Self . . . An 'Imaginary Center' as the 'Cause of Suffering'

"As LONG AS (one's subjective 'self') is centered in a phenomenal object, and thinks and speaks therefrom, (one's) subject is identified with that object and is bound."

"As long as such condition (applies), the identified subject can never be free—for freedom is liberation from that identification."

"Abandonment of a phenomenal centre constitutes the only 'practice', and such abandonment is not an act volitionally performed by the identified subject, but a non-­action (wu wei) leaving the noumenal centre in control of phenomenal activity, and free from fictitious interference by an imaginary 'self'."

"Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal center? As long as you do that you can never recognize your freedom."

Preface to "Open Secret" by Wei Wu Wei

 self / n., adj. & verb (pl. selves) 1 a person's or thing's own individuality or essence (showed his true self). 2 a person or thing as the object of introspection or reflexive action (the consciousness of self). . . .

ego / n. (pl. -os) 1 Metaphysics a conscious thinking subject. 2 Psychology the part of the mind that reacts to reality and has a sense of individuality. . . .

[Source: Concise Oxford English Dictionary.]

"(An) event," Wei Wu Wei points out, "only occurs in the mind of the perceiver of it, singular or plural as the case may be, and no event could be anything but a memory when we know it. No event is anything but a psychic experience. Events, or memories of events, are objectivizations in consciousness."

Our lives, our histories - personal and collective - the "who" we identify as, are manifestations of consciousness. Indeed, as many physicists point out, at the most basic level, the entire universe must be manifested (or "real-ized") through an act of conscious observation, through an observing consciousness. Some, like the late David Bohm, might agree with Gary Zhukav's conclusion that "modern physics has become the study of the structure of consciousness."

Buddhist teacher, Tulke Urgyen Rinpoche, would say that 'reality' ("as it is") - including the basic nature of a realized Buddha and that of ordinary sentient beings - is a fundamental and complete emptiness unified irrevocably with an infinite ability to 'cognize.' I suspect he would agree that the 'events' of our lives, and our 'memories' of those events, "are objectivizations in consciousness," albeit objectivizations that are misperceived because we are unskillful in realizing the unity of our empty and infinitely cognizant nature.

One must ask, given the 'misperceptions' of our own individual and collective group consciousness, just how functional we are as many billions of individualized 'selves.' How well does an overwhelmingly narcissistic, post-modern dualistic perspective work for us?

It is important, I feel, to realize just how much unnecessary mayhem, harm and suffering this misperception of separate individuality perpetuates if we are ever going to make the necessary efforts to be free of 'self.'

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"(I)t becomes obvious," writes spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "that the human ego in its collective aspect as 'us' against 'them' is even more insane than the 'me,' the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of the violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet 'normal' equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego."

Eckhart Tolle, best-selling author of
"The Power of Now" and "A New Earth."

"Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all-pervasive on this planet," Tolle observes. "When you don't recognize them as individual and collective manifestations of an underlyin dysfunction or mental illness, you fall into the error of personalixing them. You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group and you say: 'This is who he is. This is who they are.'"

"All this," he notes, "is enormously satisfying to the ego. It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other, whose 'otherness' has become manifested to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, not the rootedness in the one Life that you share with each human being, your common divinity."

And, he points out: "Fighting (such) unconsciousness will (only) draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconscious, dysfunctional egoic behavior can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Emphasis added.)

Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," pp. 73-75

As Wei Wu Wei asks: ""Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal center?" "As long as you do that," he points out, "you can never recognize your freedom."

Enlightenment Takes No Time At All

Spiraling, spiralling,
out through space-time
the stars and all their planets
ever whirl.

I look about and all I see
is star dust.

Enlightenment takes no time at all.
Being eternal it is beyond space-time,
which can only denote and thereby sever it.

Even the finest wine turns to vinegar in time.
Therefore, imbibe now!

If eye could see all this from without,
would not the universe itself be an infinity
of swirling vortices congealing out of the void?

And yet,
when we envision that within which is every being, how still and empty does it seem?
Such illusory stillness is the stuff of which some far off heaven's made.

