A Coherent Way to Understand Reality
Summary: There are no limits to the potentialities of consciousness. If you know where you are on an accurate map of reality, that will become clear. You will also learn that the world is made of language and is produced by pulsations of mental energy. This is information everyone needs to know—in order to cope with the rapidly unfolding events in this mind-driven matrix.
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So it occurred to me that it might be useful for us all to have a unified map of reality. So it came to me to draw a very simple one.
Shunya writes on whiteboard.
That’s it.
Now, we could add “You are here” and put an arrow—that’s the Zero Point—that’s what we refer to as Parama Shiva; that infinitesimal point of light is what is prior to the manifestation of any universe.
Now, Shiva doesn’t like to be alone, and how can you blame that poor point? So what Shiva does first is emanate a field in which potentiality can be actualized. So this is Parama Shiva, Supreme Shiva—there are other levels of Shiva, that’s why we specify that; this is the level that is the Ultimate Reality. And this entire field that, nowadays, we could call the “quantum unified field”, although it’s actually more subtle than that, and the quantum field is a congealing within the field—but the field itself was traditionally referred to in Vedic times as Brahman. Nirgun Brahman. Why? Because the field itself has no collapsed wave functions and therefore it is unmanifest. It’s potentiality.
When it begins to manifest, forms a world, then it becomes Saguna Brahman, but now it’s Nirguna Brahman. And what happens from this point of light is that, at a certain moment, Shiva emits a pulsation, and that pulsation expands around it, OK? But it will continue to expand until it reaches the event horizon of the edge of Brahman, and then it will contract again. This energy that is expanding out in its expansive phase we call the pravritti, and when it begins to move back inward, it’s the nirvritti.
This spanda itself, the energy and the information contained in that pulse, is referred to as Para Shakti. The energy is the spanda that emerges, and this energy field that science even perceives as an expanding universe—and it is expanding, although not in the same way that they understand, because it’s Mind that’s expanding—this is what is referred to as the Goddess.
Shiva remains as the point that’s transcendent and unmanifest, and the Goddess, this pulse, emerges as a world, a dream field that is, a world that, as the pulse first emerges from the point it’s in perfect order, a perfect circle, a sphere, actually, of perfectly balanced energies. And in that first emission and expansion, it creates a Sat Yuga, a world in which the perfection of all that is within this condensed point of infinite mass of infinite power and information, and light, and all of the potency of God, emerges as a world that reflects the miraculous, the beautiful, the good, the pure, the divine—it’s a world of gods and goddesses, not of humans yet.
But as the sphere expands, the order becomes less. There is an entropy, and it begins, at a certain point, to become chaotic. And when it reaches the edge of total chaos, that’s when it begins to return. But when it begins to return, some of the energies are still going outward, so you have a crossing, an interference pattern of energies, and you have both pravritti waves and nirvritti waves simultaneously in the field. And this produces, depending on the wave that you’re riding as an individual dreamee within that pulse of energy that is the world, will determine your perception of reality. But that sphere will again return to the Source—we call that the “Omega Point”—or at least Teilhard de Chardin called it that, and it’s not a bad name for it—and the word omega or the letter omega in Greek comes from om, from the Sanskrit, which is the three aspects of time as one of its meanings, and it returns to that point which we then call the Singularity. But that central Zero Point is eternal and never changes, but the spanda, the Goddess, separates from Shiva and then returns and consummates Union.
That is what is happening—systole and diastole you could call it as well—God’s breathing in and out. And they say in the Kashmiri tradition—they use a different set of phrases—they say when Shiva closes his eyes, which they refer to as the unmesha state, with a dot under the “s” [ṣ], when Shiva closes his eyes that’s when the pulse is emitted; Shiva is now asleep and dreaming and the world is Shiva’s dream. And at some point, when the chaos becomes too great, and Shiva begins to pull Shakti back into himself, he opens his eyes—that’s called the nimesha state—and as soon as God opens his eyes, the universe disappears.
So it’s not really a destruction of the universe, it’s simply God awakening from his own dream. And that awakening happens when the dream has become a nightmare, has become too chaotic, and has lost its archetypal coherence, and beauty, and goodness. And then Shiva wakes up and then emits another pulse and says, “Let’s do it all over again!”
So we are now in the final moments before the Omega Point in which these pravritti and nirvritti waves are both present, and there is both the ability to be in the state of the unmesha or the nimesha. And when one is in the nimesha state, by having returned to the Zero Point, then for that individual level of consciousness, the universe will no longer have any reality or any effect upon one’s being—one will have awakened from the dream even if a phenomenal field of energy remains, but it will be perceived as it really is. And in the same way that on your computer, you can go to some website, or some video, and you’ll see a story, a scene as if you’re in some space, and then you turn it off and it’s just a bunch of dormant pixels, right? In the same way the world is made up, we would say, of voxels—which is a pixel that has volume—and when the energy strikes these voxels they create collapsed waveforms which produce entities, beings, animate and inanimate, all of the aspects of the universe made up of the energy and the intelligence of that infinite consciousness.
And it begins to morph depending on where the wave is—but there’s a constant morphing—and as the morphing becomes more accelerated in the end, as the energy pulls back into Shiva, there’s an acceleration of time: more things happen per minute than one can even keep track of. Everything is shifting—the ground is literally shaking under us, and the world is changing too quickly to even know where we stand with anything because nothing stays the same.
And one of the key elements—well, before I go there, let me say that at the end Shiva manifests in two forms—and this is the time when the union of Shiva and Shakti create, as the pulse of the spanda returns to the Source, create an electromagnetic energy field that produces extraordinary paranormal effects, “signs and wonders”, synchronicities, extraordinary events within the phenomenal dreamfield, that are awesome, astonishing, unprecedented. And the field, depending on whether you’re riding a pravritti or a nirvritti wave, will produce an effect that is referred to in the Kashmiri tradition as the Tandava, the Dance of Shiva. This is the dance of Shiva now, he is dancing the Tandava on the dwarf, which is the human ego, and within a ring of fire, the universe is being both destroyed and redreamed through the dance. And so they say there are two forms of Tandava: there is the Rudra Tandava, and there is the Ananda Tandava.
So we are experiencing the Dance of Shiva either as a waltz of love, or as wild death rock metal, destructive sounds. But the Tandava, the dance of transformation that both ends the world of Kali Yuga and dances into creative manifestation, a new Sat Yuga, is all happening now at the same time. And so in the Kashmir Wisdom schools, the Trika Shaivite schools, they say that at the end Shiva appears in two forms: one form is Bhairava, which is a later edition of Rudra. Rudra is from the Vedas and Bhairava—which has a lot of esoteric meaning, but I won’t digress into that. Let’s see—Bhairava, this is the fearsome form of Shiva, the destructive form, the form of well, for a yogi, fierce equanimity, but it’s fearlessness, and it is a complete joy in seeing a hell realm be destroyed. It’s not at all something to be unhappy about.
And Shiva also appears to yogis in the form of Shankara. Shankara is one of the epithets of Shiva that we don’t talk about all that much, but it’s probably the most important one. And if you remember the Sanskrit, Shan is from the same word we get Shanti. And so Shankara is the bringer of peace. He gives peace to your heart in the midst of the difficult situation when the world is falling apart, and everyone around you is falling apart, and Shiva enables you to remain in serenity, and detachment, and nonreactivity. So Shankara is the one that yogis want to invoke. But when there are adverse conditions, one then wants to be able to invoke Bhairava, and face that with fearlessness and authority.
So we need to recognize that these are two faces of God, that both of them are our own nature and that we have to be able to wisely discern when it is appropriate to show which face.