusha, and the role played is one of his own created characters. The second is where the Author/Actor is The Infinite Self, and the role is a Purusha.

83

In the first situation the Purusha creates a character in a play, forgets himself entirely in playing the role, and then ‘awakens’ to himself again whilst playing the role. [The whole process is subject to time, as is the Purusha itself, since its appearance happens with the limitations created by the Kanchukas (see 16.2)]. From the point of view of the character the situation is far more radical. The character is happily or unhappily living out his or her life with any number of dramas going on – involving romance, career and achievement, sickness and tragedy – whatever it might be… What happens next, gradually or suddenly (and there must be infinitely many subtle scenarios here), is that there may develop a sense that it is all questionable – its value or meaning and finally even its reality comes under threat as it starts to deconstruct. The Sufis talk of ‘a corridor of madness’ that may have to be walked down as the fabric of one’s life comes under pressure from the energies of consciousness. [For a wonderful account of one such experience see Dr. R. Moss “The Black Butterfly”].

84 Then there comes a moment when one goes over the cliff - the pattern of one’s life dissolves. Then, miraculously, the consciousness re-forms in a more expanded configuration as the realisation dawns: “It was all make-believe – a story of my own creation, and I am the Author!” The Purusha awakens. 27.6 It may be that, at the point of awakening, the Purusha simply brings the play to an end. For in a way there seems little point in its continuing – all the ‘heat’ has been taken out of the drama, for it is seen that the central character doesn’t really exist. All the dilemmas and strategies to bring about the desired life for the character fall away as the central lynch-pin dissolves. The awakening of the Purusha acts as a kind of transcendent ‘Deus ex Machina’ that winds everything up without the need to work out the issues from within the play itself.

However there also exists the possibility that the Purusha may continue with the play, but this time having a conscious identification with the character – without losing its sense of identity as the Author. In a sense there is a rapid alternation of identification as Author and identification as character, which can culminate in a ‘merging’ into one Awakened consciousness. In some traditions the image here is of a character (ego) that has been ‘emptied’ of all the ‘drama’, leaving only a husk, or the empty ‘skin’ of a character, which can still function in its ‘world’, but whose essential sense of identity has ‘gone’ from the set and is now identified as the Author.

85

Again, there may be infinitely many subtle scenarios here as the quality of the role, and therefore the plot, changes as a response to the author/character knowing that it doesn’t exist (as only the character). Having at the same time the consciousness of the Author, the character knows it is all the ‘other’ characters (and the creator of the ‘set’ i.e. the ‘world’) as well – ‘It’s all Me!’ [Notice here the similarity of expression of ‘It’s all Me!’ with the completely different sense of ‘It’s all about me’ that we saw in 21.2. The first is an expression of awakening; the second is the expression of massive ego-inflation. Differentiating between the two may not be as easy as all that, even though they are actually opposite ends of a spectrum of self-identification!] There can be a creative feedback loop - between consciousness identifying as the Author, and consciousness identifying as the character - which enlivens the play in previously unpredictable ways. The character will see the deep meaning in all of the roles as they contribute to the whole drama.

86

In particular the character may wish to communicate to the other characters the fact that it’s all just a play. The character adds to its role the function of a Teacher - out of a compassionate response to the ‘others’ who are still convinced their role is ‘real’ and suffer as a result. Of course, this is a paradoxical play as it is also seen that their suffering, along with the rest of their role, is not real (see section 19). The character may play the role of ‘bodhisattva’ and vow not to relinquish the play until all the players are awakened to their witnessing Purusha/Author consciousness. 27.7 The situation we have outlined is where a purusha awakens out of its identification with one of its projected characters. But of course the purusha may itself be a character projected by a higher-level (earlier generation) over-arching Purusha. The purushas’ awakening is part of the plot written by the over-arching Purusha. The mind boggles to contemplate the fact that there maybe many levels of Purusha (see section 20), and therefore similarly many levels of ‘awakening’. There was a Zen master who said at the end of his life that he didn’t know whether he was enlightened or not. When asked by his mystified disciples to clarify his statement he replied that he had had seven major ‘awakenings’ in his life – and that on each ‘awakening’ he was initially convinced he’d awoken to his ‘true’ identity. This turned out not be so, as his consciousness underwent further transformation and there was subsequently a higher ‘awakening’. This had happened seven times in all, and he honestly wasn’t sure whether the identity he was presently rooted in was his ultimately true identity, or whether there were further ‘awakenings’ lying ahead! For clarity we can use the term ‘awakening’ to refer to the situation where a Purusha awakens out of identification with its projected creations - as contrasted with ‘enlightenment’ which we consider next. 27.8 We can use the term ‘enlightenment’ in the context of the second of the two situations we outlined at 27.5 – namely where the Author/Actor is The Self and the role played is Purusha. All of the above comments in 27.5, 27.6 and 27.7 still apply, but there are two further essential differences. The first is: when a purusha awakens out of identification, it still remains as a separate ‘subject’ – it is still a product of Maya. It functions on a higher level, obviously, than its own projected characters, and is a more expanded consciousness. But it is still a reified ‘subject’ projecting its ‘world’. As such it is still subject to the limitation of the Kanchukas, and does not experience the fullness of

87 the Plenum. In a certain sense it does not matter how many ‘awakenings’, through however many levels of purusha, take place for the identity still remains in separation. When there is dissolution of all purushas, though, there is a realisation of The Infinite Self: separation ends, and there is the experience of the fullness of the Plenum, a ‘return’ to paradise. 27.9 In the second essential difference we confront again a situation of paradox. For we noted, in 27.5, that the drama of false identification and subsequent awakening of the Purusha is subject to time; whereas The Self is not. So at no time did The Self ever identify with the projected Purusha. It was therefore never ‘asleep’, and so could not ‘awaken’. In short we have the unanswerable question – ‘Who is enlightened’? Not The Self, for it was never in ignorance; nor the Purusha, for it dissolves. ‘Who gets enlightened?’ This is the Paradox of Enlightenment. Of course, it should be simple to see by now that this Paradox of Enlightenment is really the reverse side of the Purusha Paradox of section 17, where we had the unanswerable question: ‘Whose illusion?’ These two Paradoxes can neatly dovetail together: whatever it was that was subject to illusion, it is that that gets enlightened – although what that is seems to be delightfully unknowable. One is reminded here of the tale of the Buddhist monk who shows a lighted candle to his disciple and asks ‘Where does the flame come from?’ The disciple blows out the candle and cheekily replies “You tell me where it went, and I’ll tell you where it came from…”