Simon Small: On the Inner Path and Contemplative Life

"I stand at the bottom of the pond as the fulcrum of limitless space, within and without, a gateway to both, an icon that joins the two. But who am I, so small and insignificant yet at the heart of existence? As I ponder this question, infinite space reveals itself once more. For as hard as I look, I cannot find myself. I can only find thoughts, memories, fears, beliefs and concepts that constantly arise and cease. But whoever I am does not arise or cease. I am who I have always been. Different thoughts and a new body, but I am who I am. And as my mind stills consciousness expands without limit. There is a deep sense that, indeed, it has no limit. It too is infinite, a vibrantly alive space. As I stand at the bottom of the pond, I am the still center of awesome space, but so is every other human being. And, in its own way, so is every animal, plant, virus, bacteria and living cell. And in some far distant galaxy, on another insignificant lump of rock, at the bottom of another pond, stands another still center of space staring uswards and inwards, filled and humbled by the mystery of existence."

-- Simon Small --
 ("At the Bottom of a Pond")

In a recent interview (attached below) Iain McNay, co-host of ConsciousTV, sat down with Rev. Simon Small, an ordained Church of England clergyman and author, to explore the latter's journey from run-of-the-mill modern materialist businessman to a Christian contemplative. Small's inner journey of self-inquiry led him from spiritualism, through A Course in Miracles, to Theravada Buddhism and back to his Church of England roots, revealing to him the spaciousness and interconnectedness that is at the heart of all the world's great wisdom traditions.

Small describes the fruits of the inner path in the following terms: "One begins to experience a taste that one is not separate to everything else, that this hard sense of being separate and cut off from all of this, and just relating to it, is actually just a perception, and that whatever I am is flowing out of the source of everything, just as this table is, and this room, and everything outside."

"Contemplation," he notes, "is an ancient Christian word for a universal experience. (It) describes what happens when we have those moments . . when suddenly our very small world that we are living out in our head almost seems to dissolve and suddenly there is this vast mystery there in the moment. We all have experiences like this. Many of us have them out in nature. We will be walking along and there will be a moment when the sunlight coming through the branches and hitting the leaves just stops us in our tracks. There is a sense of time almost stopping as well, and there is almost a sense of resonance in the moment so that we are no longer separate to the sunlight and those leaves. There is something vibrating there that is vibrating in us as well. We all have these moments."

A life of contemplation may not, however, be for everyone. The fruits of the inner path and contemplation are very rich, Small notes, but they come at a price, a price that many people are, perhaps, loathe to pay.

"At first, (contemplation) is a wonderful experience," he points out, "because you have never quite tasted anything quite like it. It is like the finest wine you have ever tasted, and you become aware. . . . Suddenly life has gone to colour from black and white.  But then very quickly," he warns, "one begins to realize that if you are going to pursue this you are not going to be able to live the same way anymore in the world. Things that you used to value, you won't value anymore. And you will begin to value things that you have never dreamed of before."

Small's advice to those who wish to explore the contemplative way is: "Enter stillness. Try and taste the wonder of being. Go out into nature, (into) whatever it is that brings this sense of wonder into your life. And then as you are experiencing that quality of consciousness, hold the question: Where do I go from here?" The answer will come, he notes.

Beyond Desire to Spiritual Awakening

"When a man surrenders all desires that come to the heart and by the grace of God finds the joy of God, then his soul has indeed found peace. He whose mind is untroubled by sorrows, and for pleasure has no longings, beyond passion and fear and anger, he is the sage of the unwavering mind."

-- The Bhagavad Gita, 2:55-56 --

"Spiritual experience," writes famed translator, Jose Mascaro, "is the only source of true spiritual faith, and this must never contradict reason, or as Shankara, c. AD 788-820, says in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita: 'If a hundred scriptures should declare that fire is cold or that it is dark, we would suppose they intend quite a different meaning from the apparent one!'"

"What," he then asks, "is the indispensable condition for this spiritual experience? It is very simple, and it can be very difficult: it is the absence of desires."

[Mascaro, "Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics)," p. li.]

But, the question remains: How will we know when we have mastered desires?

In his treatise, "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," author, William Irvine observes that when we have mastered desire, "(w)e will experience what . . . has been the goal of most of those who have thought about desire - a feeling of tranquility."

"This should not be confused with the kind of tranquility brought on be ingestion of a tranquilizer," he cautions. Rather, he notes, "(i)t is instead marked by a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living - that despite our circumstances no key ingredient of happiness is missing."

