Reflections in light

Karma, Individuals, Love, and Words

Reflections in light

It happened one afternoon near the sea, that for a moment I was only an ocean of light.

I was the light, a place, thingless and nameless without form or forms. An ocean rippled-through with faint threads among color, sound, and simple sensation. Into this ocean there slowly poured the memories of what I’d known before, now recognizing the things that I know again and will remember again some other day.

In retelling it this way, it is only an “I” playing with words the way words play with “me.”

Poplar in the clouds (February 2013) — BE

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Karma

Karma is the desire to know and remember all the consequences of attachment. It is by this desire that being calls forth all experiences. It is how the universe infinitely multiplies what it knows of itself: as everything that has ever been and that can ever be.

In myth, “this world is on fire; it burns with the fire of desire.”

In this, there is a place called Kurukshetra, a level plain upon the earth. One day before the days of Iron when this was first told, you were playing among many others and there was a little contest among us. We played the game of who could perform the best sacrifice: who among us could return the most of what we have been given to the ocean from which we came?

You were the one called ‘All Pervasive’ (Vishnu). You won that ancient contest. You set yourself on fire with pure desire. To all who read this: Know that this fire is every desire that burns within you, even right now as you search among these words.

This was your desire: To know and remember all the consequences of every attachment; to know and remember all possible experiences in every life in every place and every time. To know and to love.

You are me and I am you. You and I created both of us by Karma, by attachment to the word and idea of ‘individual’ (separated). You and I are separated by attachment to this notion of individuality and to notions of Time and Place, a consequence of which is that it will seem that we are not the same one.

Yes, it looks far more complex and final than that! But appearances are not what they appear to be (and neither are they anything else).

Who do you believe you are? What do you think you are you? Do you imagine yourself to be an independent individual? You are never what you think you are.

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Individuals

Are we each endlessly re-incarnate into new individualities so that Karmic desires can be reconciled through mere reward and punishment?

Look within yourself. There is no need for such rough sleight of hand.

You are being itself, entering into the world of individuality by your desire to know and remember all possible experiences of being. Can you remember when you wanted to remember everything?

Question your thinking mind. Individuality is only another ephemeral experience.

Deep within yourself at the seat of your pure awareness, you already know that all these illusions of individuality will in time dissolve. Is it not divinely ironic that these things called “individuals” are products of only feigned division?

You are neither divided nor undivided. The words “divided” and “undivided” simply do not apply to you. These oppositions of You and I and One or Many, arise naturally within the universe solely by their relation to one another as opposites in a scheme. You attach yourself to this scheme by habitual repetition of childhood words and other gestures. But in reality, you are far, far beyond this scheme. You are more than the scheme, you are the place, Kurukshetra, where schemes unfold.

But how would you know this?

No Individuals

The truth can become clear by simply recalling it within you. I remember it and therefore so can you, because I am you and you are me. This is truly what you really are: the self-aware reality of everything that can ever be.

This distinction between you and me is only another thing to which we can be attached, because the wider distinction between the knower and the known is also only a thing to which we can be attached.

Here in this same mythical Kurukshetra, you, the All Pervasive, appeared to Arjuna on the spiritual battlefield in the form of the avatar, Krishna. There, you explained to Arjuna in his moral suffering, how he and you appeared both different and also not different, using simple words already inscribed in your shared heart:

Though the Light shines within the hearts of men and it is in the heart that It is first perceived, it would be a mistake to suppose that It is only there and not in the outer world as well. The heart is a focus though which It shines but It is equally ‘outside’ us, for the entire content of experience floats in Its all-supporting waves.

(As a cloud that hides the moon, so matter veils The Face of Thought.)

So subtle is It that, although All Pervading, It is unperceived by men and, though ‘nearer to us than breathing,’ yet there is no cosmic depth so far away but It is farther still. From Its profound abyss this universe in which we live and all the island universes in the Cosmos are seen to shrink into a starry cluster no bigger than a man’s hand. *

I and you are one, one within two, and two within one. In this light, the truth of Karma becomes transparently clear. We desired this to be so, because we wanted to know and remember all of this in every possible way.