28. The Divine Omniscience 28.1 In section 24.4 we reminded ourselves about the nature of the Purusha and how, in a way, it could be seen as a ‘window’ onto its ‘world’ for The Self to see through – though at the cost of falsely identifying therewith. We said: ‘ We can see then that at every level in the ‘downward’ process of creation there is the projection of a purusha that knows its ‘world’ just as its own source becomes unknown.’ Now the previous section on ‘awakening’ and ‘enlightenment’ has allowed us to see the possibility of reversing the ‘downward’ process of creation, and to ‘ascend’. This ascension is a letting go of one’s ‘world’ and an awakening to a higher one. The source of the purusha and its ‘world’ no longer remains unknown as its over-arching Purusha awakens. The possibility that this awakening may happen even while the drama of the ‘world’ is continuing means that ‘windows’ may open on all the ‘worlds’ as the consciousness ‘ascends’. So the Divine

88 Nescience that was an essential part of the ‘downward’ creation (section 24) now turns into the possibility of Divine Omniscience as an awakening happens at every level in the ‘ascension’. 28.2 What have here is a view of our creation structure whose many levels forms a ‘Great Chain of Being’ (to use Arthur Lovejoy’s phrase), linked by a ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (to use a Biblical image), that ‘snakes’ its way from the lowest regions to the highest heavens. Sliding down the scales of this cosmic serpent is process of involution, creation, identification and concealment - and involves the suffering of ignorance. Ascending the rungs of the ladder is an unweaving, a relinquishing of identity, an evolution and a revelation - and releases the joy of knowing.

89 28.3 In section 24 we noted how ‘parallel’ purushas were necessarily unaware of each other; but as their over-arching (Author) Purusha awakens and there is a possibility of a ‘merging’ of the (Author) Purusha and projected purusha (character) consciousness (see 27.6) then it is possible for the purushas to know each other – ‘they’re all Me!’ So we have an extension of the quote (24.5) from the Yoga Vasistha: ‘Each purusha has its own world-appearance. However when this world-appearance of the purushas is enquired into it invariably leads to the same consciousness. Just as all waves are of the same substance and are therefore one, the awakened purushas realise their oneness and thus understand one another.’ 28.4 There is another profound consequence of our vital sutra VS4, “As above, so below; as here, so elsewhere”; as we noted in 9.1 this sutra reflects the self-similarity of the infinite field of The Self – the fact that the whole pattern of manifestation is reflected in every part. This principle, also summed up as ‘the microcosm is the macrocosm’, entails that each purusha is a fractal image of the whole pattern: every purusha ‘contains’, in that sense, every other purusha. To the extent, then, that a purusha awakens it can be a ‘window’ on every other purusha; there is real sense then that an awakened purusha has the potential for omniscience. There is an indissoluble oneness that links all manifestation; it is a reflection, in the diversity of manifestation, of the primal Unity of The Self. The extent to which there is awakening in manifestation, to that extent all can be known by every part (for every part is the whole). This is perhaps the meaning behind the old adage that ‘He who saves one life saves the world entire’; and also behind the experience that, upon awakening your whole ‘world’ awakens with you, hence our good news of section 19. I was at a meeting of Sufis once where the teacher announced that many years ago the drop of her individual consciousness had dissolved into the ocean of universal consciousness; but that a further realisation had recently occurred: ‘Only now after twenty-seven years, do I see that the ocean dissolved into the drop!’ 28.5 In section 24.2 we noted how The Self knows only itSelf, and is ignorant of any ‘world’. However the same ‘merging’ of consciousness that we noted in 27.6 may allow the paradoxically ‘enlightened’ Purusha to be the consciousnesses of The Self while the Purusha and its ‘world’ is still appearing. In which case The Self can ‘contact’ or know that ‘world’ through the ‘enlightened’ Purusha. Perhaps this is the reality behind many religious traditions’ veneration of the enlightened ‘saint’ whose intercession enables the believers’ prayers to be heard more effectively. For the enlightened ‘saint’/Purusha consciousness acts as the ‘ears’ by which The Self hears the ‘prayers’

90 of the characters. Without such enlightened ‘saints’ the Self knows no ‘world’. The possibility of the ‘enlightened’ Purusha makes The Self a candidate for being God after all (see 24.2). Perhaps this is also the principle behind the need for a Divine incarnation – the Word made flesh – a Christ that is fully the Divine Self and fully enlightened Man (Purusha). 28.6 Perhaps the paradoxical possibility of the ‘enlightened’ Purusha also makes it possible for the The Self to know its own full creative potential – to create and know a ‘world’; for the hidden treasure of The Self to be made known to itSelf. So the downward descent and the upward ascent finally have meaning as the ‘enlightened’ Purusha merges with the Consciousness of The Self and ‘arrives where it started and knows the place for the first time’ (see 5.2). 28.7 But as we have noted (in 5.2) this is paradoxical; for how can the Plenum lack this knowledge in the first place? And as we have noted (in 27.9) there can be no ‘enlightened’ Purusha; for enlightenment is the dissolution of the Purusha. Paradox all around. The cosmic serpent connects nothing with nothing; for it is the Ouroborous whose tail disappears into its own mouth.

29. New Age confusion 1 – ‘Create Your Life!’ 29.1 It is not surprising, given the paradoxes we have encountered, that the fundamental idea that our Consciousness projects our ‘worlds’ could give rise to much confusion. There is one brand of confusion, though, that is worth commenting on as variations of it are so prevalent amongst much contemporary thinking – in the ideas of the so-called ‘New Age’. Some of the ideas of the ‘New Age’ are in fact very old ideas that have been latched onto in a muddled-headed way and have become distorted into a parody of themselves. 29.2 Two factors combine to create the confusion we are considering here. The first factor is the principle: ‘You create your own reality’ (YCYOR). The second factor is the unavoidable desire to re-create all the qualities of the Eden (the plenum) we feel we have lost. When these ineffable qualities get translated into a personal dimension they inevitably appear as the desire for: personal happiness; personal love (perfect relationships); perfect health (mental and physical); material abundance (wealth/money); and the ability to create this in one’s life (power).

91

When these factors come together we have a recipe for creating one’s own personal little Eden, just by tuning one’s consciousness to create that ‘reality’.

29.3 The YCYOR principle - ‘You create your own reality’ - looks, on the face of it, like the principles of the creation of a ‘world’ by a projection of consciousness as summed up in our two vital sutras VS1 and VS2. By the ‘principle of complementarity’ VS1, the ‘world’ of the purusha is a reflection of, and perfect complement to, the energy vibration of the purusha (see 14.6); so if the purusha can change its level or quality of vibration, its ‘world’ will likewise change. This simple idea has sometimes been re-cast as the ‘secret’ of ‘the law of attraction’ – that you attract into your life the situations that reflect the same energetic frequency at which you yourself vibrate. 29.4 So simply ‘visualise’ what you want, in order that you vibrate with its ‘energy frequency’, and it will manifest for you. This ‘magical thinking’ is actually a very ancient idea - forms of it have fuelled superstitions in all cultures (see the notion of ‘sympathetic magic’ in Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’). As well as supposedly working on an individual level, it has been promoted to work on a community-wide or even global level: a meditation society claimed to be able to reduce crime and other negative phenomena in the area where their meditation was practiced. Another organisation claimed to able to eliminate world hunger within two decades by ‘creating the context in consciousness’ for this to happen.

