The Creation

Inner Cosmos, Tapestry by Maximo Laura, Peru

One of the strange thing about experience, we noticed, is that it is ever changing. In fact, no change means no experience. So change, even though not existing independently from experience, is fundamental. It deserves the title of Truth. When we observe closely, we find that what is changing is patterns, all kinds of patterns. That gives us some clues about the manifested reality, because, manifestation is nothing but patterns, all kinds of patterns.

The Experience

After dissecting the Experiencer, we take a look at the other aspect of the Presence - the Experience. We immediately find that the Experience part is much more exciting, happening, rich and very mysterious. It is all that is manifested.

Mind Map

Iconic Map of Universal Mind

It is our direct experience that Presence is dynamic. There is activity, there is change. Although there is this static unchanging aspect of it which we know as the experiencer, or "I" or pure consciousness. Ultimately both dynamic and static aspects are just one. That which changes becomes an experience and that which is changeless becomes the experiencer. There is not much to the experiencer part, it is just empty awareness, a silent witness, the light that illuminates the changing part, except that it is essential and necessary for all the experiences, it is plain boring :). The interesting things are the dynamics, the endless activity, unceasing and ever-creating patterns. This is seen as the manifested Presence, the Universal Mind.

We will try to create a map of it all - the biggest possible picture.

Introspection - 2 : Experiencing Change

Goal

We will attempt to experience change directly. We will try to see where this change happens and how it gets interpreted by the mind.

Prerequisites

Everything as before, plus it is best seen where there is some activity, such as a public place, but not too crowded or noisy.

Question - what is happening? 

Simply observe everything in an inclusive way, as was done for the previous introspection. There is Presence and there is Self as usual. Since the enquiry is formulated in a particular way, your attention will be drawn to differences in the experiences or activity. Do not name or describe them, just observe neutrally.

This introspection shows you something extraordinary - there is Change. The experiences are never the same. Some things change slowly such as your house and some change quickly such as the traffic outside on the road.

The Experience of the World

The story so far - the Presence acting as Self has a universal Mind which has instances of individual minds that are interfaced via structures known as brains to vehicles known as bodies. The bodies find themselves among other structures that are less connected to individual minds. These are far less complex compared to the body or the brain and are governed by algorithmic rule sets. When interpreted via senses these appear in various shapes, sizes, textures, smells etc. localized in space. We will call them Objects and a collection of objects is a World [1].

Objects are experienced and so is world. And like everything else these are subjected to Experiencing - the changing attribute of the Presence. The Experiencing results in a dynamic world that is impermanent. Everything in this world changes, appears and disappears. Some objects change faster than others and some change slowly. Some are complex and some are simple. But all objects are merely forms created out of fundamental structures, that are very simple and do not change much. We see only the forms and label them with names. This creates the familiar representation of a world of names and forms in the Mind.

The world appears on the screen of the Self. The change appears as experiences. The Mind neatly organizes the change into experiences of objects and their interactions. This is all there is as far as direct experience of the world is concerned. It exists and the Self witnesses it, and that’s the full story. Its a game, a play, nothing more.

Afflictions of the Mind : Part -2 (The Trick of Time)

Persistence of memory - Salvador Dali

 
2. The Trick of Time

We have already seen how the Mind employs a neat trick to put all the experiences in an easily accessible sequence. It uses an axis called time and marks the events on it. Experiences happen, they don’t come with a time stamp attached to them, the Mind adds the stamp. It makes the experiences more organized and their recall (simulation via impressions) easier. Whenever there is a change, there is an experience, or we can as well define an experience as Change (which we have already done, see Experiencing). So change is more fundamental. Some changes happen at seemingly regular fashion, such as change of a day into night, orbit of the earth around the Sun and vibrations of atoms. This allows us to compare an irregular change with regular one, and we can express the irregular change in terms of regular one. Thus the Physical Time is born, which is just a regular change, it is not an entity, as it does not exists as such, its merely a concept. We use devices, clocks, to count the regular changes. Comparing an irregular experience with the counts of a clock immediately gives more information about the change, and the concepts of slow or fast are created. Now we can stamp a number on an event, making it even more structured. Physical time is derived from physical changes that happen around us, but there is another time – the Subjective Time, which is based on mental changes, and has no correspondence with physical one [3].

Creating the Experience

We have seen in the previous articles, some strange property of the Presence is responsible for the birth of the Self. By "property" I mean its ability to be either as a static witness or just as existence. When it assumes the form of a witness, it experiences itself as Self, otherwise it remains as Experiencing. It means, it can become two, while being only one, quite paradoxically. The two being the experience and the experiencer. But it does not stop there, it wants to become many.

We now explore this even stranger aspect of the Presence, which is the Experiencing. Its not merely a random process of modulations happening in the Presence, it has some interesting properties. Not only does Experiencing form impressions on the Presence, it also self-organizes itself in the form of various structures [8]. It’d be equivalent to say that the Presence self-organizes itself. Or in other words, it creates. The structures thus created are the Creation.