"With this sense," Irvine observes, "comes a diminished level of anxiety: we no longer need to obsess over the things - a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen - that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly," he points out, "if we master desire, to the extent possible to do so, we will no longer despise the life we are forced to live and will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead, we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."

[Irvine. "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," pp. 6-7.]

The "desireless realm" described by the Buddha, and so many others, is thus, a universal spiritual state of being described in all of the world's great wisdom traditions. In the New Testament, for example (at Matthew 6:27-34), Jesus addresses our overwhelming desires and worries, observing:

"And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"

“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

"(T)he time and effort we spend trying to master desire," Irvine suggests, "are probably considerably less than the time and effort we will expend if we instead capitulate to our desires and spend our days, as so many do, working incessantly to fulfill whatever desire floats into our head."

"Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires," says the Gita (at 2:48), be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same."

Enlightenment Is Not Complex

There is a higher state of consciousness beyond the mind-chatter of our ordinary egoic human consciousness and the sense of suffering it engenders. It is in attaining to this higher state of consciousness, to a state of consciousness beyond the ordinary perceptive and conceptive mind, that one frees oneself from the anxieties, depressions, petty fears and annoyances that perpetually plague us. But how willing are we, really, to give up our perceptions about what we, life and the world are all about?

"Most of us want to feel better, we don't want to see that we are misperceiving things," says neo-Buddhist teacher, Adyashanti. "But that is the core of spirituality," he notes, "and the only way to really wake up is to realize that the way you perceive yourself may not be true."



"There is no such thing as a true belief," he observes. "Reality itself is simple, clear and unitary. There is nothing mysterious about it. The mystery all has to do with misperception."

"When we really start to wake up from our misperceptions, we realize reality isn't mysterious. Life isn't a big mystery. It's not really an overly complex thing. Freedom isn't complex. Enlightenment isn't complex. It is actually the opposite. It is the most simple thing. It is the most simple perception," Adyashanti notes.

Quantum Physics, Consciousness and 'Reality'

"God is in the macrocosm and in the microcosm." said Sri Ramakrishna, the great self-realized sage of late 19th-century India. In this all encompassing and prescient observation, Ramakrishna foreshadowed the struggle which scientists, philosophers and spiritual seekers alike are having in trying to understand and put into words the relationship between traditional notions of spirituality and consciousness with the findings of 'the new physics,' and the particular difficulty they have in describing the startling nature of the  quantum theory, which says an act of conscious observation is necessary to 'determine' what happens at the smallest levels of 'matter.' (Indeed, it is difficult even to think or talk about 'matter' at such small levels, where the quantum physicist describes 'matter' as a probability wave, and the determination of 'matter' as the collapse of the probability wave function triggered by an act of conscious observation.)

In the video, embedded below, a host of 'new age' spiritual teachers and scientists explain why consciousness is a fundamental component - and, perhaps, the fundamental component - of the 'stuff' our universe is made out of.

Perhaps the most important of Einstein's many crucial contributions to 'the new physics' was to show that 'matter' and 'energy' are the same thing (the logical result of relativity theory and his famous e=mc² equation). Now the great challenge, or holy grail of science, is to show how energy and consciousness itself act together in determining our physical 'reality,' a 'reality' which may not be as 'real' as we most commonly assume.

"There is no 'matter' as such," observes spiritual teacher, Wayne Dyer, quoting Max Planck, the forefather of quantum physics. "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."

"Matter seems like a good place to begin," notes medical doctor turned best-selling author and spiritual teacher,  Deepak Chopra. "The solidity of the world seems totally indisputable. As a fixed thing that you can see and touch, your body is also reassuringly solid. But beginning with Einstein, modern physics has assured us that this solidity is a mirage."

Max Planck (1858-1947)

"There is no 'matter' as such. All matter originates and
exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle
of an atom to vibration and holds this minute solar system
of the atom together. We must assume behind this force
the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This
mind is the matrix of all matter."

"It is the act of consciousness," says one commentator, "that actually creates the building blocks  the universe is made of. I can't imagine a universe that exists without us, because it is the act of us observing the world around us that is creating, (that is) allowing us to create as we go, a 'participatory universe.'"

"We may never find the edge of our universe as we are looking to define what this universe looks like," he notes. "We many never find the smallest particle in the quantum world to see what this 'stuff 'is that we are made out of. And the reason is, because everywhere we look - everywhere that consciousness explores with the expectation that something will be there - that exploration, that act of  looking (or) observation, is the act that creates something for us to see. We are actually building this universe as we go," he notes.