92

29.5 Of course these claims have proved groundless; and many people have found that, even on an individual level, the desired results have not been obtained.

Thousands of books have been written, and courses run, based on variations of the idea that your world is a reflection of your attitude and that this is the key to get control of your life and to have all the love, abundance and success you want. There is clearly a ‘snake in the grass’ here – after all, if the principle had worked for those who espouse it why would they need to write a book or run a new-age course/workshop in it? Unless their way of ‘manifesting their abundance’ was to take money from others for the mere privilege of hearing about the idea. This is another loop of illusion – though here the snake swallows your wallet whole on its way to biting its own tail. 29.6 The YCYOR fallacy here is a confusion of levels, and is in fact, at bottom, the same confusion that fuels the problems of ‘solipsism’ and ‘free will’ (see 21.3 and 25.2). For the ‘you’ and the ‘your’ in the phrase ‘you create your own reality’, represents two senses of the identity ‘you’. ‘You’ as the person or character is ultimately an illusion of false identification. It does not ‘create’ its ‘world’, but comes into existence with its ‘world’. It is ‘You’ as the underlying

93 consciousness (The Self, or an over-arching Purusha) that projects both the person and its ‘world’ as a complementary duality. 29.7 The only way a person or character can change the energetic frequency of its source consciousness is for there to be a relinquishing of the false identification, and realisation of itself as the source. For the person or character this means going over the cliff –‘dying’ to one’s life and identity (see 27.1 and 27.2). But if one goes that far, the original motivation to make life better for the person also goes. The Author does not suffer from (say) the poverty or illness of its character – on the contrary, it needs that ‘poverty’ and ‘illness’ to further the dramatic plot.

29.8 Of course, after an awakening of the Purusha/Author, there may indeed be changes to the plot (i.e. change of the energetic frequency) as we envisaged in 27.6 – but all that would happen in a totally different context: one where the character is seen as ultimately nonexistent. This change is tantamount to creating a new character, for a character is only an energetic vibration at a particular frequency – there is no ‘thing’, only a process or function that is reified as a ‘self’ and falsely identified with (see 11.7 and 11.8). Change the energy and you create a new character. 29.9 The fallacy originates from wanting to hold on to identification with the person or character (i.e. keep the energy frequency the same), with all its urgent need to make its life ‘better’ - whilst at the same time having the freedom of the consciousness of the Author to create whatever situation it sees fit (i.e. change the energy frequency). This, of course, is absurd. The clarity needed here is summed up in one

94 phrase by Nisargadatta: ‘Liberation is not of the person, but from the person.’ An absurd exaggeration may make the structure of the fallacy clearer: Consciousness vibrates in such a way as to manifest a cow. But the cow-consciousness decides it would prefer to leap through the sea like a dolphin. So through extensive ‘visualisation’ it tries to vibrate with a ‘leaping-dolphin’ energy. It thereby attracts this energy to itself and – hey-presto!

But there is no way a particular cow becomes a dolphin. Consciousness may cease to manifest as a particular cow (the cow dies), and may manifest as a particular dolphin (a dolphin is born); but it is doing that all the time anyway – consciousness manifests as cows and dolphins, but one does not ‘become’ the other. When an actor ceases playing the role of (say) a tramp in one play and then performs the role of a king in an entirely different play, we do not say that the tramp became a king. That would represent confusion over the levels of identity. This YCYOR fallacy represents a misunderstanding of the principles whereby consciousness projects ‘selves’ and ‘worlds’ (our VS1, VS2 etc) and distorts them into a form of unrealistic, magical thinking.

95

30. New Age confusion 2 – ‘Parallel Universes’ 30.1 There is also a possible further compounding of this YCYOR fallacy into a scenario involving so-called ‘parallel’ realities. Here we are envisaging a situation involving the YCYOR fallacy combined with a similar confusion of levels involving free will and the appearance of choice. We can work our way into the compounded fallacy by following this ‘new-age’ train of thought: “There seems to be a problem with our VS1, for the principle of complementarity means that, if, for example, consciousness vibrates with energy frequency of ‘Tyranny’ then it manifests as a Tyrant purusha in its ‘world’ of tyranny and oppression. But this requires Victim purushas, otherwise the drama can’t work. It’s not fair that these victims are doomed to play out their roles. But we must remember that these victims are purushas who have freely chosen to manifest the energy vibration of ‘victimhood’ and are creating their own reality. In this reality they have made choices that have confirmed and reinforced their ‘victim’ identity. If they use their free will they can change their vibration and make different choices - they can create, and move into, a new ‘parallel world’ where they can live out a non-victim ‘version’ of themselves in non-tyrannical surroundings. There are as many ‘parallel worlds’ and ‘versions’ of any self as there are frequencies of vibration in the infinite energy of The Self! In fact all possible manifestations already exist somewhere, so anyone can simply re-tune their vibration and live out a different ‘version’ of themselves in a pre-existent parallel world. We can choose from an infinite variety of parallel worlds!” 30.2 We have already exposed the YCYOR fallacy as a confusion of levels; but here we have confusion compounded on confusion, on different levels at once. To unpick this mess it is perhaps best to start with the idea of ‘choice’ and different ‘branching’ realities that result from different, apparent choices. The idea here is common from science fiction, and comprises fantasies based on our natural propensity to ask ourselves ‘how would things have turned out differently if I had made a different choice back then?’. The science fiction idea has its roots in Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics that we looked at in section 15. As a solution to the problem of ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ Everett proposed that at every quantum event

96 the ‘uncertain’ outcome (see 15.1) resulted in a branching of reality into ‘many’ worlds, one for each of the possible outcomes of the event. Remember here, though, that the whole point of Everett’s model was to do away with the need for a conscious observer to determine whether Schrodinger’s Cat was dead or alive – by proposing one world for each outcome, observed or not. 30.3 So the first step (fallacious, as we shall see), is to equate the ‘freedom’ of a persons apparent choice, with an indeterminate quantum event; then we imagine a ‘branching’ of reality into (say) two worlds – one for each of the (say) two possible outcomes of the choice. So, for example, imagine a woman making a choice as to whether to go for a drink with a man. In one scenario she accepts – which leads to them getting together and having a family; in the other, she declines – which leads to them never seeing each other again. So the world splits into (say) two worlds, one for each scenario:

30.4 The next step (also fallacious) is to suggest that because ‘worlds’ are only energetic vibrations in consciousness, the single woman from one ‘world’ can, if she regrets her choice, re-tune her energy vibration and ‘travel’ to the other world and ‘become’ the married woman (who is only a different ‘version’ of herself) in the other ‘world’. The simplest way to deconstruct this confusion is simply to ask ‘Who are these different ‘versions’?’