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* Yoga of the Bhagavat Gita by Krishna Prem (The Internet Archive): Ch. XIII the Yoga of distinction between the field and the knower of the field (source page)

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Love

I talk about universal love, by which I simply mean pure love, in the way being knows itself as the self of reality and the limitless awareness. The all-pervasive light purely loves absolutely everything exactly the way it is and the way it unfolds. I would defer to Dante, Paradiso and the last few cantos of Purgatorio. I read those while in Florence. I remember what it was about and what the point of it was; but from the time I read it until today, I cannot remember what he wrote, other than it was the divine love of all things everywhere.

As for parent-child love, I think of that as unconditional love, by which I mean that there are no conditions on that love, but also that it does not necessarily extend to many other beings; it is also a restricted kind of love, in that while the child or parent may love unconditionally in one way, they may also hate and attack aspects of the other in another way. So, this is a material form of love rather than divine or universal.

Personal love is different from those in some ways and similar in others. It is not universal; it is selective. Nor is it necessarily unconditional, although it is more like parental love in that today I continue to love unconditionally some people in my life to whom I was very close, but who deceived me or cut me off from them in a very harsh way. Likewise, I still unconditionally love people whom I cut off from my life, sometimes harshly because I thought I had to do it that way. The difference here is that the commitment to them is not the same anymore, because it seemed things had to be changed.

There is a lot of each of these three kinds in each of the others, and each may occur with any other.

Parental love and personal love can be ended in many ways, and ending it is often painful, more painful in my memory than birth, physical injury, or addiction.

But the only pain from universal love is to forget, deny or ignore it, and that is instantly forgiven simply by recognizing it again.

Comment peut-on aimer une personne que nous n’aimons pas? C’est la différence entre l’amour dans l’absolu et celui dans le relatif.

[How can we love a person we don’t love? This is the difference between love in the absolute and love in the relative.] — a comment from Martine Castonguay

Yes, this is the difference: absolute / relative.

I remember times past when I felt I hated someone, a time when I treated them badly or they treated me badly. In retrospect, now more awake to the nature of reality, I see that I was both the hater and the hated. It was all relative, all a consequence of desire and habit.

That time is now past, and here I am now, still the same now, while those feelings are no more except in memory. Now the past is beautiful beyond all description and all reasoning. In that, because the present is made entirely of the past, the present becomes beautiful again beyond all description and reasoning.

Absolute relativity: at the deepest core of our being, we are reality itself, neither one nor many but absolutely what is; and everything ever experienced is only the many forms of what that means in relation to each other and to the absolute.

“When Pain is taken as Failure” — a post by Heloisa Moura

I have been in immense pain a few times, but I knew what it was and did not suffer. On the other hand I have suffered horribly sometimes in ways I thought beyond enduring when I could find no pain at all except the awareness of broken love. But in the end, looking back, everything is unimaginably beautiful.

“Creation and awareness are one act.” — Anonymous

The endless memories of colors and forms of things flow out into the light to lay down in the mind’s eye the simple perception of this one sky.

“Who Am I in the Dream?” Am I only a dream of a sleeping dreamer? What is my desire if not to dream all this, to know all this, to live all this?

Is it not to remember and love every moment of every possible life?

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Words

“You say a priestess and a witch, these are supposed to mean opposite things. But I understand you.

The words we use, their meanings are now blurred. But I understand you.

Can’t you see, sensitive creative humans, We’re already communicating outside the words…” — Marwa Mabrouk

A very insightful and significant observation. How does communication happen? Words, tone, and gesture cannot possibly be enough to support what we feel is happening.

Is it a mechanism among us? Or is it a oneness containing us all?

Two very different questions:

How do people agree on what is true and what is not true?

How do people discover what is true and what is not true?

Two ways of knowing: Knowing-What and Knowing-That. With The Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Two ways of experiencing: Experiencing and Representing. With Universal Truth and Universal Context.

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“The Myth of Karmic Justice -- Why growth doesn’t require a moral universe.” — Archetype Alchemy

From the perspective of being in and of itself, I view Karma as the desire to experience all the consequences of attachment.

Thus, if I harm someone, then I am also the one who is harmed, because I am exactly the same I in every being.

“To attach is to bind oneself to consequence, to consent—often unknowingly—to feel every reverberation of that bond. Karma, then, is not moral bookkeeping but experiential inevitability: the universe honoring desire by allowing it to exhaust itself through lived result.” — AA

Yes. Not only is there the way that individuals attach to things, but there is also the attachment to individuality (and many other forms of attachment).

Life is being in and of itself, desiring to know individuality in all its forms.

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Thank you to all my subscribers and followers, and also to others who sometimes stop by to read. You are why I write.

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