POSTCARD #233: New Delhi: There’s an alertness in listening to the story, subject-object narrative, and I find I’m not caught in thought about what’s past or what’s future, knowing and recognizing how I feel, what I think, and who (and to whom) I have been who I am, who I was in former times and in quiet holy places, where it is always a historical here-and-now, anywhere and anywhen, over endless horizons of time.
A slight sense of foreboding these days where any serious applied thought seems to have gone right out the window, unless it’s got to do with greed or personal gain in some way. Thus we’re driven by nothing sensible to think about, craving for something, anything of substance. Hand-held remote glued to fingers in a multi-channel TV state of anything’ll-do, but finding nothing except the urge to find something that’ll fill that overwhelming sense of ‘lack’. Despondency of ungratified longing, dukkha; world-weariness and I see the only way out is to go in.
And it’s as if it were a light shining in darkness of mind (suffering is caused by wanting it to not be like this), thought processes maintain themselves hesitantly for an instant and fade away. Unless I consciously reach out for the next thought item, there’s nothing to think about in here (what ease there is to be found in that…), just a transparent curtain, through which I see a transparent stage, set in a transparent theatre. All the actors, transparent with background seen shining through, backlit and everything filled with light. Dazzling sunbeams in a snowy white blinding of the eyes. We cannot see we are filled with God because we are filled with a concept of God. World crashes into my small consciousness and reflected out again in a micro imploding ‘big bang’… oneness of time and space so utterly present the past tense has disappeared completely, taking the future with it.
Was the ‘Big Bang’ of all big bangs in fact caused by another big bang before that? And so on, and so on; big bangs inside other big bangs, consecutively reducing, smaller and smaller like Petrushka dolls fit inside one another until we reach ‘the nothing’? Is it that the origin of cause/effect stretches back so far, everything falls into the vacuum caused by it not being there during the time taken to find a good answer to the question? Or I could say, and it seems reasonable to me, the origin of it was/is neither existence, nor non-existence, the matrix – the quality of darkness because there is no light of sensory perception.
Here in India, to cut a very long story short, Brahman (God) is the original cause and the world we see around us is the effect. It leaves me thinking if there’s a context wherein I find myself – yes or no. Without the cause, the effect no longer exists. Everything is real when seen with Brahman but false when seen independent of Brahman. Those of us who are unable to grasp the meaning of Brahman are living in illusion māya. It says a lot, really, about the way things are, these days of illusion, delusion and a glitzy casino owner for President…
Header image: painting by Jill Lewis
dhamma footsteps 
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Thanks for this source of useful tips and wonderful photos on travelling in India
Yes.
Affirmative answer to a question not yet asked? Thanks. You’re welcome…
My way of saying Yes, you’re right and I agree with what you have written. (Just lazy. 😉 )
😉
may a happy
ending moment
flicker through
even briefly 🙂
Thanks for your kindness, the flickering happy-ending moment is timeless…
Interesting article! 🙂
Personally, one feels that the sacred, the timeless, is not the cause of anything. Otherwise it is merely another component in a cause/effect sequential continuum (in and of time)… which it — most definitely — isn’t.
I see what you mean Tom. It could be the ‘world’ has this effect in different ways depending on the way Brahman is comprehended. The source of this article is linked at ‘the nothing’, click there and read Chapter 1, Second Brahmana: The Creation Of The Universe by Swami Krishnananda. It is a lengthy piece, often dwelling on the subtleties of cause and effect, understood in different contexts.
Thanks, but i don’t read that kind of thing. Additionally, the Universe was never created. 🙂
It’s different for me, I’m looking at this kind of thing because, living in North India as we are, I simply cannot ignore it.
Loved this. Beautiful writing…”Dazzling sunbeams in a snowy white blinding of the eyes.” Poetry. And loved the feel of Petrushka dolls endlessly opening to yet another. Of course, Hume says there is no such thing as cause and effect…
Cause of death: birth.
Thanks Ben, the entire history of the world wrapped up in four words 🙂
More laziness. 😀
Words stretch but cannot reach…
Thanks Ellen, the snowy white blinding was something experienced in Switzerland a long time ago, the sun shining so brightly on the snow and blue sky, it was as if there were diamonds sparkling everywhere. I’d like to read more Hume, 18th century Scottish philosopher from Edinburgh, I wonder if there’s something you could recommend, not too lengthy…
It has been so long since I have read him… but I loved him. Here is the most basic book I think k…
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0872202291/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8
Thanks Ellen, it’s exactly what I was looking for. Just downloaded it in Kindle.
Cause and Effect is often not what it seems to be …
and, … perhaps it is also part of those fairy tales,
not much different from the world of Disney …
The Mental needs them inside its logic,
which is useful, but how real is logic …
which reminds me of the tetralemma
used by nagarjuna to attack all concepts,
perhaps even of itself.
Sorry Bert, I had to google tetralemma, and the wikipedia entry lost me in a few words. In the words of the Buddha Suttas, I understand it as a way of covering all conceivable possibilites when describing something that is beyond conceptual language and thought. But that is intuitive. Can you give me an example of the Nagarjuna tetralemma?
this seems to give a ‘simple’ explanation. Something I cannot write: http://www.lionsroar.com/it-will-never-add-up/
I see it (as simple) AND (as complicated) as this:
Western logic is based on (1) TRUE and (2) FALSE, were tetralemma adds (3) both (not TRUE) AND (not FALSE) and (4) both TRUE AND FALSE … 🙂
Thanks Bert, for your explanation. A development of Western logic, you could say. Or… Western logic is not as totally embracing as the tetralemma of Eastern logic
I am deeply curious of the many ways our election is viewed by non-Americans. Certainly no less alarm for many, but all with differing historical views. And differing concerns about how it will effect them. Even so, we appear to be galvanized, perhaps as never before. If true, there is great opportunity here.
We appear to be galvanised perhaps as never before. This sums it up for me, I’m just hoping he will fulfil expectations because it is an opportunity to shake up the system. Trump is the one to root out all the darker figures who make their presence felt, because he’s not beholden to any of them, being self funded, it would seem…