97 Are they numerically several ‘characters’ who exist at the same time in different worlds, but who have qualitative or functional identity? (see section 10). In which case, even if one of them could ‘travel’ to a different world, it could only take up the different role by ousting the other ‘version’. In the above diagram, after the branching, there are two worlds and four separate adults. It makes no sense to talk of the single woman ‘becoming’ the married woman – they are separate characters. This is a confusion of functional or qualitative identity, with numerical identity. To use our example from 29.4, the king in one play does not ‘become’ the king in an entirely different play just because they are both ‘kings’ - even if played by the same actor. 30.5 Or are these ‘versions’ really numerically one and the same character appearing in different plays? But here we have the same fallacy that we uncovered in 29.6. The character and its ‘world’ (play) appear together as the creation of the Author. The character cannot ‘change its vibration’ and manifest a different play for itself. Only the author can do that; and a change of vibration means a new character, for a particular vibration is all that a character is. Nor does this mean that the character lacks free will; it can have all the apparent choices it needs relevant to its role – in our example above that may be the choice, for example, to summon the energy to fight against being a victim (without the need to vanish off into a parallel world!). As we saw in section 25, there is no pre-existent character that is in any real sense bound by its role. For a character is its role. It is this fact that enabled the good news of section 19, that really speaking “none there was or ever could be who had need for ought ”.

30.6

98 Also, the first step (30.3) is fallacious because the apparent choice that a character makes is not at all represented by the different outcomes of a quantum event. The interpretation of quantum physics that has parallels with our model of Consciousness has the determinate outcome of a probabilistic quantum event being the ‘collapse of the wave function’; in 15.3 this was seen as the equivalent of consciousness becoming the mind by ‘contracting in accordance with the object perceived’ (our VS2). This, though, is not a branching into different ‘worlds’, but rather it is the manifestation of a mind (purusha) and its unique ‘world’. Not the ‘choice’ of a purusha, person or character, but the process involved in its very creation. This is a very different interpretation of quantum physics to that of Everett’s ‘many world’ interpretation, which tries to eliminate consciousness as an essential element in creation altogether. 30.7 We did indeed (in 20.4) see the possibility of parallel ‘nesting’ and ‘branching’ of purushas and their ‘worlds’. But, if understood correctly, it would be strictly meaningless to contemplate any character in any world ‘travelling’ to another: it would be like a filmcharacter turning up in a completely different film, showing on a different screen, in a different cinema. Indeed the impossibility of any mutual knowledge of each ‘world’ by another was seen in 24.5 and 24.6. [Or, as we saw in section 28, such knowledge was only possible on the release of identification with the character, and therefore a dropping of its role, and the ‘merging’ with the consciousness of the author.] 30.8 These kinds of confusion result from a confused ‘meta-reification’ of the character into a substantial entity that can exist outside the context of its inception. This kind of thinking has a place in science fiction and cartoon fantasy, but that is where it belongs. 30.9 There is a very general fallacy that is exhibited by much of what appears as ‘new-age’ ideas. Having once latched on to the idea that ‘anything that exists is a manifestation of consciousness’, there is a powerful tendency to commit the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’: that is, to assume that the reverse must follow - that therefore ‘everything I can dream up in my consciousness must manifest’. But this is to forget that much of what is dreamt up is contradictory and absurd and can never manifest except as a mental fantasy. The principle that ‘all has its roots in consciousness’ is not a license to blur the distinction between fantasy and fact.

31. Ancient confusion 1 – ‘The Hierarchy of Creation’

99

31.1 Just as the confusion at the root of many New Age ideas revolves around the idea that, to put it glibly, I can change my reality on a whim, so there was an ancient confusion that was really its opposite. This was a conviction that one’s sense of identity is something fixed, solid and objective - and has its place in an immutable order of creation. This order is the ‘Great Chain of Being’, that appears, in one form or other, in all the religious traditions. In 28.2 we considered this ‘chain’ being formed of different levels of consciousness, different degrees of Self-identification with the Purushas on every level of their respective projections – their ‘worlds’; but in the exoteric traditions of more ancient times there was one objective world; so the ‘chain of being’ primarily gives order to objective realms within creation. This great Hierarchy was an ordered collection of realms depicted as a collection of concentric spheres. These were explicitly identified as the spheres of the physical Earth and the elements, and the 8 spheres (the orbits) of the moon and planets; and then the stars; beyond that there were an equal number of angelic spheres, and finally the Empyrean realm of Paradise where God dwells.

100 31.2 In the battle for the soul there was a cosmic game of snakes and ladders going on: ascending ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ into the heavens, but always the danger of being tempted to slide down the snake, for the thrill of it - but ending back where you started, or worse, in the infernal regions. If you couldn’t be tempted by the desires of the snake-slide, there were always the agents of the serpent – demons who were ready to frighten you off the ladder.

31.3 Although it was possible to ascend the ladder by ‘purifying’ oneself, in the manner prescribed by the tenets of one’s religion, there was always the presumption that the basic sense of identity remained intact; this is expressed by the term ‘soul’ – which is the static, immortal core of the temporal personality. This ‘soul’ was still considered as something objective, though; it was something that could be fought over by the forces of light and darkness – something that could be ‘saved’ or ‘damned’. Of course it follows that if one’s very ‘soul’ is thus objectified, naturally its environment (the appropriate sphere) will be objectified; and its ultimate destination will be to arrive at an objective realm, in the presence of God (or Devil!) who is also objective – an ‘other’. 31.4 So opposite to the ‘New-Age’ confusion – that my reality is a reflection of ‘me’, we have, in the exoteric religious traditions, an ancient one that Reality has little or nothing to do with me, subjectively considered. I am a little cog in a big machine for processing souls, and if I malfunction and fall of the ladder, then I perish; but the machine rolls on.

101

31.5 The ancient confusion consisted further in the following: while recognising that identification with the body, ego-sense or intellect was in some sense a ‘mistake’ – ‘the sin of pride’ – the true nature of the false self-identification (asmita) was overlooked. What needed to be seen was that: a ‘no-thing’ (pure consciousness) mysteriously engages in a process that gives rise to a phenomenon that is falsely reified and identified with (the operations of Maya - see 14.2); instead of seeing that, though, the sense of reification and identification was detached from its natural (and temporal) projected objects (intellect, ego-sense, body etc) and projected onto an idealised sublimation of the sense of self – the immortal ‘soul’. This was a self stripped of its usual and natural embodiment, and was thus ethereal and eternal; but still something objective, with a history and a destiny over which there should be concern. It was even possible, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, to ‘gain the whole world, but lose your soul’. This concept of ‘losing one’s soul’ is of course contradictory, since one’s deepest identity is precisely what’s left intact after all else is lost. 31.6 This all-round objectification – of one’s soul, the spheres of creation and of God – was really the upshot of a failure to appreciate how the process of creation is a continuous interaction between subject and object, and not only an objective ‘fait accompli’. A failure to realise that it is a process in consciousness and that - in Berkeley’s famous dictum – to be is to be perceived (‘esse est percipi’). 31.7 What this means for the Hierarchy of Creation is that it is seen as a Hierarchy in Consciousness: So at every level, the ‘angelic’ being that appears to inhabit a more exalted realm ‘above’ is really an expanded version of oneself – not an ‘other’, but an expression of the self-same consciousness; an expression that has realised this identity more deeply.

