This world is moving. Moving at a fast speed. Something is pumping it up to make it thumping and going. Like something is pumping in your heart that is making your blood go around your body in full circle. The world is going round and round full circle. It is creation, destruction and recreation.
But the mind is not able to see it. Modern science is against this Eastern wisdom. It needs proof that every cause has an effect. Sigmund Freud calls it eros — the instinct to live and thanatos the instinct to die. For Freud man is just a matter and nothing beyond matter. Freud does not say that there is something in man that is beyond matter — nonmatter. The whole Western psychology denies the existence of non-matter. That is the bane of psychology.
World comes into being from nothing. Science agrees that if the world is, there would be time that it would not have been before therefore, it is. Science agrees that the universe was formed with space and time and the universe is expanding. Therefore, as an anti-thesis of expansion, science invented the Big Bang theory. But about that space and time theory and its cause and effect, science ends. Science remains in a self-restraint mode.
Science knows the world or universe as matter in space and time. Beyond that science does not comprehend. Because it is fettered in its bondage of matter, space and time. It does not go beyond what the East has discovered for thousands of years. Buddha calls its ‘emptiness’.
Man is made of matter. And a stone is also made of matter. Between stone and man, both are made of matter. Man is matter. Matter is matter. The matter was not matter because of non-matter that incarnates matter. The non-matter is also matter. When non-matter goes out of it, matter behaves just as matter. This world is created with matter.
Science agrees. Buddha also agrees. But Buddha describes the journey of a subatomic particle, the matter, to non-matter. Science agrees that matter is moving itself in certain patterns and is changing forms from one to the other at sub-atomic particle level. The matter is like a non-matter in a deep state of slumber. Stone does not move a bit. Only Newton can comprehend how inertia works when stone is thrown in the air. Cause and effect is certainty for Newton but quantum biology has gone a little beyond it. It says subatomic particles tunnel into each other. As science has gone deeper, they find that subatomic particles are behaving not according to the patterns of cause and effect but with uncertainty, just as waves particularly sound waves. Hindus call it Om — the Anhad Naad, the soundless sound.
In the East we say that a stone will gain wakefulness one day. The particles will shatter away and its consciousness will wake up in it. From a deep state of sleep it will be conscious. It is like saying that when a dot starts walking it creates a line. From the state of asleep to consciousness. Like a seed, a stone is evolving to be able to explode into life. The stone is in the absolute state of being with consciousness sleeping in it. When life’s wakefulness happens to it, time will be bred into it. Before that stone has no past, no future. Stones appeared dead. When consciousness happens, a tree is born from a seed. Seed is just a stone with a tree-code imprinted on it. Similarly, stone has a code of consciousness embedded in it. Animals are a little more conscious than trees and humans are more conscious than animals. Between it there are animals and man. Animals become more conscious of themselves when they feel hungry or are attacked by others or injured. But they have freedom that is limited to their past choices only. The consciousness in man is infinite and absolute.
Therefore matter is not the opposite of consciousness or against it. There is consciousness in matter. But that consciousness is sleeping in it. Consciousness will flower one day. It will wake up one day, like a Buddha.
You must have seen the statue of Buddha. Someone asked Bhikku referring to a Buddha stone statue: “Why Buddha in my house does not blink and is so still?” Bhikku replied, “Because it has become a witness and one day it is going to be Buddha.” Freud cannot fathom it because he works only with a material state of consciousness. When life enters matter, freedom enters, it frees matter. Freud can enter to fathom it now. In comparison to what Buddha has perceived 2,500 years ago, modern science seems primitive to fathom it even today. Buddha said that one has to pass through all forms to finally be the formless so that that-which-is the formless is attained or known by you in totality.
Consciousness is ultimate flowering. Mind is not needed when you are fully awake, fully conscious, but mind is needed when you are neither in the state of deep slumber nor fully awake. In between. If you are not ready to be fully conscious, you will live in your mind. Mind is a string of thoughts. For it to happen, ego is needed. Thoughts live in patterns and the mind creates a false centre of ego to exist for its own existence. Mind cannot function without ego. Therefore, in egolessness, the mind flies away. In matter, consciousness is asleep, therefore no time is no mind. If you are living fully in the being you are living in eternity. Buddha asks us to live in the now-ness of being where time and mind is not needed. But man is thinking of the future. He is living in anxieties of the future.
Worldly progress comes through anxiety. Anxiety of doing something and fear of failure breeds anxiety and tension. But man can live in absolute selfconsciousness. You have to drop the time that has bred the mind, the mind that bred ego, and ego that bred anxieties of the future — and drop the mind to be awakened. Buddha says form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, and form is not other than emptiness. There is only infinite consciousness.
No name, no form. In emptiness insight starts functioning. From intellect, intelligence is formed. The condensation of teachings of Buddha is just that he tells that mind is that we are in the absolute state of nothingness. Matter is part of nothingness. Forms are part of nothingness.
In nothingness that-which-is is. You can know it. Because you are in it. In fact, you are it. Nothingness means nothing to obstruct; when nothing obstructs, you can see the truth naked. You are both matter and non-matter without them torn apart. Both happen on the canvas of nothingness. Buddha says that you go beyond matter, then you go beyond mind, thought, thinking, self-ego and you go beyond the beyond. That is when matter meets nonmatter. That is what the circle of life is, that is when one is biting one’s own tail one is chasing. And in pure emptiness you are absolutely empty. You are in ecstasy.
The author is a spiritual coach and an independent advisor on policy, governance and leadership. He can be contacted at arunavlokitta@gmail.com.