The Ending of Ego-Addiction: "A Pathless Land"

". . .. (T)he annihilation, cessation, and overcoming of bodily form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, this is the extinction of suffering, the end of disease, the overcoming of old age and death."

"This, truly, is the Peace, this is the Highest, namely the end of all formations, the forsaking of every substratum of rebirth, the fading away of craving, detachment, extinction, Nibbana."

("A Buddhist Bible," Dwight Goddard ed., page 32.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Perceptions, mental formations and consciousness." Over 2,500 years ago, the Buddha identified these three mental phenomena - or, perhaps, noumena, to be more precise - as the root cause of suffering. In growing up we are conditioned by the people in our lives and our culture to regard so-called "normal" perceptions, mental formations and consciousness as being our "reality."

Few even think about these concepts, much less question whether our "reality" is so "real" after all. In a very literal sense, it could be said that we are "addicted" to our thinking, and the perceptions, ideas, inner narratives and identities that we take to be who we "are."

But is that so? And what can "we" do about it?

A modern enlightened master, Jiddu Krishhnamurti would ask us to question these propositions for ourselves; yet, his life's work points us to the truth that there is a near universal addiction to the ordinary  human consciousness. We are, he would likely say, overwhelmingly ego-addicted.

"When one makes an abstraction in thought, one moves away from 'what is,'" Krishnamurti writes in his book, "The Wholeness of Life." And that, he observes, has both ethical as well as psychological implications for the individual, suggesting that our propensity to think without an awareness of what we are thinking, is a life-long 'habit.' A 'habit' we should probably quit, as it interferes with our deepest psychological functioning, the ability to love.

"That movement of abstraction," he notes, "becomes a condition according to which one lives, therefore one no longer lives according to facts. This is what one has done all one's life; but one will never know what love is through abstraction, will not know the enormous beauty, depth and significance of love."

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
". . . Truth is a pathless land . . . "

"Why does man put up with this suffering," Krishnamurti asks, utilizing his customary method of inquiry:

Why does man put up with this suffering? . . . What is it that suffers? When one says "I suffer," who is it that suffers? What is the center that says "I am in agony of jealousy, of fear of loss"? Is it the movement of thought, as time, which creates the center? How does that I come into being, which, having come into being says, "I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely". That I is never stationary, it is always moving: "I desire this, I desire that and then I desire something else", it is in constant movement. That movement is time, that movement is thought.

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  152.]

Such 'desire,' along with 'anger' and 'ignorance' is, of course, one of the "Three Poisons" that the Buddha identified as the root of our human suffering, our addiction to self, our ego-addiction. End desire, end anger, end ignorance and one will end suffering is the essence of the Buddha's "Third Noble Truth," the noble truth of the end of suffering.

The Buddha suggests a comprehensive eight point methodology to end this addiction to ego-centric thinking (his "Fourth Noble Truth," the noble truth of the eight-fold path to the end of suffering), all of which is set out to stop the 'thinking without awareness' that is the root of ego-addiction. Krishnamurti, for his part, suggests rigorous self-examination and inquiry to overcome theses thought processes

"Thought identifies itself with the name and with the form and is the I in all the content of consciousness," Krishnamurti observes. "(It) is the essence of fear hurt, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all the content of consciousness. . . . If one runs away from it, one has not solved it; but if one remains with it, not identifying oneself with it  - because one is that suffering - then all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that happens. . . . (W)hen one observes suffering in oneself, not escaping from it, but remaining with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, without any alleviation, comfort, but just completely holding to it, then one will see a strange psychological transformation take place."

And that transformation? Is it the end of "self," or ego death? One will, of course, have to find the answer to that on one's own? It was the Buddha who said, in effect, "do not take my word for it, do not worship me, find out for yourself if these truths are not real." Or, as Krishnamurti famously said to a crowd of his "followers" before setting out on his radical course of lonely self-inquiry:

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. . . . Because I am free, unconditioned, whole -- not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal -- I desire those, who seek to understand me to be free; not to follow me . . . Rather they should be free from all fears -- from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself."

["The Wholeness of Life," p.  153. Emphasis added.]

To end this addiction to thought, to end 'ego-addiction,' therefore, one must follow one's own inner path of self-inquiry and self-examination as one travels through this inner, "pathless land."