102

31.8 What this means for ‘God’, is that the Divine is seen as essentially identical to oneself in the most expanded expression: when all false identification is dropped, the operation of Maya ceases and The infinite Self is revealed as one’s own Divine Self. Then the previously objectified concept of ‘God’ will be seen to have its roots in a projection of the immature mind – an external sublimation parallel to that of the ‘Soul’ (31.5).

103

31.9 Of course within many exoteric religious traditions there has existed an inner, more esoteric teaching that recognises the centrality of consciousness. Within Christianity we find Meister Eckhart saying ‘I and God are one in my act of perceiving Him’ , and within Islam the Al– Hallaj, the Sufi mystic, proclaimed ‘Ana ’l Haq!’ – ‘I am the Truth!’. But Eckhart was judged to have been deluded by a demon posing as an angel of light; and Al-Hallaj was executed for heresy. It is not hard to see that any teaching that openly proclaims that the ultimate validity and reality of Divine truths lies within our consciousness, must pose a great threat to the authority of any objectively established religious order. So the inner truths of creative consciousness were, for the most part, kept secret. [An interesting case of such a threat was that represented by the Copernican revolution. Ostensibly about the relative position of the Sun to the Earth in the scheme of things, it was more than just a ‘scientific’ controversy, as for centuries the Sun was also a symbol for the Self (it functions as the principle influence in Astrology). So putting the Sun at the centre of things was not only upsetting to the order of the ‘chain of being’ (31.1) but also seen as a symbolic statement of the dangerous esoteric truth that reality revolves around the consciousness that is The Self.] There have been traditions that were more or less exclusively ‘esoteric’ in that sense, though. In such a tradition there was not the same danger of committing heresy. Kashmir Shaivism belongs to such a category, and the creative process in that tradition is entirely

104 described as the involution and evolution of consciousness; though the seeing of creation as a Hierarchy in consciousness can also harbour confusions that are worth looking at.

32. Ancient confusion 2 – ‘The Hierarchy in Consciousness’ 32.1 For the esoteric traditions the objective realms of creation all had counterparts in the inner realms of consciousness: every sphere in creation was at the same time a level of being within consciousness. The different traditions all had variations on this theme and we can see the parallels in the following schema (compiled by K.Wilber):

Here the upper semicircle represents the objective realms and the lower semicircle the subjective levels in consciousness. We exist on all levels at once, but can be prone to identify within a more limited spectrum – typically those of the body and psyche (in the Christian ‘cross-section’). The ‘ascent’ is the journey, not so much through the objective spheres of the planets and the choirs of angels, but rather within as the sense of identity expands to include the soul and spirit sometimes at the cost of bodily identity. 32.2

105 In Kashmir Shaivism the creation schema is more exclusively ‘inner’, with the gross, objective and physical world being relegated to the final five lower levels (tattvas 32-36) out of a total of thirty-six:

Paramashiva is The Self and the tattvas 1-5 we have seen in 8.9; tattva 6 is Maya, and 7-11 are the Kanchukas of limitation we saw in 16.2. Tattva 12 is the Purusha that results from Maya and the Kanchukas, and that we first saw in 14.3. Tattva 13 onwards comprises the ‘world’ of the Purusha, with which it is prone to further identify, as we saw in 20.1. [There is a further complication, we need not dwell on, due to the three ‘gunas’ which ‘colour’ the subsequent tattvas of the ‘world’ according to their qualities of harmony (sattva), action (rajas) and inertia (tamas).] Intellect, ego-sense and memory are tattvas 1416, and 17-26 are the senses and powers of bodily action. The

106 remaining tattvas, 27-36 are the subtle and gross elements. The vast physical universe, as comprehended by modern science, is thus restricted to the very bottom right-hand corner (gross elements 32-36)! Little wonder then, that the mystic poet Rumi, knowing the ocean of Consciousness that is Paramashiva, should say that: “a million galaxies are a little scum on that shoreless sea.” 32.3 What is lacking in this schema is: firstly, it seems overtly solipsistic, with one solitary purusha –this we have dealt with in section 21; secondly, that it lacks the property of self-similarity of our VS4, which led to the ‘big bang’ of section 20; thirdly, it doesn’t adequately deal with the question as to whether Paramashiva is a ‘Self’ or not, and avoids dealing with the Void of non-Being (see section 6); fourthly, that it has a tendency to reify the tattvas – to create, in effect ‘states’ of consciousness through which one has to travel to reach The Self, or Paramashiva. Whereas, in so far as there are ‘levels’, we exist on them all simultaneously: the schema is really a cross-section of our Being. It may be that, through false identification, Asmita, we identify with only a narrow spectrum of ourselves; so we may want to drop that and see that we are Paramashiva and all 36 Tattvas; but there is nowhere we need to ‘go’ to do that, for we are already there – it is what we are. So our second ancient confusion was to subtly reify consciousness into ‘states’ which we enter and leave, and through which we ‘evolve’. This is a subtle equivalent to the confusion of the previous section which led to the complete objectification of creation. Now, even though all is seen as consciousness, it is given a hierarchical structure that binds consciousness, whilst strictly defining the terms of its ‘evolution’. 32.4 We have this ‘evolution’ described as a strict reversal of the process of creation in the Shiva Sutras III.4 ‘The reabsorbtion of the tattvas from Earth (tattva 36) to Shiva (Tattva 1) should be accomplished by dissolving each into its cause.’

107

The trouble with this evolutionary journey through the hierarchy is two-fold: firstly it implies that, as we have just noted, there is a certain distance to be covered; secondly, it begs the question: “Who, or what, exactly is it that makes the ‘journey’?”. 32.5 As regards the first point, we have already noted in 27.8 that in a sense it doesn’t matter how much ground is covered – however many levels of awakening (or ‘dissolving into its cause’) occur, as long as there is still the sense of separation: for the gulf between the finite and the infinite is never bridged however large the expansion of the finite.

