The Condensation of Our World A Brief Look into the Bendiness of Time and Space According to Buddhist Thought
/I pay homage to Ahimsa, the continuum untainted by harm
I pay homage to Bodhichitta, the altruistic field to benefit others in which divisions subside
I pay Homage to The Great Perfection, the True Pure Nature of Everyone and Everything
“Everything – appearance and existence, samsara and nirvana – has a single Ground, yet two paths and two fruitions, and magically displays as Awareness or unawareness.”
– From Great Perfection Aspiration Prayer of Kuntuzangpo[i]
Message from a White-Clad Yogi
As our minds grasp onto the particulars in life, density appears to coalesce. And as density solidifies and compresses within our minds, the walls of the outside world appear to close in on us. When density increases, compression increases and when compression increases, time appears to decrease and to go by quickly. Why is this? As things are brought closer together, the time it takes to get from one point to another decreases.
We’ve all heard the expression: “It’s time to pay the Piper.” Today, we look around us and see the relentless waves from a vast ocean of unintended karmic consequences hitting us as we wade in the shallows. Our waters are fouled, our air is toxic, fires are breaking out everywhere, and the Earth is rumbling everywhere like never before. Even an atheist could almost become evangelistic these days. The major players of the world – USA, China, India, Russia, and Europe – all have their plans and strategies. Maybe there is a deep-state puppeteer, too, who really knows? Each one has a view and set of goals and action plans. Whatever information we get, whatever science there is, whatever fact is stated, is tainted with partisan self-interest pretty much as a rule. But one thing is clear, wherever there is intention, wishes and concepts, there is cause and effect. We used to be fairly aware that if we committed a crime that the result, going to jail, etc., could or would follow. The time frame of this ripening was often unknown. Not getting caught before one’s natural death was called “Getting away with it”. Some karmas simply ripen slowly. But some karmas seem to ripen more or less immediately. These are called Karma of immediate retribution. It is these karmas which humans find the easiest to learn from, provided the ripening doesn’t kill us first.
When I was around six or seven years old, my father and I used to sit together on a canvas sling chair and watch TV. I would sit on his lap and would reach down to feel the underside of the sling, which was tight from the weight of my father’s buttocks pressing into it. One day, I got hold of a safety pin while I was sitting in that position. I felt how tight the sling was and it felt like a balloon to me. I wondered what would happen if I just stuck the pin into it ever so slightly. I tried a little and nothing happened. I tried again a little deeper… nothing happened. I tried a little deeper and all of a sudden my father punched me very hard in my arm. I immediately started to cry. He said: “What did you expect? You stuck a pin in my butt didn’t you?” I can safely say that this is a fairly good example of Karma with immediate retribution.
Today, and according to the principles above, many of our actions seem to ripen faster than in previous times. There seems to be less space and things feel more claustrophobic.
Almost the entire world is “online” and seems omnipresent, destroying the lengthy display of time and seemingly causing distances to either vanish or become less relevant. The media is largely corporate owned and most open-minded people can see that what we used to call the news, which was researched before being reported in a so-called balanced manner, is now closer to our definition of propaganda. Corporations lie to us almost as an intrinsic part of having a board of directors and shareholders. Big Pharma lies to us that they and their actions, despite thousands of lobbyists working on their behalf, reside within pure science and are guided by benevolent nonbiased government regulations, with democratic checks and balances. Politicians on both sides tell us they are the ones to look out for the interests of the public, when nothing could be further from the truth. Most ironically, all these sectors complain loudly when we no longer believe them. At the present moment it would seem impossible to make any president appear to say a single intelligent word. But when he says “fake news” and it seems plausible, whose fault is that? When we are told we’ll never fly a plane again without a tracked vaccine certificate, don’t we wonder why the president doesn’t seem totally deranged when he wonders why an infant in the USA gets a hundred vaccines before he or she can even walk?
In short, when one lies all the time, there is a consequence and disbelief surely follows. There are just some people whom you trust and there are those that, no matter how good they try to be, just don’t seem worthy of trust. When we can no longer trust the people around us, our bewilderment is increased along with a sense of isolation.
Cause and effect are not actually separated by time.
Normally, we see cause as coming first and effect as following the cause. This displays through the medium of time or at least how we perceive time. Quasimodo pulls the rope and then the bell rings. When he stops pulling, the bells settle down.
But if you really observe the functioning of the mind, the world we are experiencing does not in fact really work like that. The game is real time and everything stays at equilibrium at each and every moment. Although it seems to change, it is in fact at perfect equilibrium at any given moment.
Vajrayana prophecies speak of future times when the five poisons of mind, ignorance, hatred, grasping attachment, jealousy and arrogant pride are so strong that father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, friends, partners, none of these get along any more. They speak of a time when everything appears as extremely dense. They are times when evil as a cause ripens immediately and so does the good. It is a time when we can feel the immediate repercussion of our mind state even before we act. We have reached the moment when the electronic dog collars we use on our domesticated pets are already placed on our own necks by ourselves. When we get too far out of our harmless altruistically oriented mind, we get a shock and are thrown to extremes like children who fall off a fast spinning playground carousel.
The message is extremely clear. Or is it? Who is listening? Who is tuning in and who is not? Do you like the analogy of the electronic dog leash? Can you imagine an intelligence so powerful that it can collar us without us even knowing it? Maybe even using what the intelligence considers to be a child’s technology. Oddly enough, this God-like power is called wisdom.
Can you imagine a force of natural selection, which can differentiate between altruistic people ready to cooperate as a harmonious species and those hell-bent on usurping and abusing Mother Earth for their own unbridled selfish purposes, regardless of the cost? What would such a process look like?
