91. The world of infinite possibilities

Now, what is the origin of matter and energy? What is the origin of the body and mind? From where does the energy in all objects arise? What then is the reality behind this perceived world? If we are not able to see reality as it exists through the senses, what is the nature of reality?

This question is asked in the Shiva Sutras, an ancient vedic scripture on the science of enlightenment. Shiva's consort Devi asks Him, 'What is the nature of this wonderfilled universe?' As a response, Shiva delivers 112 enlightenment techniques

This whole Existence and all its events happen as causeless auspiciousness.

which, when practiced, give the answer as a direct exp-

erience!

This question about reality leads us to a world beyond matter and energy, beyond the limitations of space and time. This is the world where all the possibilities exist as seed. It is the essence and the origin of thoughts, and it is the essence and origin of events in the material world.

In this world-beyond, ordinary logic does not exist. Cause and effect relationships do not exist. The happening of one event does not cause another event to happen, but it is correlated with the other event that happens. This correlation has no dependence on space and time. So what we call the seed is the ocean of infinite possibilities from which the waves of events arise.

This whole Existence and all its events happen as causeless auspiciousness, like waves arising in an ocean. Existence is an ocean of bliss and ecstasy. Out of the causeless, overflowing ecstasy, the wave of creation rises in the ocean of Existence! That is how things happen. The Divine, playing with its infinite manifestations in innumerable universes is called sustenance. Dropping from the play and relaxing into Itself is called dissolution. Dissolution is the settling back into the Absolute or Parabrahma* state. Then for no logical reason, the play starts again…! This continues. What we see as results are the infinite happenings in the universe.

The real nature

We see this causeless and ecstatic play of Existence through our own individual perception! Our very perception collapses the beautiful happening into a localized reality. Each individual 'boils down' the beautiful happening into his own individual reality.

Someone asked me, 'I see this table here. All the people in this room see this same table. Then how can you say that this table is not a reality?' Please understand that what you see as this table here is not the same as what the other person sees! Each person in this room sees this table differently! That is the truth. That is what I am trying to explain here.

As long as the mind tries to perceive, what is perceived is not the ultimate reality. Only an infinite being can perceive reality exactly as it is happening. Also he cannot explain it in words, because words cannot describe what is beyond space and time.

Parabrahma - Supreme Being.

He can only tell you to wait for it to become your own experience! That is why Shiva answers not with philosophy but with techniques. He directly gives techniques for Devi to experience the reality, the nature of the universe.

Let me explain this concept based on the energy-matter idea. We saw that matter is actually energy. Classical physics said that the electron is a particle. However, quantum physics says that it is a wave. Actually, the electron exhibits the properties of both a particle and a wave in different situations. Physicists have now concluded that the electron has a dual nature as a 'particle-wave'!

The act of observation collapses possibility into reality

Since the electron is a particle, what is the location of the electron? Since it is a wave, what is the momentum of the wave? The answers to these questions lead to a very startling discovery that the particle-wave can be either a particle or a wave or even both at the same time. But you cannot determine both the location and the momentum of the electron at the same time, because the very act of observing the location of the electron will change its momentum, and the very act of determining the momentum of the electron will change its location! This is

what is known in science as the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.

The particle-wave is both a particle and wave at the same time until the act of observation comes into play. This act of observation can now be connected with our act of observing the causeless happenings of Existence. When we observe, we observe through our own set of conditioning, what we call engrams or preconceived and deeply engraved memories and conclusions. Each individual's act of observation is colored by his own conditioning or engrams. Based upon that, he boils down the happening to suit his own experience of reality!

In the case of the particle-wave, the very act of observation 'collapses' the waveparticle to a particle or wave. This is what the physicist Erwin Schrödinger showed in his hypothetical cat experiment.

Suppose you put a cat and a vial of poisonous acid in a chamber and seal it. There is no way the observer outside can determine whether the cat is alive or dead. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead as well as alive. It is a distribution of probabilities which includes the probability of dead as well as alive states.

When you break open the chamber to see the condition of the cat, the very act of breaking open the chamber could potentially change the state of the cat. The

The very act of observation changes the possibility into a particular reality.

cat could be killed by the acid vial being broken due to

breaking the chamber. So, it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed in its true happening.

This leads us to a deep understanding that both possibilities exist simultaneously, and it is the very act of observation that changes the possibility into a particular reality.

Let me give another scientific experiment that highlights how the very act of measuring distorts the beautiful reality. You may have heard of the double-slit experiment with light.