108 32.6 As regards the second point, we are again faced with the operation of Maya and the Purusha Paradox of section 17. We can remind ourselves here of the nature of Maya as comprised of an illusion of continuity and a subsequent false identification. If, for the moment, we imagine all the levels of consciousness (tattvas) as a hierarchy of concentric spheres in infinite space, then the illusion of continuity reminds us that these spheres are not solid structures that separate the infinite space into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’; rather they are all spherical ‘nets’ of thought that are full of ‘gaps’ (see 26.5). One may fall prey to Maya and identify with a small ‘sphere’; one may go on a ‘journey’ and begin to ‘dissolve’ the net and shift identification to the more expanded, surrounding one – and this operation may be repeated indefinitely. If it were possible to reach the outermost ‘sphere’, then on dissolution of that there would be nothing left to identify with – only the infinite space of The Self. 32.7 But this shift of identification – from the net to the space – can happen at any moment; for the nets are full of gaps, and the space is never divided. There is no need to ‘travel’ from one net, to a more expanded one, for they are all equally illusions of continuity, suspended in the infinite space of consciousness. Wherever one is, one is in the infinite space – there is nowhere else to be. Nor is there any need to ‘dissolve’ a net in order to shift identification away from it and onto the infinite space, for it is not a substantial entity of any sort, but a presumption. In our examples of the illusion of continuity in section 11 we noted that the illusions are created by a misunderstanding of what was seen, a presumption of a substantial enduring entity, where there is only a process. The underlying process does not necessarily have to cease in order for the overlaid presumption to be seen through. The surfer can still ride his ‘wave’ into the shore even though he sees there is no separate ‘wave’. You do not have to turn the T.V. off in order to know there is nobody behind the screen. Nothing has to change; no ‘journey’ has to be made, for there is no-one to make it. Any identity is a presumed one – a chimerical net of thought mistaken for a ‘self’. If, in reality, ‘Nothing arises, nothing subsides’ as in our VS3, then of course there is no hierarchy in consciousness – only an illusory self-created, reified one. 32.8 An apparent tension between a hierarchical and a non-hierarchical view of reality has fuelled an ancient debate between the ‘gradual’ and ‘sudden’ schools of enlightenment. Clearly a hierarchical view would lend itself to a view of ‘gradual’ enlightenment, attained in stages as one progresses ‘up’ through the hierarchy. Whereas the considerations of the preceding paragraph might lead one to suppose

109 that enlightenment is necessarily ‘sudden’ – the instantaneous seeingthrough of an illusion. This dichotomy of gradual vs. sudden enlightenment can be seen as a false one, though: for The Self is not bound by the limitations of time (which is one of the Kanchukas, tattva 10). So the realisation of The Self is not strictly an event in time at all; it is neither of indefinitely short duration nor of a more prolonged one. If it can be called ‘an event’ at all, it is in a non-measurable dimension of Being. A ‘lower reflection’ of this event may trace a ‘path’ in temporal consciousness, but this is purely incidental. Just as an object flying in a vertical dimension may incidentally, by flying diagonally up, cast a shadow that traverses a distance on the horizontal plane; the height the object reaches is quite independent of the horizontal distance covered by its shadow on the ground (e.g. if it flies absolutely vertically to an indefinite height, with the sun directly overhead, the shadow doesn’t move at all). 32.9 The ultimately illusory nature of the hierarchy of consciousness is also what allows room for the magical or miraculous; for in a sense these are occurrences where there is a ‘leaking through’ of phenomena into a different level in the virtual hierarchy. For example, in our three level structure of author, businessman, and game-character of section 22.4 we can see that, from the level of the author, the other two levels are purely fictional, that there is no-one really there. Having once so constructed the levels, the author would be quite at liberty to ‘break the rules’ of the respective realities and loop one into the other: one could have a magical fantasy where the warrior who was cruelly used as a strategic sacrifice manages to ‘awaken’ and break out of his game reality into the ‘real’ world of the businessman, and come looking for revenge on the player of the game. From the point of view of the businessman this would be a hideous and miraculous impossibility. From the warriors’ point of view it would be a mind-exploding realisation. From the point of view of the author, it is a change to the kind of novel being written, but no big deal - for it is all fiction. It is a delightful play of creating structures only to distort or destroy them. The world of magical manifestations, miraculous powers or events, and other open-ended, infinite impossibilities of life can all be given expression through this kind of structural warping or looping. Just such a looping occurs in the Yoga Vasishta where the sage Vasishta, while instructing his student Rama, gives an account of how one mind projected several different ‘selves’ who then went on to project further ‘minds’ – one of whom was the mind that supposedly started the whole process in the first place! More than that, all the projected ‘identities’ end up getting together in the same ‘reality’ in

110 order to discuss how they all came into existence – to much mutual astonishment.

Of course, in the light of this one may ask: “Isn’t the account of the creation process given here an illusory, reified and hierarchical one – the ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ purushas, the successive applications of the Maya principle?” To which the answer must of course be ‘Yes!’ So we must wrap up our investigations by undoing what we have done – by looping back to our starting point and perhaps knowing it for the first time.

33. Uncoiling the Serpent – Liberation 33.1 Our account of Reality has comprised considerations of The One, which led to the Void and then the Plenum and its consciousness, The Self; from there, via the reification and false identification that is Maya, we considered the separate subject, the Purusha; and then its further projections as the ‘person or ‘character’ (based in general on further reifications – principally the ego-sense (see 20.1)). We also considered that there could be an indefinite ‘nesting’ and ‘branching’ of purushas and their projections in the explosion of infinite consciousness.

111 At each stage of these considerations we were confronted by paradox: In the process of manifestation or involution (1) From the One to the Void/Plenum – in 7.8 - The Paradox of Manifestation) (2) From the Plenum to The Self – in 8.7 - The Paradox of Consciousness (3) From The Self to Maya – in 12.6 - The Paradox of Identification and – in 14.9 – The Paradox of Projection (4) From Maya to Purusha – in 17.8 - The Purusha Paradox and - in 18.4 – The Paradox of Omnipotence The Paradox of Manifestation in unity is reflected as The Paradox of Projection in the operation of Maya to produce separation. The Paradox of Consciousness in unity is reflected as The Paradox of Identification in the operation of Maya to produce separation. In the process of awakening or evolution (5) From person to Purusha – in 25.1- The Paradox of Free Will and – in 26.7 - The Paradox of Practice (6) From Purusha to The Self – in 27.9 - The Paradox of Enlightenment 33.2 Whilst bearing in mind the potentially infinite levels of consciousness in the ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ purushas, we can, nonetheless, discern five broad structural levels: The One, The Void, The Plenum/Self, The Purusha and the Person (or character). There happens to be one esoteric tradition from the Naqshandi lineage of Sufis that mirrors this precisely: a teaching on the Lataif, or spiritual centres in the human being. According to this tradition (not found in any mainstream Islamic or Sufi texts) there are five chambers in the spiritual Heart of man, from the innermost chamber of Truth, to the more peripheral ones relating to consciousness in separation – the person – and the return Home. The outermost chamber (Latifat al Qalb) is the chamber of the heart where the spiritual longing of the separate person is first awakened. The next (nearer) chamber (Latifat al Ruh) is the detached spirit, the serene witness of the ‘world’ – the Purusha. Nearer still is the ‘secret’ chamber (Latifat as Sir) where, after the annihilation (fana) of separation, there is abiding in the Oneness of The Self (Baqa), or enlightenment.

