I agree with this mostly except I would reverse one thing. It is the universe that creates us right now and right now we dissapear. The present moment is a property of our consiousness and our consiousness is a property of the universe. We are constantly dying and being reborn every moment, constantly changing. I wonder how many myselves have existed while just typing this up. It is our simultaneous living and dying that gives us the perception of the passing of time. I'll have to think about it more. I just made this up during lunch break.
Good job. I agree, with the added clarification that the present moment that is a property of consciousness, that is a property of the universe, is a property of us. You are the universe. Let me see if I can clarify that more.
Being aware creates symbols called "things" that we are aware of that reside in memory as
knowledge, and at the same time creates a symbol called "me" or "I" that is an agent of awareness, that also resides in memory. A symbol is something that represents something, and our knowledge represents the world to us. We then "know" it.
Everything we
know we know only after it resides in memory and is accessible to us. Everything --every "
thing" --
to us is of the nature of a bit of knowledge. Things in the universe are as we know them; the universe, as a thing, is as we know it; and "I am" known to me. Even properties that make things are "things" as we know them, everything as a thing reducible to more things. "Things" are our things, property of our consciousness.
If we allow time for the mechanisms that store knowledge, then we recognize that everything we know is a bit past tense. Even knowledge of "I am," which we think of as the present, is necessarily a bit past tense, however small we imagine that time to be. As a representation only, we can realise that the "thing" we know is different than what must necessarily be "out there" in the actual present to be
cognized in memory or recognized from memory as a "thing" by us. It acquires a "form" through our
understanding of it. "Solid" is our understanding of it, as is "fluid" and "gaseous," "large," "medium" and "small," "random" and "orderly," "up" and "down," "male" and "female," "right" and "wrong," "physical" and "mental," and "spiritual." This is our understanding of the universe. "Duality" describes our ability to split the world into things. It's a world of
differences, a world of our making.
Understanding the world = a metaphor, a world "standing" or residing in memory "under" the world. Our "things" under a universal one-thing.
We can also recognize that "out there" is our understanding of things. So is "in here." That sets us up for the understanding that what the actual "out there" is like is
beyond what we know (agnosticism), beyond the
forms our understanding gives to things. Duality splits the world, now, so that we put ourselves in relation to a "nothingness" that we can't know. Mythology has given it the image of "the waters," others have called it numinous, the ether, "emptiness," or void. Really, it is belief in
nothing, a not-thing (not one of our "things").
(With this understanding we still operate in a world of duality, but it opens the door to understanding a "unity" of all-things, nomenon and phenomenon, that brings together thing and nothing.)
That also necessarily means "in here" is one of our things, too. "In here" is our understanding of "I am." We can recognize that the symbol "I am" is an accumulation of moments of consciousness, representing something that fundamentally changes with every passing moment. It is a creation of every moment of conscious existence.
This is from Brad Warner:
It's very difficult to reach this kind of understanding when it comes to your sense of self. We've been taught implicitly since birth that our "self" is something fundamental and important and real. But our self-image is nothing other than the sum total of those particular things about our universal human nature we've chosen to emphasize in our own lives. Some teachings like to differentiate between "self" spelled with a little s and "Self" with a big S, but this just obscures the problem with unnecessary complications. No matter how you spell it, self is an illusion...
The concept of self relies upon past and future. "I have a past." "I have a future." You say, "I was made fun of as a child because of my horribly out-of-fashion shoes," or fear that, "I will die someday in a freak accident with a bowling pin." Where is the I who will die? For that matter, where is the I who is reading this word right now?...
Time isn't really like a line.
Sure, you can find evidence that things happened, photographs, old letters, scars on your hands. But the time itself is gone. I can plan for the future. I'm writing these words now, hoping they'll be read someday by someone who is interested in them. But that doesn't exist where I am now. It's a dream for me. The thing that exists right now is the action of typing. Real time is so short you can't even perceive it. Perceptions necessarily lag after real events that trigger them. Thoughts are even further behind... if there's no past and no future, the concept of "self" ceases to make any sense...
Ultimately, you are addicted to the idea of "you." It's intoxicating, fascinating, compelling. You think that there is something called "you" that perceives things, that thinks about things, and feels things and knows things. You think "you" are reading this book, and evaluating whether it's true or worthwhile. But that's an illusion. Perception occurs. Thinking occurs. But there's no one doing the perceiving, no one doing the thinking. And there's no one reading this book (actually, I do hope some people read this book, but you see my point.)
~Hardcore Zen
There's no "one" doing the thinking, there's just thinking that occurs. And if thinking can occur out of a void, then so does everything else that we are. "Self" is illusion = the Void that's thinking. it's thinking "you."
We both "are" and "are illusion" depending on how we look at it. Depending on perspective. We have three inherent perspectives on the world: objective, subjective and ...other (I call it spiritual perspective). Changing the way we look at things is as natural to us as the difference between "the world," "the world to me," and "the world-me."
It sure takes a lot of words to talk about "nothing," eh?
