
Gary Horvitz
From the view of awakened mind, the term beginningless is a non sequitur. It names a condition that cannot exist. Yet Hindu and Buddhist teachings refer to the karmic panorama of numberless lives stretching into beginningless time. As with the word infinity, a condition having no beginning and no end has no reference points whatsoever. We have no way to understand beginningless other than from a conventional definition of time. Beginningless is the best we can do to refer to the nonexistence of time altogether.
Modern physics theorizes the beginning of the universe (the beginning of time) to be the Big Bang, but there’s no reason to assume the Big Bang denotes a beginning of consciousness. When modern science speaks of consciousness, it’s a reference to ego-awareness. When Buddhists speak of beginningless time, they are referring to what preceded the beginning of the known universe and what will remain after it.
Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening all at once.
—Woody Allen
Allen may not be a quantum Jedi master, but he was onto something. In a quantum universe, some things do happen simultaneously, a condition called ‘entanglement’ in which atoms at a distance seem to ‘know’ each other and mimic behavior. But those entangled atoms arise from the same source. Relative consciousness can only imagine ‘everything’ as seemingly unrelated discrete events, jumbled together without order, arising in random fashion, crowding each other out as they compete for ‘space,’ clamoring for the limited resource of our attention in the chaos of phenomena. This would be an inaccurate view. As quantum theorists suggest (Bohr and Barad), there is no such thing as an objective event removed from the observer. Theoretically, events only arise as a function of our interaction with them. It would be more accurate to assume all events are intra-actions. There is no objectivity we can claim. We are engaged with co-arising phenomena in an endless flow of becoming and disappearing. It’s difficult to comprehend this reality. To the relative mind, this flow appears as the instantaneous partition of perception into binary categories (this and that, etc), imputing relative qualities to everything. We are constantly making up ideas and concepts about perception, including thoughts in relation to the timing of ‘events’ we perceive or imagine existing.
Is there any true substance to time at all? Not really. From a practical view, like money, time is a currency we use to organize our lives, our relationships, to prioritize and make sense of our self-care and interactions. Like money, its value is arbitrary, shifting on a daily or even moment-to-moment basis according to our changing priorities, health, age, and personal pursuits. Have you noticed how the value of money is also elastic, shifting just as quickly according to our material circumstances? Time is another tool we employ to create permanence. Our aggregate accomplishments over a lifetime may be viewed as a record of our relationship with permanence. It’s a key component of consensus reality, to be sure, but it’s also no more real than money.
Absolute reality is not some unconventional form of time, unfamiliar to us as we hurry to our next destination. There is no sequence of events. There are no events. There are no discrete moments; no procession from one thing to another because there is only one thing (which is not a thing at all): everything, free of any limiting or defining conditions—cognizant awareness, emptiness that knows itself. It is time-less. All that arises is a manifestation of the spontaneous dynamic unceasing creativity of Being without limitation or variation. The term beginningless is a conception arising from a relative view, intrinsically based in time, dubiously limited by karma. Normally, we are not capable of another view.
How might we extricate ourselves from the reflexive time-based mode of mentation to create space in our universe for a timeless view? The Sanskrit meaning of samsara is ‘continuous flow’—the repeating cycle of all the transitional events of human existence: birth, life, death, and rebirth. The root of the word samsara means ‘flowing into’ or ‘wandering through.’ It could also be thought of as spinning in circles. If we only thought of the transitional events (birth, death, and reincarnation) as features of samsara, we would be overlooking the continuous flow of moment-to-moment ‘events’ in between these major transitions. We are continuously wandering, always spinning into ourselves. Can we imagine anyone ‘flowing out of themselves?’ Why yes, we can. I would put the saints of history into this category, people completely flowing out of karma, out of themselves, whose entire beings come to represent an absolute and common truth: Jesus, Buddha, Rumi, Padmasambhava, Longchenpa, Mother Teresa, Meister Eckhart, Sheikh Ibn Al-Arabi, Garab Dorje, Neem Karoli Baba, Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, Thich Nhat Hanh and so many more. What the hell, I’ll even include Dolly Parton—strictly in a spiritual sense. These are enlightened beings. The rest of us are still flowing into ourselves.
Despite quantum theory calling the substance of karma into question, we still regard karma as the essential feature of samsara. Our habits of thought and our immediate actions fuel samsara as we helplessly fall into duality over and over in a continuing moment-to-moment dependent co-origination of the phenomenon we call time. Our conceptual frameworks reflect the ways we are embedded in time. Language also reflects these conceptual frameworks.
Part 2 next week 09 June 23
About “Just Passing Through”
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