History of History

So Jamshed's eye, i.e. Infinite Intelligence's Infinite thinking, by opening does the work of creating, by remaining open does the work of preserving and by closing does the work of dissolving his sakar Infinite shadow, which, when his eye was closed, was in nirakar, most finite form. The eye produces, preserves and dissolves the sakar Infinite shadow from, through and into its putli [pupil], i.e. Om point. [PDF # 66]

The point through which maya expresses itself always exists like your shadow. From this point, comes out the universe, and into this same point goes in the universe. [PDF # 153]

Making a Whole Lot Out of Nothing

The Nothing is necessarily contained in (not apart from) The Everything. For where else could it be? And surely The Everything could never be contained in The Nothing. Baba says this.

The Nothing is the one infinitely finite (thus non-existent) point in the Everything where God is not. And that is both necessarily nothing at all, and also an infinitely finite point by necessity, the singular vanishing point of nothingness in the midst of The Everything.

Where is this zero point? As explained it is in The Everything. Where in The Everything? The question is vacuous, for within the omnipresent there is no marker against which to locate the point of The Nothing. The Nothing is where The Everything is not, which is of course nowhere. Thus it is categorized as a point in The Everything without substance or location.

We might ask then, in what sense is there a point of nothing, most finite though it may be, against the backdrop of the infinite? The answer is that it is a point of focus, a focal point, a point of concentration. At the moment of the apparent (though never happening) beginning, that happens eternally in the dream of the eternal, it is this focus or concentration of the seeing that manifests the point as a point, which prior to the focus is only what Baba calls in God Speaks "the latency." The one nothing in its latency is of course 'the latency' (singular) for there is nothing else that could possibly be latent in The Everything besides The Nothing, since everything but The Nothing simply is and is of course therefore never merely latent.

If one stares vacuously into the the emptiness of void, one sees not even the vacuity of that emptiness. For looking, but looking inattentively, one does not take notice even of the emptiness of the emptiness. For one is looking too vacuously or inattentively to take notice of it. In such a state of looking vacuously it would not be true either to say of the looker that he is seeing or that he isn't seeing. For one does not notice oneself (here likened to The Everything), nor does one notice the emptiness (here likened to The Nothing). For this reason, I suspect, Meher Baba says that of the beginningless beginning (the state that precedes the condition of time so is without beginning) one can only say that God is. For in that state there is not only no experience of everything (God), but also no experience of nothing. Thus we say it was and ever is eternally beyond consciousness and unconsciousness, or, as has been said sometimes, beyond the categories of being and non-being, although this really means beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. [10]

If one can imagine staring vacuously into a vacuum (nothingness), one can imagine not even being aware of its vacuity. I think this is like the original state, the original condition.

Now imagine being in such a tranquil state of isness. If this tranquility is stirred by an urge to take sight of something, one would become aware of the emptiness, even if one did not recognize the fact that it was empty - not having that concept.

Thus Baba seems to say that when consciousness stirs, by which I take him to mean that attention is directed or focus as if to a point, the Everything becomes aware of the Nothing, is stirred, is spurned by its urge to know something, which is the initial urge. And spurned by this urge to know something, attention is drawn to the Nothing which we could say then takes on the character of a point (since it has no extension, i.e. assumes no part of The Everything although it is in The Everything).

Why does the attention of The Everything go to a point of Nothing when it itself is everything? Why not to itself? Because The Everything is too all-pervasive to take hold of its own attention, just as a fish can't possibly pay attention to water before it has been removed from water and its gills starved of water. So the attention is drawn first to the infinitely finite point of The Nothing instead. The act of attention then produces the point, i.e. it manifests the latent Nothing in the Everything. Just as switching on a light causes a shadow, the switching on of consciousness causes the nothing to be made manifest.

In the state of God where this stirring takes place (not at a point in time, but eternally), all sorts of things potentially come forward before the faculty of seeing. Or we could say, "become imaginable" to The Everything. What appears is really nothing more than the imagination of The Everything appearing to itself to emanate from itself (spontaneously) into the imagination -- appearing in the midst of the Nothing at all to be exploding forthward (the Big Bang).

Baba calls the original state that The Nothing took on "a most finite point." This point becomes the first atom point, ansh, and it is this point that becomes somehow both the first medium for experience and also its first object. [11]

To get a picture of the outfolding dream that begins to emerge (in appearance) before God through this first most finite point of The Nothing, first atom, imagine staring at a tiny spot on a piece of paper. The smaller the spot on the paper, the more focused we would say your attention is. And, since there is nothing on the paper but paper, this spot on the paper that is your point of focus (or focal point) on the paper will become replaced by imaginings, gradually expanding for you into an expanding dream, though all the while you are only looking at a tiny spot. This is like a daydreaming student who, while staring at a fixed point in space, begins to dream a big dream.