The "Present Moment" As a Mere "Consciousness of the Past"

In the first chapter of his insightful book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self," philosopher Thomas Metzinger takes us from the leading edge of cognitive neuroscience, where the search is underway for the 'neural correlates' of consciousness (the specific areas of the brain that correlate to various mental phenomena and perceptions), to a discussion of the for-now seemingly ineffable question of just what consciousness is, and back to the question of epistemology that traces its roots back to Plato's famous "Cave," and beyond.

Quite correctly, he takes us through the argument that what we see as our 'reality out there' is an internal representation of the stimuli we receive from the outer environment. What we make of it, the mental construct of what "it" is, is a purely an internal matter.

Take colour. Metzinger points out that all the colours we see are just our own internal representation of the outside field of electromagnetic radiation that falls within the frequency range that our retina can detect and relay to the visual centers in our brain (the 'neural correlates' of vision). Yet the frequency range of electromagnetic energy we cannot see - gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet rays, infra-red waves, radio waves etc. - far exceed the limited band of frequencies we can detect as colours. But still the adage that "seeing is believing" continues to hold sway in our common understanding of our 'reality.'

Interestingly, Metzinger suggests our detection abilities may be evolving. Certainly, this has been put forward by Metzinger's predecessors who have studied the phenomena of consciousness. Both the pioneering psychologist Richard M. Bucke in his classic treatise, "Cosmic Consciousness," and the philosophical polymath, Gerald Heard, in "Pain, Sex and Time," both cite the inexplicability of  the 'blue' of the Aegean Sea never being mentioned in Homer's works, its  waters being referred to as wine coloured. Both give credence to the notion that our eyesight has continued to evolve in the bottom part of the visual spectrum.

Most interestingly, Metzingers states that the two facets of our subjective consciousness which are universally evident are (a) its "spatial internality" and (b) its "tempororal internality." The 'world' we see out there is not the world at all; it is not 'reality' but, rather, is our internal construction of the stimuli that our sense receptors - eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin - bring to our attention. We live in a 3-D world of our own making which is seamlessly cobbled together from the stream of stimuli created by our 'contact' with this colourless, odourless, tasteless and undivided, silent 'outer world' of electromagnetic phenomena. The more we ponder this reality, the more it begins to feel like the Buddhist notion of the Void from which all ideas and 'things' arise in a process of 'dependent origination' within our mind.

There is a famous Buddhist saying, "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." Meant to signify that the spiritual methodology one uses to attain enlightenment is not the state of enlightened consciousness and experience, the "finger pointing at the moon" analogy suggests an interesting counterpoint to Metzinger's observation that there are two very interesting aspects of our 'ordinary' consciousness: 'spatial internality' and 'temporal internality.'

The first of these concepts, spatial internality, is straightforward. What is seemingly 'out there' impinges on our senses, we form our 'internal image' of what is 'out there' and, then, our consciousness does a flip and it seems that all we see is indeed 'out there' and is a fairly accurate (if limited) representation of what is 'external' to us. However, 'temporal internality,' while equally convincing, seems to me to be an inherently inaccurate picture of what is 'external.'

"Conscious experience, as such," Metzinger observes, "is an internal affair. Whatever else may or may not be true about consciousness, once all the internal properties of your nervous system are set, all the properties of your conscious experience - its subjective content and the way it feels to you are fully determined. By "internal" I mean not only spatial but also temporal internality - whatever is taking place right now, at this very moment. As soon as certain properties of your brain are fixed, everything you are experiencing at this moment is also fixed."

It seems to me that the latter part of Metzinger's analysis dealing with "temporal internality" is evidently wrong, and just tends to reinforce the 'reductionist view' that consciousness is just a by-product of a highly evolved brain. Take the man (above) with his 'finger pointing at the moon.' He 'sees' his arm, his finger, perhaps some clouds, the moon, and the panopoly of stars behind the moon. According to Metzinger, this would be (from our pictured man's point of view) "what is taking place right now, at this very moment, when "everything (he) is experiencing at this moment is also fixed."

Yet, we know that what he is "seeing" is the light from the stars and that reflected by the moon illuminating the clouds, the finger, and the man's arm. And we know that this light is travelling at a uniform 300,000-odd kilometres per second. The light from the man's fingertip is reflected a split nano-second before the light illuminating his arm. The reflected light from the moon takes just over 2 seconds to travel the 700,000 or so kilometers that lies between the man's fingertip and the moon.

