1.2 The Bubble of Being
This is a continuation of my first post ‘The highest technology’.
What is this canvas, on which I and the world appear? In spiritual schools, we call this canvas the ‘Being’. When we disect this Being, what we see are a number of layers interacting with each other to create the perception of ‘me’ and ‘the world’.
At the lowest level of the being, there is simply space. We experience this as the space around us, and the space in which our body, time, feelings, thoughts, imagination, and the world appear. This space is also a part of your UI, and not something separate from you. In the Advaita tradition of ‘non-duality’, this is what the masters are inferring: The ‘you’ you believe yourself to be, is not apart from the world you believe yourself not to be, and the core layer of that experiencing is this space in which everything appears.
After space, we have the layer of time. Time is an abstract layer that creates the sense of being in a continuum, when in fact we have never moved or changed. Time is the basis of everything that comes after the Space. Without time there would not be any concept of me, the world, my thoughts, or my feelings or emotions. All these variables require time to exist before they can exist. In this case, time is not considered ‘clock time’, but you could more accurately say it is a sense of unravelling: A sense of past, and a sense of future.
Now that we have space, and the sense of time, we come to the sense ‘I am’. This is one of the biggest illusions in the Being, and that which causes us to believe we are an individual. Superimposed on the sense of space and augmented by the perception of time, is the sense that ‘I am a thing’, and I have my own reality. The ‘I am’ is experienced most directly in the sense ‘I am the body’.
Have you really investigated what you feel to be your body? Close your eyes — Had you never seen ‘your body’ before, would you be able to describe it? Probably not. Its almost a sense of an amoeba-like object which no real definition. Where does this feeling of solidness come from? This feeling of me? The body itself is the sense I, and it too is an illusion.
So we have space, time, and now a body which thinks ‘I am’ — The next layer is the ego. The ego is a sophisticated program that is conditioned to weave together the other layers into a sense of integration , and separation — The ego, a psychological construct, integrates the feeling of space, time, and body, into a sense of a single entity ‘me’. It also contains the base of your behaviours, which we can compare to firmware in a computer. The ego is designed to absorb knowledge from ‘the world’, and ‘its surroundings’, and develop itself to survive in that environment. Most of what the ego knows is conditioned by the world.
So what is the world? Well its also part of the giant ploy known as me. The world itself appears in my Being — In the space and time. Except because of the ‘I am body’ thought, tied up with the sense of ego or ‘I am this person who is this age, was born in Nevada, yada yada’, the world which appears in me seems to be different from me. And this is the root cause of all trouble.
Because we believe the world to be ‘outside us’, the illusion is now complete — I am a person, living with a body, in a world that follows rules of space and time. But am I really?
In the next post ill talk about why this misconception is the root cause of all suffering and trouble.
