You are the one free miracle
Terence McKenna said of science; grant one free miracle and then we can explain all the rest. By seeking an explanation for how nature behaves, we have already assumed a ground of being. A first cause that by definition cannot be explained by another.
Under idealism, the miracle is not a big bang or laws of nature. The miracle is you, the consciousness from which all of nature springs.
Right now, even as you read these words, you can recognise that you are universal consciousness reading these words.
It is the same awareness reading this part of this sentence as the one that is reading this part. It is the same awareness experiencing your body now as the one that was experiencing your body when you were ten, or five, or zero. It is the same awareness looking through your eyes as your neighbour’s, the bird that flies past your window or the earth worm in your garden.
This field of subjectivity is host to your body, your memories, your plans for a future. It doesn’t go anywhere, rather, different places and events go through it. Just as when you dream, many scenarios pass through the mind without the body moving neither forward nor back, neither right nor left. Just as how the road rushes by whilst your body sits static in your car, so life unfolds in the quiet stillness of the one field of subjectivity.
Why am I here and now, not there and then?
Why is nature this way, not that?
When the central insight of idealism is absorbed, some questions are not solved, they disappear.
Like with the Hard Problem of Consciousness, they require a hard look at long held assumptions. A combination of analysis and introspection, and to recognise when a statement is tautological - true because it simply repeats the same idea in different words, or with circular logic.
For example, could God have chosen for things to be some other way? If we answer yes, we are still left with the fact that things are as they are, and the choice was made based on what God is. Even if we posit multiple universes, they are all as they are and not some other way. Since nothing exists outside of nature to constrain or compel its behaviour, it is how it is because it is what it is. Free will and determinism are one.
Seeking primordial wisdom
This meeting opened with Jamey Hecht's evocative poem on Odysseus and his encounter with the Sirens. These mythical twin sisters "know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth". In most cases, to hear them is to lose one's mind.
There might be ways, however, to experience the primordial state without losing our dissociative boundary. To bind our bodies to the mast of our ship and take in the music of eternity and not lose our minds.
Bernardo was more clear on the tangible fruits of this philosophy in his business life, but accused himself of hand-waving when trying to explain it. I felt the opposite. The direct-pointing of the non-dual tradition can be at once disappointing, bewildering and exhilarating. And when you're pointing at the infinite, shouldn't we expect our hands to wave around a little?
I look forward, as ever, to your reflections in the comments below.
Enjoy!
Amir
Time Stamps
0:00:00 The Sirens - Poem by Jamie Hecht
0:15:00 Death & the most familiar feeling
0:20:30 Why am I here & now, not there & then?
0:32:00 Soul - a useful fiction
0:40:00 The true you vs egoic you
0:47:00 Why is nature the way it is?
0:52:00 Letting the play of life unfold
1:18:00 The possibility of parallel universes
1:28:00 Metacognition was dormant in nature
1:33:00 We cannot know what will happen
1:35:00 Imagination: an authentic mode of self-discovery
1:39:00 Individuality after death?
1:47:00 The primordial state experienced during life
1:55:00 Even spiders dream
