I had a client come by the office tonight to process some paperwork. She is a very bright lady, a student of Advaita and alternative healing. As we were finishing up she comment that, in the time of Copernicus, the radical idea was that the earth was not the center of the universe. This was regarded as heresy, ridiculous, yet now we recognize it as one of the foundational perceptions of our rational-scientific world-map. And now we are on the verge of a paradigm shift of equal if not greater magnitude, and there is now as there was then an equally disturbing truth that a few brave souls have allowed themselves to notice, but that raises cries of heresy among the multitudes, and certainly would never be allowed to be taught in the halls of our universities. And that idea is simply this: that the world as we percieve it does not exist. It is an illusion, a compelling illusion but an illusion nonetheless.

We are not here. The earth is not the center of the universe. Kings do not rule by divine right. Shocking.

I am not meditating. Neither am "I".  Oh, I do sometimes but with no great regularity. Yet still I go in and out of percieving that "I" don't exist. I am not practicing in any particular way.  Well, maybe I am. It seems that my practice has bled out into everything I do. I was sitting in a committee meeting today, for most of the day. The work might have been seen by my old "self" as tedious and boring. Maybe it was. It didn't matter. There was this underglow of presence all day. I just kept noticing: I AM. I AM all these annoying people. I AM the insensitive cop who tasered the poor 18 year old manic kid who wouldn't come out of his cell. It's everywhere, kind of a glow. The wierd thing is that I have the utter knowledge that none of this is new. It's been here all along. The only thing that has happened is that my pretend world, my made up system of conditioned meanings and concepts, is disintegrating.  Wierder still, the main blowtorch that seems to be melting everyting is the idea a la Ramesh Balsekar, that "I" can't do anything. That thoughtform is like a floodlight for me, exposing all the subtle strategies and attachments that were part of my program of "practice" and "spiritual growth".

I recently bought the book, "I Hope You Die Soon".  Yea, I hope I do. It's what I really really want. Wierd.

I am going to complain. My head hurts, I have a cold, I am in that miserable state of counting the minutes between the drips coming out of my nose. And I can see that this cold has fully reasserted all my attachment to simple physical comfort.

So what. Attachment comes and goes. Realization is not a race or an olympic sport. I'm here. Even my miserable cold is a miraculous creation. Consciousness, precipitated as matter, precipitated as living tissue, having the illusion of having a bad day.  How cool is that!

Heres what I get.  Human love is finite, and beside the point. But right here, right now, in this sacred instant, is infinite love. It simply is, you may have missed it, you can ignore it, you can fail to notice it. But you cannot not have it, because you cannot not be here now.  You may think you are not here now, but in fact, now is all there is. Now consciousness unfolding is.  Now love infinite is. Now loving infinite consciousness is. Let it in, it will blast your poor suffering headcold to smithereens.

But you'll still need the kleenex.

There are 2 overarching principles that can be observed to operate as invariant constituents of consciousness, either taking consciousness broadly to mean the inherent quality of matter-energy / space-time, or more narrowly to mean the chemo-tactic sentience evidenced by cellular life forms, or still more narrowly to mean consciousness as we understand it colloquially, as a quality and defining feature of human life. These 2 principles are invariant, in that they are always present, and it is by virtue of their invariance that they are habitually overlooked, for it is in the nature of attention to be drawn naturally to that which varies, rather than that which never changes. And they are irrefutably present, in that all existence, all life, and all human thought dependently exist upon the operation of these 2 principles. Metaphysically they have been identified as the yin and the yang, but more explicitly they can be referred to as the principle of coherence (light), and the assertion of being (darkness).

The principle of coherence is on one level a statement of the fact that the the universe and it’s contents relies for their operation on the absolutely non-contradictory quality of being. The non-contradictory dimension of being is most vividly embodied in the quality of light, it’s capacity for coherence, illumination, and focus. The behavior and properties of light overtly mirror and reflect a quality that, it turns out, is subtly infused in the properties of physical matter. The principle of coherence, simply put, states that “what being asserts, it asserts without contradiction or internal inconsistency”. It is the principle of coherence, for example, that allows us to take the patterns and impressions in physical material and rely upon them as evidence of events from the past. It is the principle of coherence that allows us to assign properties to classes of phenomena; ultimately it is the principle of coherence that allows phenomena to be classified at all. And it is the principle of coherence that, properly understood, supplies the necessity that the relations among the constituents of matter subordinate themselves to mathematical comprehensibility.

The second great principle is the assertion of being. The assertion of being is an acknowledgement of the fact that we find the particular universe and its contents as we do, and not in some other equally possible arrangement. It is an acknowledgement that the world has content, and though relations among the contents of the world are subordinate to the principle of coherence, the particular fact of its contents is not. Even acknowledging the principle of coherence (wherein operate the lawful relations among classes of phenomena), the world need not necessarily be as it is: in fact it need not be at all, but for the assertion of being. The principle of the assertion of being notes that things are just as they are precisely because of a quality of being that asserts them to be so, and continues to do so with unrelenting reliability, albeit constrained by the principle of coherence.

It should come as no surprise to us, as humans, that the conjunction of these two great principles, one luminously if austerely feminine, the other darkly and energetically masculine, is an explosive wave of creative and destructive dynamism that, when “observed” globally, inferentially, and intellectually is called the “big bang”.