These days, it is becoming clearer and clearer, our planet must grow into a world family one way or another. It can happen, either by forceful dictatorship modeled somewhat like our current medical system or by AI, so it’s equilateral, or perhaps there is another way. Instead of requiring top-down policing and force, we simply get the message and decide to help one another. Even the simplest of beings like ants do this with little trouble at all. And we consider ourselves to be more advanced than ants. Are they really separate individuals or is there a unified colony mind? Are we so sophisticated that we cannot do something similar? What factors would hinder such a capability and what factors could support that and make it a living reality for us all?
Increased Psychic Connectivity of Our Times and More
My meditation teacher used to say to me that when he was growing up, those skilled in meditation didn’t need telephones in order to communicate from afar. As a suburban kid I found the idea intriguing, like a superpower. My teacher was an Asian man I trusted implicitly and I felt that there was in fact a way to gain some kind of superpower. Well, it turns out it is not a superpower at all. The capacity has even been enhanced by the Internet’s function.
There is something big to consider in all this, a silver lining if enough of us wake up together. Energy is in fact neither good nor bad. Since everything is more like a fractal equation in nature, the same forces that make for the appearance of an increased density and sped-up sense of time bring with them a kind of greater capacity for speedy realization and actualization of Vajrayana teachings in particular. This in turn means that each and everything we do, regardless of how small or insignificant it may seem, has a much larger and faster positive effect than in earlier times. One can even say that the results of the good are as immediate as the results of the bad.
If we compared this to the stock market, now is exactly the perfect time to invest in our personal and group practices. It is time to slow down and take time for introspection and generation of humility and awe. Although the challenges are already quite significant for everyone and will likely increase before they decrease, one must take the lesson and change one’s actions without blaming others or outside factors. Blame will not accomplish much when it comes to enhancing wisdom and happiness, whereas generation of a harmonious altruistic mind of compassion will bear the immediate positive fruit of happiness.
Clear Skies, Clean Water, and “The Message”
Two years ago we had a most amazing set of different species of trees on our half-acre property in New York state. Each year these beautiful trees bloomed like clockwork, making us feel so happy. Last year, five of those trees died an instant death. These were surprisingly of four different species, which indicates that a blight of one type of tree was not the cause. The stars were always blurry on our night walks; the snowy Himalayan Mountains we used to see regularly from Kathmandu valley in the 1980s have been hidden by smog for over two decades. Dolphins disappeared from the waters of Venice, Italy, and the list of effects of “civilization” on nature obviously goes on. Meanwhile, cigarette companies knew they were killing us. But they had so much revenue that spending literally billions on lying to us had no appreciable effect on their bottom line.
Oil companies have known for decades about human carbon activity causing climate changes and also found it worthwhile to deny the effects and collect the money. The idea that the earth was in trouble due to human activity was laughed at by those in control, as was the even more far-fetched idea that we could ever do something about it. Scientific study results are skewed by political economic interests. A young girl skipping school comes along and says: “We are not doing the right thing. Listen to the science and fix it.” This eleven-year-old was immediately vilified, of course. She must be the privileged daughter of Satan to say such a thing and expect so much. Laughably, she was even accused of being a tool of the deep state which, for some reason, although normally said to be out to kill us all, somehow all of a sudden wanted us to live on a clean Earth.
Once again, thanks to the virus, it has become clear that the Earth can heal itself just fine without humans.
1. The dolphins have returned to Italian waters.
2. The Himalayan snowy peaks can be seen from Kathmandu Valley every single day now.
3. I have not seen such bright stars in the sky above my house in decades.
4. The proof that nature is fairly resilient has been presented visually for all to see.
5. The notion that humans are not responsible for pollution is visibly false.
6. The evil and ineffectiveness of having a solely for-profit model for health care is completely clear to everyone.
7. The defeatist notion that we cannot come up with a responsible and effective collective response has been shown to be B.S. The notion that we could in fact come together as united humans to solve our problems now seems actually possible.
8. The alien ships no longer have smog to hide behind. (I’m really not sure if I am joking or not)
In Short
For whatever reason this all feels like deja vu. We’ve all seen the writing on the wall and the eerie prompting of prophetic movies that prepared us in an uncanny way for what we are supposed to accept from our rapidly changing realities. In brief, somewhere inside us we really already do know what is going on, although we are often wrong about how the things really arise or how they are caused.
When it comes to being assimilated by the Borg, we are reminded of the phrase from Star Trek; “Resistance is futile.” But these words cause alarm for us and that becomes our wake up call, a kind of inoculation against our enslavement. What is really futile is doing nothing when the time to push forward and model our new existence is squarely at hand. Please note that artists of some of the most oppressed places and times have produced the most beautifully spirited art. We cannot simply couch-potato-blame all others while thinking ourselves to be outside the spheres of causality. That’s correct, rather than simply wear the buttons, clothes, badges, and whistles of being Buddhists, it is actually the time to put all the practices into play. We need to slow down, travel less, act locally more, and look squarely and directly at the state of our mind with its silly collective assumptions on how things have to be. While death is certainly inevitable, dying without regret is not. Carpe diem, and get to work whatever you see that work to be.
This was written during a pandemic lockdown by an insignificant sycophantic follower of the Second Buddha who was born from a Pure Lotus flower. May our Garuda-like natures instantaneously pop out of our egg-like ignorance and our Buddha-awareness immediately take flight into the unimpeded space of the Dharmata, arising as bliss for all.
[i] The Great Perfection Aspiration Prayer of Kuntuzangpo translated by Bhakha Tulku Rinpoche, Vairotsana Foundation 1991