In this experiment, a beam of light is aimed at a barrier with two vertical slits. On the other side of the barrier is a photographic plate that is used to record the light as it falls on it after passing through the barrier. If only one slit is open, the pattern on the photographic plate is as expected, a single line of light aligned with the slit. If both the slits are open, we would expect two lines of light on the plate aligned with the slits, but what is observed are multiple lines of light and darkness in varying degrees. This is the principle of interference where light beams behave as waves that interfere with each other.

Now, if the light beam is slowed down enough so that instead of a stream of light particles or photons hitting the plate, each photon individually hits the plate, then there should be no interference and the plate should show a light pattern aligned with the slit. But the resulting pattern still showed interference!

How is this possible? There is only this one photon, what can it be interfering with… other than itself? It was concluded that each photon not only goes through both the slits, but also simultaneously takes every possible path on the way to the target!

To see how this can occur, experiments were done to track the individual photon paths. But what happened was that the measurement in some way disrupted the paths of the photons. Whenever an attempt was made to observe, only two bright lines on the photographic plate aligned with the slits! If they didn't attempt to measure, again the pattern became the multiple lines of light and darkness!

Each photon moves simultaneously in a number of paths. But an effort to measure the paths causes it to collapse to a single path! In the same way, our very effort to perceive the infinite risings of the ocean of Existence causes it to appear as what our limited mind perceives!

Once a student asked a Zen master, 'What is the path?' The master replied, 'Everyday life is the path.' The student asked, 'Can it be studied?'

The master said, 'If you try to study, you will be far from it.' The student asked, 'If I do not study, how can I know it is the path?'

The master said, 'The path does not belong to the perception world. Neither does it belong to the non-perception world. Perception is a delusion and non-perception is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.'

Physiology of perception

Let us start with what really happens on a physical level when we perceive things.

When there is a perception of physical reality, the various parts of the brain show a change in neural activity as the neurons, which are the basic building blocks of the nervous system, fire in synchronicity. This results in the random visual patterns of light being perceived as specific shapes and forms. This is how the input from each of our senses is perceived as an experience of particular sound, touch, smell, taste or sight.

Each photon moves simultaneously in a number of paths. But an effort to measure the paths causes it to collapse to a single path!

If you now step back and look, you can see that before the observation or the perception, both the world as well as you, that is the seen and the seer, existed in a dynamic and chaotic state of activity. The act of perception changes that chaotic state into some sort of an order that becomes both the seen in the outside world and the process of seeing in the seer (as the activity in the nervous system) at the same time. At the moment of seeing, the probability of what is seen collapses into a specific form.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, the lord and master, chooses to give Arjuna* the experience of Krishna's cosmic form. Until then, Arjuna* had seen Krishna only as the six foot tall, handsome friend. But upon Arjuna's request, and after Krishna sees that Arjuna is ready to receive the cosmic

Arjuna - Warrior prince and the third of the five brothers of the Pandava family in the great Indian epic Mahabharata. He was a disciple of enlightened master Krishna and received the wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita from Krishna.

form experience, He decides to give it to him. Arjuna then sees Krishna as the manifestation of the entire cosmos in all its seeming chaos.

He cries out, 'O Lord! I can see all the gods and deities in Your body. I can see all the sages and divine serpents. O Lord of the Universe, I see many arms, stomachs, faces, eyes and your limitless form. O Universal Form, I cannot see your beginning, middle or end.'

Arjuna is unable to bear the experience because he loses his intellectual control over things! He begs for equilibrium, meaning he wants his mind to be under his intellectual control again. He wants to know the cause and effect of things and feel that they are in his control, because the experience rips him away from his perception of the cause-and-effect logic itself.

As long as cause and effect logic is under your control, you feel you are perceiving reality! Your ego is strong and steady. But the moment the logic is shaken, you feel tremendous fear. You feel you are just a drop in an ocean. What Arjuna sees is the absolute Reality, but he is afraid of that very Reality because it doesn't conform to his logic. He begs to revert to the earlier state of perception through his five senses alone, through his own solid identity, his own solid ego.

Perception of space-time

Let us analyze what space is.

The 1D, 2D and 3D Worlds

Take a basic element, a point, a onedimensional object. When a point traces across a direction, it generates a line.

Now, let us trace the motion of a line, a two-dimensional object. If it moves in the

same direction as it is in, of course it will just continue to be a line. If it moves in a direction not contained in it, it traces a surface or a plane.

Similarly, if a surface or a plane moves in a direction not contained in it, it will trace a solid, a three-dimensional object.

So, a line is an infinite number of points. A surface is an infinite number of lines. A solid is infinite number of surfaces. Similarly, we can imagine a four dimensional space as an infinite number of three dimensional spaces.

Now, just as we built up these higher dimensions from the lower dimensions, we can also see the lower dimensions as parts or sections of a higher dimension space.

For example, a point is the intersection of two lines. So, a point is a section of a line.

