An Endless Potential State
This is something I have written up in an attempt to allay my doubts surrounding various points about Sanatana Dharma. I wonder if there are any inconsistencies here I might not be aware of.
***
Shake up a bottle of Sprite™ and start opening it. What do you see? Bubbles start racing in streams upward to the top which, had you turned all the way, soda would have gushed out of in spades.
When did this potential state of happening first occur? Was it when you twisted the cap? Or when you first shook up the bottle? What if the bottle had been rattling in your car for hours on the way home? What about before? Looking at things microscopically, when did the bubbles actually "start" racing when you finally gave the cap its twist?
Take another example. Say you start falling asleep while riding a Ferris Wheel. Say you become jolted while in your doze. You wake up immediately disconcerted! How long was I on the ride? When did this wheel start turning? At that concentrated point of questioning, there is no idea of limitation to how long. It may have been fifteen minutes or it may have been an eternity. Prior to concepts hedging one's experience of time, there is no means to measure.
Take the notion of desire in this relation. Prior to the satisfaction of any desire one has what may be termed longing. There is a sense of both potency and incompleteness. Potency is a measure of one's longing, which is really infinite. As part and parcel of the divine, only absolute fullness can recompense to us our own sense of our natures. Incompleteness is the distance between the object of longing and one's unfulfilled desire. When we feel incomplete we are trapped in longing. We wish to escape into dreams of desire. This of course is illusion. We are already full! Or, to put it in devotional terms, God is already omnipresent and ready to be enjoyed at this very moment! We realize, then, not intellectually but viscerally and intimately, that our unfulfilled desire, waiting to be actualized in a never-ending future, is already the state of our own fullness, and God's fullness, and we simply need to realize that fact. Potency then is true actuality and incompleteness is misconstrued completeness! This is pure non-duality at its most explicit!
Now the question arises as to how such a flat-out base contradiction could have ever arisen: to seek what is outside oneself in order to satisfy oneself, who is all things? If God is all-blissful, then we could not be God. We cannot deceive ourselves into being on a par with sat-cit-ananda proper if that is the Absolute, for the Absolute can never be fooled.
What is a more compelling interpretive frame is the idea that we entered into this material world at a given point in time, and that we are infinitesimal specks of that Absolute. That is when time arose, to state it more accurately. Material time, if not spiritual time. Spiritual time is endless and seamless, without the finite break we call an individual "present" which limits our perception conceptually. On the other hand, our entrance into matter is akin to heaving a long heavy wrench into an endless, unruffled turbine. All of a sudden the turbine slows down, starts creaking or even stops altogether. This is deadness, dullness, and lethargy - in other words, matter. All in juxtaposition to the activity, the dynamism and endless energy of Shakti/Shaktiman, as represented by the turbine, in relation to which the appearance of matter is nothing - a mere appearance in the endless roll of Eternity. And yet, the decision to throw the wrench in was always there. Why is that? Because of beginningless ignorance. The sense that one was always incomplete, at least in some way if not another. Or that there was some desire or wish that was left unfulfilled - that could only be, that MUST be, ACTUALIZED. And that desire was for, of all things, material enjoyment, which we know is so tempting.
And so this is the reason for the blowing up of the soda bottle. This is the reason for the jolt on the Wheel. This is why we are not God but an infinitesimal fraction of the Potency of God. We were always, prior to time, in spiritual variegatedness, in our own pastimes, sometimes within closer proximity to God, sometimes farther away, but never in complete Knowledge of non-duality, the Final Understanding. This is why our entrance into Matter, out of Eden as it were, though it was due to our own ignorance and our own misuse of free will, was nonetheless inevitable to our growth and coming to see, that even Matter is nothing more than a gritty mirror image, a paling reflection of our own Potency, which is the Potency of God and the cure to our "incompleteness."
How can I put this in a sentence? Try next time.
Bookmarks