The Immensity

What is the end of our search? Or is the endless search its own end? The movement of life with its turns and twists experienced as joys and sorrows comes from a deep Unknown and seems to move towards an even deeper Unknown. While going through the business of being alive, there is an intensity of awareness which seems to come from a source much deeper than memory and hope. Awareness inheres in a timeless, spaceless grand essence which is neither of being nor of nothingness. At an earlier juncture, I would have been content to see a holistic awareness as the grand essence. But it increasingly seems apparent that the essence transcends awareness. The Grand Essence speaks through Awareness but is neither of awareness nor of oblivion. Neither being nor nothingness penetrate it. Indeed, what is being from one vantage point is nothingness from another. In the night, when I go off to sleep and enter the universe of dreams, it can also be said that I wake up from the waking sleep into the dreaming wakefulness. This long dream that I take for life seems mere nothingness compared to the transcendental experiences of a tremendous expansion that touch me at times. Those times seem free from the very notions of time and space and my entire life as a human being and experience as a human body seem like evanescent visions in a hypnotic mist. When I say I do not really feel I am only human or am living a truly ‘real’ life, I do not mean it in an abstract or philosophical sense. Even a dream cannot be called a dream until it meets its end in a higher reality. Here the maxim is that Reality is as Imagined as Imagination is Real. Ultimately, what is taken as reality and what as imagination is a matter of conviction and hidden predilections. I am not talking about a purely ideational negation of the reality of the objective world for that would be mere wishful thinking and reality is too obdurate for such escapism to last for long. I am talking about an experiential realization of a reality so immense and transcendental that empirical reality and the usual life utterly pales in its comparison. Clearly, such an experience doesn’t happen to many and is not bound to happen again even if it happens once but to those who touch the Transcendental, the sharpness of the empirical reality is blunted forever. My own experiences of the Vast oceanic awareness has made me an onlooker, a stranger to the mirage like shadows of human life. I know integration is desirable and even necessary but at times the human dimension seems too prosaic for me to want to be integrated with it. Everything is half-baked here. The Whole is not amenable to human categorizations like good and evil or existential speculation like Being and Nothingness. Even the immensity of physical universe is neither Being nor Nothingness. The stars we see in the night sky are not what they seem. Too many light years have passed and some of them have withered before there light could reach us. And the very notion of an infinite Universe is built upon the juxtaposition of an infinite points of condensed matter, the stars in space illumined by their expansion. If the points were taken away, the space would be neither finite nor infinite, neither of being nor of nothingness. Without matter, space is neither empty nor full; indeed it is hardly space. It is the great Unknown, the immensity which can contain absolutely anything. For awareness, the Great Immensity is revealed when all thoughts become still without even an iota of dullness because thought-patterns in the mind function as starry constellations in the spaceless and timeless physical trans-universe. Just as stars create both time and space, thought-patterns create psychological time and space and the resultant web of pleasure and pain, hope and fear et al. Meditation is then the retention of profound awareness minus any content; an awareness of Awareness rather than an awareness of thought. The pure Awareness free from all content is the window to that which transcends Awareness itself and is absolutely beyond everything, beyond even the notion of beyond. And once the Immensity appears, meditation becomes redundant and is dropped as the boat once the river has been crossed.