A line is a section of a surface. A surface is a section of a solid.

Extending this, we can say a solid is a section of a four-dimensional body. Our three dimensional space is a section of a four dimensional space. P.D.Ouspensky* , in his book Tertium Organum, explains these very beautifully. He extends this to say that many separate three dimensional bodies, like humans for instance, may actually be the sections or parts of one four dimensional body!

He explains this with a simple example. Suppose a horizontal plane intersects the top of a tree, parallel to the surface of the earth. Now, on this plane, the sections of branches seem to be all separate, not

P.D.Ouspensky - Russian philosopher, mathematician and student of enlightened master George Gurdjieff.

connected to each other. But, from the three dimensional space, we can see that these are all sections of branches of one single tree.

The four dimensional world of space-time

In our four-dimensional world, the maximum dimensions in space can be only three. We can call this fourth dimension time. So, the four dimensional world can be looked at as a space-time continuum. It can be said that time is the fourth dimension of space.

We understand time in three forms – past, present and future. We think that the past is over and does not exist anymore. The future has not yet happened, hence it does not exist. The present thus happens at the transition of the non-existent future to another non-existence, the past.

In the three dimensional world, we see that the seemingly separate sections of the tree in the two dimensional world are actually joined in the third dimension. In the same way, if we imagine a consciousness that can rise above our plane of living, this consciousness can also see the continuity in the fourth dimension of time with the past, present and future all existing simultaneously. This consciousness sees the simultaneous happening of events, which the ordinary consciousness sees as distinct events separated by periods of time.

A three dimensional body, moving in time, traces a four dimensional body. Across time, we can see the motion as we grow from a child to youth, to adult, to elderly person. But we are not able to see or feel this 'four-dimensional body' because of our limited perception. Being in the same three-dimensional world, we see only the section of the four dimensional body that is the normal three-dimensional body. It is like one of a series of pictures on a cinema roll.

To understand how a four-dimensional world is perceived in three-dimensional form, let us first see how a threedimensional happening is seen in a twodimensional world.

Suppose you are in a two-dimensional world, the world of planes and surfaces. Your life, your perception is restricted to a plane, like a vertical wall. Now, imagine a wheel with each of its spokes painted in a different color is rotating perpendicular to the plane in which you live.

How will you perceive the motion of this wheel? When a spoke of the wheel intersects the plane, you will see a line of a certain color at the intersection of the wheel and the plane. Then, after one spoke passes, there will be a gap when you will not see anything. Then, the next spoke of a different color will pass through the plane. So, you will perceive the motion of the wheel as lines of different colors happening at regular intervals of time.

What is happening is this, the limited perception in a lower dimensional world is changing the perception of space to a phenomenon in time! Since you can see only two of the three dimensions of space, you see the third dimension only when it becomes manifest on your plane over time. Hence, you see it as unrelated to your two dimensions of space, and you call it a

phenomenon in time.

Now, imagine when a green spoke passes through the plane, simultaneously The limited perception in a lower dimensional world is changing the perception of space to a phenomenon in time!

another independent phenomenon occurs, say the barking of a dog. In the two dimensional world, it will be seen as a correlation between the appearance of the green line and the sound of a dog barking, when in reality it is not!

It is not possible for the two-dimensional being to believe that there can be a rise of events outside his plane of perception. That means, to understand the threedimensional world, he cannot be in the twodimensional consciousness, he has to rise to the three-dimensional consciousness. Similarly, to understand the fourdimensional world, we have to be in the fourth-dimensional consciousness.

Is this possible? Is it possible for us to go beyond the perception of the senses which give us only a three dimensional view? Can we actually see reality instead of mere glimpses of reality as phenomena in time? The answer is YES.

Through in-depth rese-arch and development, the Eastern mystics and sages have discovered that it is possible to understand

From whatever quality of consciousness we see, that appears as our reality.

Reality as it exists and to experience it also. This can happen

as a natural way of life, not just as a chance happening. This experience has happened in them.

Through meditation, it is possible for us to experience this same state of awareness.

A beautiful Zen story:

Once, two soldiers were looking at a flag flying in the wind. One of them said, 'The flag is moving.' The second one said, 'No, it is the wind that is moving.'

A Zen master passing by saw the argument going on. The soldiers requested the master to help them resolve this serious issue.

One of the soldiers asked, 'Master, I say the flag is moving. But he says the wind is moving. Which is correct?'

The master says, 'Neither is correct. Only consciousness is moving.'

As of now, what we feel as reality everyday of our life is also a 'virtual' reality. It is only a perception of things being separate in space and time. If you look deeply, you can see how our very perception of the world itself is questionable. From whatever quality of consciousness we see,

that appears as our reality, not the absolute Reality.