So time is an occurrence within timeless Presence, and that is what is real. And it is that and that alone that survives the death of the cosmos, the eternal Light of the Absolute Self that is the power that creates, emanates the universe, sets it going, in apparent motion in time and space, even though it’s only apparent and not real—a holographic, cinematic illusion—but nonetheless filled with meaning.
And in these final days, as we perceive the onrush toward the apocalyptic end, there is ever more clarity, understanding, of the necessity of all that happens, the perfection of all that happens, the blessings hidden within all that occurs, even if it feels like adversity or suffering—everything is the will of the one Supreme Intelligence, that we can call God, or Buddha Nature, or Brahman, or any name you like, because it’s beyond all names, forms, and possibilities to conceptualize by a finite intelligence—and yet we are all manifestations of That.
So in the West they say that the highest state of consciousness, Christian mystics call it Agape. They say there are three kinds of love: Eros, Philia, and Agape. And the highest love is this love of God, the love that divinizes one, because your love of God is also God’s love of you, and the realization of the union, and that’s what brings the union of Shiva and Shakti. It happens at every fractal level, and it happens with the whole. The principle of the manifest and the unmanifest, form and formlessness, potency and kinetic actuality.
So Agape is what is the name of the highest state in the West. In India, the highest state is represented by a gopi. Our goal is to be a-gopi with Agape. And they are the same, because a gopi is a devotee, a lover of God. God manifest, but the manifest as symbolically archetypally representing the Unmanifest—the beauty of form signifying the formless infinite beauty. The beauty of form is finite and temporary. We had a beautiful sunset tonight, but where is it? Gone.
All beauty of form is temporary and is only there to represent the real Beauty and the real Truth. But truth and beauty, interestingly, come in two languages—the universe is made of language, but it’s made of two languages, two languages in superposition. And those languages are the languages of word, and the language of number, as the Gospel of John says accurately, and so far as it goes, “In the beginning is the Word, and the Word is with God, and the Word is God” because it’s the Logos. It’s the logic of the capacity to think with heart. That’s what creates the world. The love that can cast a spell of joy, of beauty, goodness, and sustain an energy field that has been spelled out by a sustainable understanding of the Real, in which the symbolic remains in contact with and as a liaison to the Real, the Supreme Real that brings that supreme, formless, inconceivable beauty into the beauty of form, via the soul that is able to translate the Word into flesh.
That’s what creates the world. But the world of words has recessively, in superposition with it, number, because the universe is also entirely mathematical. This was the great insight of Alain Badiou, by the way, who we saw a video about him and of him—his understanding that ontology is mathematical. But what he didn’t get was that in the beginning it’s the word, but it ends in mathematics. This is what the theosophist, let’s call him, Rene Guenon, or the perennial philosopher, he called the “reign of quantity”, that at the end of time we lose our connection to the word as the archetypal image that can be translated into the beauty of form, and instead, our minds have become mathematized. Everyone, whether they know it or not, are thinking much more in terms of quantity than quality. “How much do we have? How much money do we have?” The whole capitalist system is about the mathematizing of value. “This is worth so many dollars, or so many rupees or rubles” or whatever, but it’s always mathematized and quantized.
And so the world begins with the word, but it ends with mathematics, because mathematics is used to create weapons of destruction. You can’t have ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads until you have a very high level of mathematics that has been applied in engineering, and that can produce such weapons of mass destruction, and digitizing, and creating artificial intelligence that is, in fact, heartless.
So mathematics is a language that is heartless. It’s a language, but a language without meaning.
It has truth and it has beauty, but it has a beauty of death. Even the physicists today are saying physics is dead. And the reason physics is dead, it’s made no real progress conceptually for the last thirty years or so. And why is it? Because it became mathematized. And the mathematics has produced theories like string theory, that are not falsifiable. And once you have a theory that is not falsifiable, it’s no longer science, it’s a religion.
And so science becomes split into those with different mathematical thought constructs, none of which can be proven or disproven, but none of which is able to produce a meaningful understanding of the Real, but it can produce a capacity to destroy that which has been created.
And we see this happening not just in the, let’s say, the manmade cultural construct of a dying society, but the natural world as well. Because you could think of the universe as an equation that is being solved, and time is the solving of the great equation.
And that great equation will ultimately reduce to this: infinity equals zero. They are not different. The infinity of infinities is zero, and zero is not a number, so zero is not part of mathematics, but nor is it a word. Zero is not classifiable in either of those two languages. The Zero itself is the Language of God. And only if you are in the Zero Point will you hear the word of God directly, as the stillness of eternal luminous clarity itself.
And so this is the state that really is represented by the term Agape. And the only way that it can be understood is through the realization that the self is the other, and the other is the self. This was the great phrase that everyone remembers from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, right? Je est un autre—I is an other. And when you realize that the I-thought in your mind is an other, it’s not yourself, and there is a fission from that, then the Self, that is the pure awareness that contains the I-thought and its chatter, but contains all, and thus reduces that chatter to irrationality and insignificance in the face of the all that is nothing, then the chatter itself becomes a pure reflection of the stillness, the power of the Light of God that shines now through a mind that has been cleared of its self-attacking obstructions. Because the ego forms as a mathematical structure, an algorithmic structure, that repeats certain patterns of thoughts that have to do with a quantifiable relationship to the other. And it’s only when the other and the self are both recognized as zero, as the Emptiness that is all-containing, that, that self and other are one.
So in Buddhism, especially in the Asian varieties, the Chinese and Japanese, the Japanese term for self-power is jiriki, and other-power is tariki. So the Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism, they’re based on the idea of self-power. I, the Buddha nature is I. Whereas the later, the latter-day Buddhist saints of the pure land Buddhism traditions, beginning with people like
Honen and Shinran, and now many other followers of the repetition of the mantra, Namu Amida Butsu, everyone knows about that—what does it mean in Sanskrit? Namo, the same namo that we use in Namo Shivaya; Amida (Amitabha in Sanskrit), Buddha Awakened one, but also meaning Lord or Bhagavan, as we have seen in The Flight of the Garuda. So it’s really another way of saying Namah Shivaya, because what is Amida or Amitabha? It’s translated as the Lord of Infinite Light and Life.
But who is the Lord or the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life? It’s Shiva. So it’s a return to a pre- Buddhist understanding that the other alone can bring the grace of deliverance from the ego’s miasma of ignorance and resistance to love, and to surrender to the Real.
And so the process of self and other realizing unity begins with adoration of that wholly other God-Self that cannot be conceived and therefore grasped or believed in by the ego-mind, one must nonetheless be able to have a faith that enables one to surrender to that which one cannot understand. But through that surrender of our own mind and attending upon the presence of the Absolute I that underlies our consciousness, one receives a download or a lightning bolt, but a power of Shakti, the goddess energy that comes and fills the mind with the power of Infinite Light and Life, and takes one out of the realm of time and space into the eternal Presence that is the Absolute Self.