But what might that be that could originally come forward from oneself into the imagination? Thoughts could certainly not? With what words could thoughts arise at first? Colors would not? Upon what experience might one postulate a color? Number would not? Upon what basis could the indivisible conceive divisibility?

And there isn't even time, so no time to look even.

This is what I guess. While there is no time, there is a question, or more truly an urge to know or see. Baba calls this initial urge (which does not happen in time) "the cause."

Where would this question arise from beyond time? It need not since it is entailed by reality. What might the everything have an urge to know or see? There is only itself to know, by which we mean truly know, for in truth there is nothing else to know? And God wants to know the truth, ultimately, since the truth is the only thing that can truly be said to be knowable. This is because, if we know what is false this is said to be not knowing or false knowing, or a mere false sense of knowing, so is not truly known. Knowledge is not knowledge that is of that which is false. So to seek real knowledge it can only be himself (the only truth) that He seeks. Though this was not known to him in the beginning.

But this urge by the seeker (God) to know the the identity of the seeker (God) never came about. For how could it? There cannot be any moment beyond the ever present now (the Eternal present) in which time might appear as a mode of seeing, even in imagination. For there is no time in which to imagine.

The question or urge to know in the midst of being the only thing to know didn't really come along the way things happen in life where there is a time before, a time during, and a time afterward. For Meher Baba says that time never existed at all.

The only real question and its only real answer simply are! Eternally. Just as - in His eternal state, God simply is and is Eternally.

So, so long as there is the absence of the answer latent in the ignorance that is the vacuity of the nothing that is God's nonexistent absence, the question exists. The question needn't come into being for it is the only possible question to ask, "I?" And its answer needn't ever come about for it is the only possible answer, "I!" Thus they don't come about because they cannot not be, since they are the only true question and answer, thus cannot be in the infinite knowing.

Who am I? I am I. What am I? I am all. Where am I? I am here. When was I? I am eternal. How great am I? I am. What? Who? Where? Why? Who in the heck am I?

Out of the All that was, the only logically possible question - that is a substantive true question - as one gazes into the infinitely finite point of isn't, which is the only place where God is not, is "I?" And the only answer that is logically possible to give to that question - that is substantive and true - is "I." And what is between these two only truths that are a single truth, true question and true answer? That which is all that Isn't, which is The Nothing.

So now out of the state of Everything is the state of Nothing logically strung between I and I. And it appears to God as an initial first instance of time for an instant - yet it is only in the appearance (which is nothing) that this happens.

Thus the appearance of time isn't really a contradiction with the Eternal, because it never really happens. It only happens in appearance from the vantage point of God. For the initial urge is not really initial. It is the latency in the Everything.

The question of identity (and its answer being one with the question), being the only possible question, never really needed to come about because there is no condition where it could not exist. Being of eternity there is no time where it can be absent. Being of existence there is no condition where it cannot be. Being of omnipresence there is no space where it can be missing. Where it is left unanswered, the only question (I?) simply is. It is eternal, not conditioned by the categories of time and space, being or not being. It is the eternal question.

Only when answered does it cease to be. This world is the question itself (the seeking of its answer).

If you are all that is, and all that could ever be, and you looked into the vacuum of the infinite void of the Absolutely Nothing (that is All there is besides yourself to look upon), and you are not thinking since there is no language out of which to form thoughts and no time in which to conceive any, then what would you possibly have to ask yourself? What urge is possible for the One and Only to have? If one wants what exists one wants oneself, necessarily. Words such as "Who am I?" were unnecessary, for, being All, there was nothing else to ponder about, to ponder with, or to ponder in terms of. You were pondering itself, and, being all that was, you had only your pondering to ponder.

The question was wordless like hunger in the infant who has no conception of itself, of the concept of hunger, of the absence of food, or waiting, and certainly no words. Thus it hungers in silence and its hunger is its only word (which we hear as crying).

There always was and always is the one original, unspoken, wordless, timeless, formless, question. So the Original question or urge is eternal and did not happen and will never happen, for it is eternally asked and the question eternally produces the dream out of the most finite limited point of itself - not, as we imagine it, once upon a time.

This world is the question all around us asking itself. And this eternal question is "the cause." But this question is not in time, and from the vantage point of reality this never really happened, because this (that might have happened) was Nothing but the Nothing.

Out of that Nothing Mind came.

