Am I going mad?

Boethius knew that time is a game.  As did Teresa of Avila.  Siddhartha knew, but he didn’t care that much.  He was concerned with the bigger picture, the glorious, spinning, stationary unity of it all.  But the vast armillary sphere of reality, in its oneness, is no different than the bizarrely resolved chord of my individual life.  By looking at it, from the knowledge that it doesn’t exist, can I perhaps find peace?

The future, of course, does not exist.  Most people would agree that what I have now is not what I will have then—that what will be is not what is.  And yet this multitude of atoms of which the Tathagata speaks is said by the Tathagata to be no multitude.  Thus it is called ‘a multitude of atoms’.  Neither atoms of dust nor worlds are real.  Our personal multitude of present perceptions is neither real nor unreal.  It neither exists nor does not exist.  Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive, nor not alive.  But it does not, as some think, exist in some intermediate state.  Such a state would be a convenient, but meaningless theoretical construct, designed to spare us the discomfort of the fact that the cat is neither alive nor not alive.  It neither exists nor does not exist.  To say that there is some third option is no more a solution than to answer “I don’t know”. 

That which we are experiencing seems to fold in upon itself to cause some future reality, the nature of which we do not yet know.  But this is a trick of perception, an illusion fueled by a belief in separation, in sequences, in divisions of time.   Our present is not causing our future, however.  The future and the present are parts of the same Rubik’s cube, and the turns of one side do not cause the shifts on the other.  They happen simultaneously.  The cause and the effect are indistinguishable.  Did we move that red square so that it is next to another red square?  Or so that the white square on the other side is in a better position? Yes.

And this is what Boethius saw in his prison.  He saw time from above, not from within, and that it was one flower, infinitely unfolding into and out of itself, and that one what seemed to be the center, was in fact more petals, as was what seemed to be the base.  The nunc stans does not distinguish between one part and another.  And so is it said that each petal is neither real nor unreal.  A shadow is not real.  It has no substance, no identity.  It does not exist in any explicable way.  And yet we see it.  Shadows cast by light are tricks of perception.  As are shadows cast by time.

But just as the red square and the white square, that which we call the present and that which we call the future, have no meaningful distinction, turning and moving as they do simultaneously, so too does the yellow square move.  That which we call the past has no mind of its own, no volition, no separate existence.  Even those who accept the meaninglessness of the future bristle at the suggestion that the past does not exist.  But it is no different.  How many revisions has our past undertaken?  How many times have we twisted the red square into position, and found the yellow square somewhere new?  And yet it does exist.  Furthermore, Bhagavan, this perception of the past of which the Tathagata speaks is said by the Tathagata to be no perception.  Thus is it called the ‘perception of the past’. 

It is not difficult to conceive that our future is formed even as our present unfolds.  Neither is it absurd to suppose that the movements of our past have caused our present to be what it is.  But every movement has three parts—and, of course, no parts at all, and six parts, and parts without number.  Every motion of the red square changes the entire cube.  Every movement of the present has as great an effect on the past as it does on the future.  The past is subject to the constant unfolding and whirring of reality no less than the future is.  And it all exists as one, viewed from a prison cell, until the pieces click into place and we are free.  A Rubik’s cube that disappears once it has been solved, only to never have existed.