112 When even the consciousness of The Self fades, there is an entering into the chamber (Latifat al Khafa) of Non-Being – the Void. Here all vestige of existence or manifestation is destroyed. It is the ultimate remedy of all ills, beyond the need to be anything whatsoever, in separation or unity. The innermost chamber (Latifat al Akhfa) is the domain of Absolute Truth, The One. Neither Being nor Non-Being, nor both, nor neither. “Here there is neither rising nor setting, neither right nor left, neither up nor down, neither space nor time, neither far nor near, neither night nor day, neither heaven nor earth. Here the pen breaks, the tongue falters, intellect sinks into nothingness, intelligence and knowledge miss the way in the wilderness of amazement.” 14th Century Sufi mystic

33.3 We have outlined an account of Reality that is both satisfying and unsatisfying; it feels positive to have some kind of intellectual handle on, or map of Reality; but it is disturbing to be surrounded by so much paradox. The term paradox actually means ‘beyond the doctrine, or dogma/teaching’. Whatever doctrine is espoused, finally there is a need to go beyond it since a conceptual doctrine only engages the intellect. But if ‘going beyond’ is not to mean merely an anarchic free-for-all – (a ‘new-age’ hell where any fantasy can count as my truth) – then there must be a context large enough to accommodate both a conceptual understanding, and an appreciation of the limits of such a kind of understanding. This means having the capacity to turn the gaze of understanding onto the process of understanding itself, and to be comfortable with fact that this must entail the possibility of self-referential paradox; and to ‘go beyond’ in the sense that, just because the intellect has reached a limit (and has to turn back on itself), that doesn’t mean that our Being is so limited. The intellectual capacity is inextricably bound up with thought and language and these are tools that work very well in the limited domain of separation – the ‘subject’ and its ‘world’ of objects, the province of the products of Maya. As Wittgenstein said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also. What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

113 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Nor is it only a modern logician such as Wittgenstein or Gödel (see 1.4) with the tools of mathematical logic at their disposal that can appreciate the limits to thought. Our 14th century Sufi mystic summed it up precisely: “Intellect is a failure; it cannot lead save to what is a failure like itself. Intellect can only look upon an entity either as body, essence or quality; or in Space and Time. It cannot go beyond these limitations. If it fixes any of those limitations on God, it sinks to infidelity. If, bewildered, it exclaims: ‘I do not find any existence save with these properties. So God, being without any of these properties, is perhaps naught…’ – it is still dragged down to infidelity. In short, Divine Knowledge depends on Divine Illumination alone.” Our mystic hit the nail on the head here as regards the limitations of the intellectual process. The tools of modern logic (first developed by Russell, Wittgenstein and their immediate inspirational predecessor Gottlob Frege) have their foundations in the theories of propositional and predicate calculus; here a ‘proposition’ p (the bearer of the ‘truth values’ true or false) has the minimal form F(a), where a is a nameable entity of some sort, and F is a property or quality of some sort. Without this minimal structure logic cannot even get off the ground; but the primordial realities we want to consider are prior to this structure. This structure comes into being as the intellectual function of Purusha – i.e. the Buddhi – and is as late as Tattva 14 in Kashmir Shaivite schema we saw in 32.2. Wittgenstein also intuited that the limits of thought are set at what we have termed the Purusha – the ‘subject’ of its ‘world’: “I am my world. (The Microcosm.) The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit – not a part of the world.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6 and 7) So strictly speaking we cannot think or talk of anything beyond or prior to, the Purusha: of Maya, The Self, The Plenum, The Void and The One, there is literally nothing to be thought or said.

114

33.4 But of course the monkey-mind of man is not going to just sit quietly – it is going to attempt the impossible and try to express the inexpressible, even if the result is a paradoxical parody of Reality. As we have seen, one of the central components of creation as the manifestation of consciousness is the process of reification – to treat as a nameable, relatively fixed entity something which is really an ungraspable flux or process. It is not surprising then, that this same process of reification must appear in any conceivable account of Reality, since any account is itself a product of Buddhi and recursively productive of further reifications. Once aware of this we can see that in mapping the territory of the whole of Reality it is inevitable that the map-making process itself must be represented in some way on the map – and that this looping of territory-mapping onto map is bound to cause paradox. That may mean that Reality in itself is not necessarily paradoxical, but that it must appear so to the map-making intellect. It is in this light that we must hold our list of paradoxes (33.1). So we have ‘reified entities’ such as ‘The One’, ‘The Void’, ‘The Plenum’, ‘The Self’ etc. None of these are fixed entities of any sort, and in a very real sense cannot even be said to exist. But they have to be treated as existent entities in order for thought and language to have a foothold. They should be seen as practical expedients, as temporary presumptions needed in order to unfold a narrative. If nailed down too dogmatically they can self-destruct upon examination. For example, people like to talk of holding to, or believing in ‘Nonduality’, meaning the realisation of oneness. But if you hold on to, make important, or reify Non-duality, the thought process inevitably sees it in contradistinction to ‘Duality’, which must be rejected. But then, like it or not, we have a duality: Non-duality vs. Duality. So

115 ‘Non-duality’ self-destructs. What ‘Non-duality’ is trying to express may well be true; but the minute you think it, it is gone! Wittgenstein realised that even his talking about the limits to language and thought, was a transgressing of those limits, and so, by his own criteria, strictly meaningless. Nonetheless they were held by him to have an expedient value: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up upon it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” (ibid. 6.54) 33.5 So perhaps there is some value in that, while recognising that nothing can be said, we try to get the measure of that nothingness by elucidating a nonsensical structure, and process, of Reality and its manifestation.