And the stars? Their light has been travelling for hundreds or thousands of years (or perhaps much more) to reach our man who sits quiescently pointing at the moon behind which they lie. (The closest stars - those in the Alpha Centauri star system - are 4.35 light years distant from the earth, while the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way - the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the only galaxy visible to the naked eye - lies 2.65 million light years beyond the man's outstretched fingertip.)

Indeed, it takes a nano-second or so for the light gathered in the man's eye to travel through his neural circuitry and register the images of "what is taking place right now" in the visual cortex. So, in a very real sense, whenever we 'look out, to the stars (particularly when we are looking at the far distant objects in the night sky) we are looking into the past. Sound waves are incredibly slower than light, so in actuality, what we hear is a 'dim echo' of our past. And while the sense of what we touch, together with our taste and the fragrances we smell, are more immediate, we still 'grope' in the darkness 'blindly,' so to speak.

In one of the most familiar passages in the New Testament, Paul observes that: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (I Corinthians 13:12) It is a prescient reminder that our consciousness is much more than what we see, perhaps much more than we think . . . or even can think.

And each time we gaze at the stars, it is a reminder that  we are all only cognizant of what has already passed, that we are in actuality blind to the present let alone the future, but that we are able to take (and are taking) actions the effects of which we will only come to know in time. Each time, this is a reminder that the laws of karma - the laws of cause and effect - are operative; and we do not, and cannot, know what those effects will be precisely, though we are good "guessers" or prognosticators. Therefore, we should treat our ever-changing present moment with the care and respect which are its due.

As the stoic, neo-platonist Roman Emperor. Marcus Aurelius, observed: "All we ever have to live and lose is this ever passing present moment."

"Fragments" from Bohm's "Implicate Order"

“. . . If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For what we know is incomplete and what we prophesy is incomplete. But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will be done away with.. . . Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully . . ."

(I Corinthians 13:8-12)

David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

David Bohm, the renowned physical theorist - who was at once the contemporary, colleague and friend of both Einstein and the renowned spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti - proposed that there is a for-now imperceivable "Implicate Order" within which our perceivable universe (the "Explicate Order") unfolds. "I would say," he wrote in his treatise, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order," "that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment. . . ."

Over and over, Bohm observes that the basic problem we have in understanding ourselves, each other, and the basic nature of our 'reality' - particularly in the West, which is still in the grips  of a more-or-less 'classical' Newtonian worldview - is that we tend to break up or "fragment" the universe, the world, mankind, and even our thoughts, in order to 'understand' them, rather than trying to obtain a holistic vision of what we perceive.

"Being guided by this view," he observes, "man then acts in such a way as to try and break himself and the world up so that all seems to correspond to this way of thinking. He therefore obtains an apparent proof of his fragmentary self-world-view." (This echoes Einstein's comments about the commonly held world-view that he described as a sort of cosmic "optical delusion of [man's] consciousness.") It is a world-view that has grave implications, according to Bohm:

"Fragmentation is . . . an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. . . .

When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first - his own person, his own group - he can't seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. Even if he does try to put mankind first, he will perhaps think of nature as something different to be exploited to satisfy whatever desires he may have at the moment. Similarly he will think body and mind are independent actualities. . . . Physically this is not conducive to over-all health which means wholeness, and mentally, not to sanity which also has a similar meaning."

In a five-part 1989 interview (hosted on SeekerAfterTruth.com) that was filmed at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Bohm lucidly - given his vast knowledge, wide yet cohesive interests, and keen intellect - holds forth on a wide range of interrelated topics.  These include the relationship of the quantum and relativity theories to a holistic spiritual or metaphysical view of our 'reality,' the interconnectedness of all 'things' (including humankind) in a 'Wholeness,' the conflict between Western and Eastern worldviews, and the underlying 'deep roots' of the world's looming environmental problems - problems which stem from our treating world resources as separate "fragments" instead of the interrelated parts of a larger whole.

The "must-see" Bohm interviews capture one of the great minds, as well as great spiritual seekers, of the past 100 years at the height of his understanding of the "inter-relatedness" of all 'things' in the universe and our tendency to perceptively and conceptually break 'everything,' including (perhaps most importantly) our human interactions into 'fragmentary,' unrelated pieces.