Out of Mind came this everything.

This everything is also Nothing coming out of That Everything

This nothing has come out of That Nothing

That Nothing came out of That Everything

This nothing has taken the form of everything which is not Everything. Out of formless Nothing formful nothing has come.

(Meher Baba, Stay with God, p. 13)

Emanation through the lenses

This original and eternal first and last question (or urge to know Self) issues forth from God not as smoke or gas or color or space or time or number or sound or vibration (all incoherent before the beginning), but it issued out and issues out eternally in the only form it possibly can, as concentration or consciousness. What truly arises is not form but the first glimmer of the rising of awareness, which gives rise to the dimensions of form. What arises first is most finite, then less finite, and so forth until what emerges is God's infinite shadow composed of infinitely imagined varieties of form.

Staring, searching, scanning, concentrating, straining to see -- see what? anything.

Not in a burst (as in a moment of time where there is a before and after) but in the eternal now. The now you conceive of is not the eternal now, for your conception is predicated upon the past and future. Yet you live in every instant in the eternal now.

The world rushes over you like a cascade over rocks. What is constant is the you -- which is the now, the percipient, the point of view that is stable and unmoving. The past and future washes over you. You do not flow through time. You are not in time. You are that witness which watches illusory past fade into memory and anticipates the illusory future.

You are there now. You experience it. You just don't experience it as such.

And latent in this eternal, focusing, straining to see -- anything, something, when in fact there is nothing to see for there is nothing beyond the Self -- this straining to see logically entails time. For if I am waiting for something I am necessarily separating myself in imagination from what I am anticipating. This sense of separation thus entails time. Time does not entail the sense of separation.

And time entails space. This is so because space is conceivable in terms of time, but time is not conceivable in terms of space. For we think, "Here, and then there" (thus conceive space in terms of the dimension of time), but there is no inverse idea. For we can't coherently think, "Now, and over there a little then."

And motion is conceivable in terms time and space. For motion is nothing more than a relation between space and time. For we think, "Such and such span of space is crossed in such and such amount of time." And that (amazingly enough) is actually what we mean by motion.

And the natural laws are laws of motion (all of them) and so forth out and out, one aspect of Creation entailing its logical consequent, producing the world in appearance in the False Thinking of Infinite Intelligence.

The enigma of how time came about when there is no time in which to come about is solved. For the condition of the Eternal Question reverberating is eternal, and produces the appearance of separation (by way of innumerable intermediate imagined false answers).

From the Point of View of you, lost in these appearances, taking yourself to be a player in them, a subject as well as someone's else's object, the Creation (as an event that happened over time) really does appear to have happened as an event in the past!

End Notes

[1] One could see this as a good reason not to bother to consider this particularly deep and difficult subject any further. However, a problem this ancient and intriguing leaves some with the opposite reaction; it intrigues them more because of its futility. They find themselves hungry to explore it even if such exploration is a lost cause. They find themselves energized by the challenge to fathom fathomless things, if only as a meditation on a divine subject for the sake of meditation.

[2] Something can be a necessary logical consequence of something else without following it in temporal sequence. For instance, if you push down on one end of a seesaw, the opposite end of the seesaw will go up. The rising does not happen after the lowering, but happens simply as a necessary consequence of the other. This is due to a larger logical schema that transcends and includes both parts of the event, and that larger schema conditions the response.

[3] After first siding with the logical positivists that all philosophical problems could be solved through proper syntax, Ludwig Wittgenstein later lost faith in the ability of logic to produce more than what he called "language games." Much of what Wittgenstein believed to be the problem of considering "context" in logical formulations was actually the problem of perceptual schemata and point of view. Likewise, what John Rawls referred to as "a fair position," Thomas Khun called "scientific paradigms," and Jacob von Uexkull "umwelt," was perceptual point of view, although not fully recognized as such.

What many analytic philosophers have recently come to refer to as "common sense" or "intuition" (considered respectable epistemological concerns since Russell's philosophers at Cambridge failed to justify belief in matter with reason), such terms are merely a backlash from the scary helplessness such philosophers feel when faced with the obstacle of perspective. What they mean by "intuition" is not the transcendental experience of the mystic, which is actually a precursor to divine inspiration, nor the pure intuitions of time and space proposed by Immanuel Kant, but simply a reference to their habit of checking their imaginations to see if a premise is possible or impossible. Upon examination of the content of their conditioned imaginations they return to say, "I didn't see it there, so it's impossible," or "Yup! I checked my imagination and it's true." This makes the ego of the philosopher the Qutb (Arabic for axis or pivot point and a Sufi word for a perfect master) of their Universe, and it is hardly philosophical. Interestingly it is in this spirit that materialism, the theory that one day human experience will be explainable in terms of material substance, has come to be referred to as "common sense metaphysics."

