Dear Rupert,
In The Transparency of Thingsyou say, ‘our experience is one of a stream of appearances in consciousness, A, B, C, D, E, and each disappears absolutely before the next arises’. Is my following understanding correct?
As the lit torch which when twirled appears to be a solid circle of fire, so the speed of molecules and atoms makes the world appear to be solid and continuous. As a movie film run through a projector gives the illusion of solidity and movement on a movie screen, but actually is a series of stills, so the world is actually a fast-moving series of ‘stills’, appearing solid and continuous but able to be seen through as a transparency.
This means there is no past,and it completely removes the burden of the past. There is only now,with A, B, C, D, E occurring, and ‘each disappears absolutely before the next arises’.
Thank you,
Barbara
Dear Barbara,
I understand where you are coming from, but in your formulation there is a fundamental presumption of the separate existence of objects (A, B, C, D, E, molecules, atoms, the ‘stills’ of the world, and so on). You then try to fit this presumption into a model that is consistent with an understanding of non-duality.
However, it is the fundamental presumption that is at fault. We have no experience of a world, objects, molecules, whatever, that exist outside of or independent from consciousness. All these appearances, A, B, C, D, E, are not the appearances of different objects. They are all the same ‘thing’ (consciousness) taking the apparent shape (through thinking, sensing and perceiving) of the mind, body and world, just as there is not a multiplicity of objects in a film but rather one ever-present screen.
It is the ever-presence of the screen which imparts apparent continuity to the objects in the film, and it is the substance of the screen that gives apparent solidity to these same objects. In other words, it is the reality and ever-presence that properly belong to consciousness that are conferred by the mind upon the objects of its own imagining and seem, as a result, to become solidity in space and continuity in time.
With kind regards,
Rupert
