Maharaj uses this simile of ‘the child of a barren woman’ fairly frequently. One morning, a visitor, who had perhaps heard it for the first time, was quite intrigued and. requested him to illustrate it by an example. For a while, Maharaj remained silent with his eyes closed, without the least movement, his breathing as shallow as could be, and we thought he would go into a Samadhi. But then he started talking in a low voice: Look, understand what time is. Unless you know the nature of time, you will not understand the nature of phenomena. What happens is that one takes time for granted and then proceeds to build all kinds of concepts. If you are going to build, should you not see what your foundation is like?
Time and space go together. Why are you able to cognize things? Because you see them. Would you have been able to see things if they had no form? You see things because they have form, volume, because they are extended into space. Let us go a step further: If things were seen in space for a split-second only, would you be able to perceive them? You perceive things, only because they are extended into space for a certain duration (time), and the forms remain long enough before you to enable you to perceive them.
If there were no concepts of time and space (time and space themselves are obviously not objects), ‘things’ would not be perceptible and things would not be ‘things’. If there were no space-time (no past, present, and future), how could there have been any phenomena, any events? Please try to understand that both phenomena and time are merely concepts and have no existence of their own: Whatever things are seen, or thought of, are merely images conceived in consciousness, the supposed actuality of which is as ‘real’ as a dream or a mirage. Now do you .understand what I mean when I say that all phenomenality is the child of a barren woman?
This point about space-time, said Maharaj, is so difficult to grasp that even highly intelligent people are baffled and confounded at its complexity and are unable to comprehend its true significance. At this stage he addressed a question to the visitors generally: “Have the scientists ever gone deeply into the problem of the nature of space-time?”
There were various comments, but the consensus was that no scientists had really made a deep study of this problem, but that some of the topmost among them, including Einstein, had come to the conclusion that the entire universe is ‘of the nature of thought', and they held that the nature of space-time is really incomprehensible since it crosses the borders of the mind and all human knowledge acquired so far.
Maharaj laughed and said: How can the scientists do it with their puny minds? They may conceive ‘unlimited space’ and ‘unlimited time', but can they conceive the very absence of space and time? It is impossible because that which conceives, in its conception, cannot conceive the conceiving. Would it be possible for the eye to see its own seeing? Can the fire burn itself? Can water understand thirst?
If you can grasp the significance of what l have said, you will cease looking at ‘things’ against the fixed background of time; you will cease searching for truth through the medium of your proud intellect. Indeed, you will realize that the very effort of searching is an obstruction because the instrument with which you will be searching is a divided mind a conceptual subject seeking a conceptual object. When you realize this, you will stop searching and let the impersonal consciousness take over. And then, when the impersonal consciousness lets you in on the mystery of its own source, you will know that there is no ‘you’ or ‘me’, but only ‘I’, the essential subjectivity; that ‘things’ have no substance and, therefore, a phenomenon is the child of a barren woman; and, finally, that ‘I’ am intemporality, infinity !
No comments:
Post a Comment