[4] What is God-like about a director is not his power to command others, but his ability to see through the eyes of others while taking in the whole.

Socrates surrounded himself with mathematicians and philosophers, Jesus with the sick and the poor. But Meher Baba, who spoke of a coming age of intuition, surrounded himself with artists, especially among his western disciples. This seems to be a clue as to the new mode of spontaneous understanding that may soon come.

At the time of Plato the full body of instruments that would become the analogy of life as a projection of consciousness dancing on a cinema screen had not yet arrived. So he portrayed it in a cave. Meher Baba made great use of these newer metaphors, the projector, the film strip, the colored lenses, in "Infinite Intelligence" which he most likely wrote down in 1926.

[5] Answers to questions by Rom Landau, sent him in a letter,

May 1932, London, A p37-40

("A" stands for The Answer, edited by Naosherwan Anzar) (My source)

[6] At any given moment, yesterday has passed, tomorrow hasn't happened yet, but the present is forever occurring. Baba says, "Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future" (LM 5809). We usually think of the present as being over in an instant, but introspection shows that it is always the present at every single moment of your life, and never yesterday or tomorrow. So the present lasts forever, literally, while the past and future are limited to their expected or forgotten moment. In this way, the past and future are in fact limited, but the present is without limit — as it is always and forever the present. Thus it "stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future."

It is only because of the present that both the past and the future find their point of fusion everlastingly in the present. In the eternity of existence there is no time.* There is no past and no future, only the everlasting present. Therefore, in eternity nothing has ever happened and nothing will ever happen. Everything is happening in the unending NOW, if there is anything happening at all; because all that has apparently happened, all that is apparently happening and all that will ever apparently happen in the illusory cosmic universe is all that which God has already dreamt the moment His own original infinite whim surged as “WHO AM I?” So, really speaking, nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen. [Meher Baba, GS 91]

* A dream is nothing more than an experience of gross things by means of the subtle organs, and we have all been told how a long and intricate dream may take place in an impossibly brief moment in that imaginary time which is measured by the movements of the hands on our wrist watch. [editor's footnote from the same page]

[7] Why does Baba refer to nothing as "The Nothing"? Why doesn't he simply say "nothing"? Baba explains that just as there can only be one everything, there can also only be one nothing. If you add together a thousand zeros, you still wind up with only one zero. Thus there is only one nothing, which he calls "The Nothing." The whole Universe is the emanation into imagination of this one Nothing point, or Zero point in The Everything. Baba gives the analogy often of a shadow. One man castes a single shadow where he blocks the sun from his own experience. Similarly God, being one, castes a single shadow. Baba thus refers to a clear dichotomy of The Everything and The Nothing. See The Everything and the Nothing by Meher Baba and The Nothing and the Everything by Bhau Kalchuri.

[8] Generally speaking, all that is of the finite is only relatively finite. Thus in general the finite is always marked by degrees. But when we speak of the shadow of the Infinite (The Everything), this finite must be equally infinite (or it could never be the shadow of The Everything). This infinitely finite point, which is the direct shadow (or opposite or negation) of the infinite Everything, is therefore most finite.

[9] Our birth experience that we can't remember of ourselves is a kind of physically expressed recapitulation of this oozing out of the Om point.

[10] Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent "One", containing no division, multiplicity or distinction; likewise it is beyond all categories of being and non-being. According to Plotinus the concept of "being" is derived by us from the objects of human experience called the dyad, and is an attribute of such objects, but the infinite, transcendent One is beyond all such objects, and therefore is beyond the concepts that we derive from them. Yet Baba seems to say that God is, even in its most transcendent state. For the moment (I may have missed something) I attribute this apparent contradiction to the fact that the transcendent state of Existence is beyond the categories of consciousness and unconsciousness, and perhaps the Neo-platonists such as Plotinus mistook this to be beyond being and not being. It is more true, it would seem, that this state is describable as neither knowing nor not knowing, but knowledge itself, or neither aware nor unaware, but pure Awareness. Or, neither perceiving nor not perceiving, but only perception itself.

[11] Note that you only ever experience your own body (medium). It is the illusion of the nervous system that gives the appearance of being in contact with an external world. You do not experience the world directly, but experience your nerves, and by the media of your nerves the world. Or so the theory of physicality by scientists goes. It may be that the world never truly manifests outside the medium. For the world is nothing but the sum of such media.