116 After all, our VS4 states that ‘As above, so below’; so there is some rationale in trying to reverse this, and hoping that ‘As below, so above’, and that the Buddhi can act as a mirror on manifestation (at least sufficiently to warrant Gautama Buddha co-opting the term to act as an appropriate title reflecting his Enlightenment). Also, a recognition of the limits of the intellect is very far from lapsing into an irrational anti-intellectualism, or philosophic nihilism. That hope must underpin, for example, the Kashmir Shaivite schema of creation we saw in the diagram of 32.2. For this schema is an example of the kind of tail-eating serpent (territory/map looping) we are considering. Ostensibly a map of the whole of Reality from Paramashiva down through the 36 Tattvas, it is, as a conceptual structure, necessarily itself a product of Tattva 14 – the Buddhi. So the whole map loops into a small fraction of itself. The hope must be that, as the whole is holographic and fractal in the way we have seen above, this looping is a reflection in a reflection etc. that nonetheless is a faithful image of the original. We even have in Shiva Sutras III.12 (and in seeming total opposition to our 14th Century Sufi mystic) the idea that ‘The essential nature of the light of Reality is attained by mastery of the intellect’. Even though what the term ‘intellect’ refers to here is debated in the commentaries, we can nonetheless appreciate the instability of the predicament: for the looping creates a feedback effect whereby any distortion in the Buddhi feeds back into the map of the whole, which in turn must distort the understanding of the position held by the Buddhi, and so on. It is this kind of relativising of territory to map, that leads to the fruitless gainsaying of most metaphysical debate. For there is no authoritative map all can agree upon, and an opposing position is assessed by reference to one’s own map. There is the common plea that ‘the map is not the territory’, but this is rarely, if ever, appealed to as a plea to intellectual humility and a foregoing of all maps in favour of a more direct apprehension of reality. Mostly it is appealed to as a plea to recognise the independence of reality from any map; but the motive for this is to further validate one’s own ‘true’ map – so that what it claims is valid because reality is independently just so, not merely because it is depicted that way on one’s map. It is built into the very nature of metaphysical/religious belief systems that one’s own is the one ‘true faith’. Even avowedly tolerant systems, such as e.g. the Baha’i faith, are such just to the extent that they can incorporate the tolerated systems into their own. This kind of conceptual narcissism, which seems incapable of apprehending another viewpoint except by reference to its own, is not merely a narrow provincialism, but is actually built into the very nature of subject/object consciousness. To see why this is so we

117 must, paradoxically and inconsistently, turn to our own map, and finally unmask the looping serpent that has poisoned our attempts at a paradox-free, simple account of Reality. 33.6 Wittgenstein talked of a mystical feeling that comes from contemplating the whole of reality – the desire to somehow stand outside it all and contemplate it in its entirety. What is so aweinspiring is not how it happens to be, for “all happening and being-so is accidental (ibid. 6.41) – but rather that there is anything at all. “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but rather that it is.” (ibid 6.44) The central question of all philosophy has been characterised by existentialist thinkers as ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ However, we have described Reality such that ‘something’ is not opposed to ‘nothing’ – rather they form a complementary pair. As Nisargadatta has commented: ‘every object needs its own absence’. Were there only a Plenum and not a Void, that Plenum would finally be burdensome; an eternal wakefulness never refreshed by sleep. The relevant question for us is, rather, ‘Why is there this dance of something/nothing?’ It is an unanswerable question since in the nothing it is not, and in the totality of something there is nothing else with which to furnish an explanation. But if the ‘why?’ is unanswerable we may still contemplate the ‘how?’ – in effect, ‘what keeps the cosmic dance turning?’ In our account of the creation process of Maya, we described a twofold process of false identification and reification which splits the unity of The Self into a separate subject (Purusha) and object. What we have described is how a false sense of identity apparently eclipses or usurps the true identity of The Self. This identity is the supreme ‘I’ of the Mahavakyas – ‘I am That’. But what both The Self and the Purusha have in common is identity. The identity of the Purusha is created by the involution or serpentlooping of The Self onto its own subjective pole and falsely identifying with it. (see 12.6) The identity of The Self is manifested by the serpent-looping of awareness in the Plenum to become its own object. (see 8.4) In short, our paradox-inducing, self-looping serpent is the apparent need for identity. By our principle of complementarity VS1, the identity of any object is a reflection of and complementary to the identity of the subject. That is

118 why it is impossible to truly take on a different, non-narcissistic viewpoint or perspective, unless there is a relinquishing of identity. But in the relinquishing of identity, what need can there be to take on another perspective – for all apparent need is in relation to an identity. When a purusha ‘awakens’ to a higher one, there is an uncoiling of a loop of asmita and a false identity is destroyed. In ‘enlightenment’ any separate sense of identity - of being a Purusha of its ‘world’ - is destroyed in the identity of the Oneness of The Self. 33.7 Finally, then, any vestige of (even supreme) identity meets its destruction in The Void, where there is an uncoiling of the serpentloop of awareness – an awareness that requires no object. From the perspective of The Void (if one can make sense of such a thing) there is no such thing as Asmita, or false identity. For all identity is false and unnecessary. Love can be, without having to be anything, for anyone. This cessation of identity is ‘liberation’ – but it is liberation with no-one liberated, for it is seen by no-one that there was no-one bound. As our Sufi mystic said: “Nothing can be separated from the Infinite, and attached to the nonInfinite. Since the Origin is Him, the End is in Him. Separation and Union, coming and going, are thus unreal. This is a long story. Discreet Silence is here absolutely necessary.” In non-identity the paradoxes drop out. There is no-one who is bound or has free-will. There is no-one subject to illusion, and no-one gets enlightened. There is no-one to have power or to lose it, or to lose knowledge and then regain it. 33.8 This is not quite the end of our story. For in one way the Void can be seen as the destruction of all problems, for in The Void there is no-one for whom anything could be problematic. But it is not really that there was a problematic identity which was destroyed. Rather, in liberation it is seen that there never was anyone. All were characters in a divine novel. So Being was never inherently problematic, and though unnecessary, need never be undone. For it only is when paid attention to, and such attention is entirely incidental. This position of perfectly natural poise between The Void of non-Being and The Plenum of Being, is the perspective of the One. From there, there is no paradox of manifestation; there was no need for manifestation to mysteriously kick-start itself – for it never was not, for there was never a need for it not to be; moreover it holds the entirely incidental and unnecessary possibility of Being something – and who can resist the charms of such a seductive serpent?

119 33.9 Have we tracked down our strange serpent, cornered it and fully exposed that trickster? Not really, for it is very slippery and even while we stare it down we may find it slips away and comes at us from behind. Just as we think we can bear down on it to finally devour it, we suddenly find we are biting our own tail, and we seem to be that very serpent - and nothing seems to be the way we thought it was. Rather than, as Bishop Butler proclaimed, “Everything is what it is, and not some other thing”, we find ourselves, on the contrary, caught up in game where identity skews all, and nothing is what it is, and we are always some other thing. In Shakespeare’s ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ (Act 2, Scene VII) the character Lepidus, travelling in a foreign land, finds himself marvelling at the strange properties, described by Anthony, of a fabled beast said to inhabit those parts. When asked by Lepidus as to ‘what manner o’ thing’ this serpent-like beast is, Anthony answers, and a dialogue ensues: ‘Anthony: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it… Lepidus: What colour is it of? Anthony: Of it own colour too. Lepidus: ‘Tis a strange serpent. Anthony: ‘Tis so; and the tears of it are wet.