The Myth of Mortality

Imagine you are in a room with an assailant and you have combat in which the assailant delivers a mortal wound.

So you lie there bleeding and your gasps grow ever weaker as the life leaves you.

It seems like the end. But for who?

There are only 2 people in the room. The assailant call them Jane is watching you die. She is witness to the fact that your are mortal and will soon die. She will watch you die. You, Peter, seem very mortal. A tragic end to the Jane and Peter ladybird books.

But this blog has already established an odd feature of this situation. As you look at Jane through the eyes of dying Peter on the floor it must be that you have seen Jane and so you must be over there!

Its no surprise that we cannot see through walls. Light must get to our eyes to see. So in fact although we think we can see far away, actually science says we can't see far away, all we can see is whatever reaches our eyes. What does not get to our eyes we cannot see. So to see Jane, she must come to our eyes. Normally we skip the details and think that what we see over there sends light over here and that is how we see. But in fact the "over there" we are looking at its not about to send any light, it must have already sent light for us to be see it. Everything we are seeing must have already been seen! So what we think is over there is really over here. As we look at Jane she is not over there, she must be over here. So how then can she be looking at me Peter over here if she is over here too?

It turns out that the whole situation is an illusion. The Jane we are seeing "over there" has already been seen. And the Peter we see here has also already been seen too. His eyelashes blurring the rim of our vision his nose in the corner of our field of view, his arms, body and legs if we look down. In fact there is no difference between Jane and Peter they are both already seen, but by who? It can't be Peter or Jane.

Even the simple scene that Peter is looking at as he lies dying doesn't make sense. Peter is not at the centre of the scene and Jane is not looking down on him. we have added these perspective after it was all seen.

Now more sophisticated thinking by Peter in his final moments leads him to ignore the scene in his vision and instead concentrate on his consciousness. Ah ha says Peter okay I see that all I am looking at is an illusion but it is like a film being played on to a cinema screen. That Peter lying on the floor represents the Peter who has this consciousness. Perhaps it is that inside that Peter on the screen is this consciousness and that is the real Peter who is thinking these things. I accept that the pictures of Jane and Peter in that consciousness are illusions but the consciousness itself, I am sure of that because it is actually here, I am aware and know that I am aware and I know that when I die it will vanish (in some way).  

Okay we have gone deep enough for this blog and to go further is actually very advanced indeed. You will need deep meditation experiences, access concentration and Dhyarna to get really get fully to this level.

But let us not forgot how easily the Peter lying on the floor was fooled into thinking that Jane was over there and looking at him dying in the floor here. By direct analogy it turns out that even the ideas of a unified consciousness "over here" belonging to a true Peter "over here" who is dying turns out to be an illusion. We think its so certain that we are conscious, that conscious must be us, here it is, it is certain, I am consciousness, I can see it all, I can see it is me. But remember it seemed obvious at first that I was sitting at the centre of vision and looking at a world that seemed remote and outside me. Its only a small step (although a deep one) to see that consciousness itself is the same. Peter is not at the centre of consciousness any more than he was at the centre of his visual world.

Consider if we were somehow linked to consciousness then where are we when asleep? Do we stop existing until we wake up? The first step is linked to turning off the lights and thinking we never-the-less still exist even when we can see nothing. Surely this means then when the lights go on what we see is not us. If we existed even when we could not see, then we exist regardless of what we see. So we can forget that we look like anything. Likewise if we fall asleep, where are we? So we can ignore that we have consciousness. But we are running out of things. What are we, and where are we if we are not in our senses and we are nothing to do with consciousness? Complete mind f**k and while simple to write to really see this and unhook the self from what we sense and our consciousness is a seriously hard and subtle thing to do. There is another thing we have ignore here I realise. There is the thought of our self too. Okay we think yeah I am not in the senses, yeah I am not consciousness: I get that. But all we have done is go and sit in our thoughts. Thoughts in the West courtesy of Plato have a very high status, but actually it is a very low status like that of other sense. Cat. See immediately all those thoughts of "me" are gone and now a cat is there. Where does the "self" go when we are thinking about a cat! 

Its even more fragile that Peter lying on the ground considering that Jane is not really over there. We quickly back track in our minds, but it was me looking at the cat. Really? You had to invent that thought afterwards! When you were looking at the cat you were thinking cat! Suppose you were not thinking cat, you were thinking "I'm looking at cat" then isn't everything prefixed by this? I now thinking I was thinking I was looking at a cat... oo not correct I now thinking I was thinking I was thinking I was looking at a cat... ad infinitum, Once you can no longer just think something and everything must be wrapped in a bubble of "me thinking it" then you have an infinite loop cos even that surely gets wrapped in a bubble. Unless you allow of a bubble outside all the others that you don't know about. Really? Isn't that the same as just thinking it with no bubbles? SRH (see rest of blog). Thinking must at some stage just be thinking, and sometimes you think about me and sometimes you don't. And if you can sometimes not think about me, then it is not me thinking! Just as with vision and consciousness it turns out the self cannot reside in thinking either.

So that Peter lying on the floor is an illusion. That Peter who is conscious is an illusion. And so it goes on. Peter is an illusion. Peter is thus not mortal, he does not die. This is the essence of Buddha's "anatta" teaching where all impermanent, conditional things (those things that come and go, that have not existed forever and won't exist forever) cannot be the standing place of the self.

But we have seriously raced through this. Going back over it its important not to throw anything away. Vision is still there. Jane and Peter are definitely in the room and Peter is lying on the floor dying. Jane is looking at him. They can talk about this. Jane will leave the room after Peter is dead and perhaps think about this afterwards, remember it, perhaps even tell people about it. And Peter will be found and buried. All this is true.

But at the same time Peter was not there at the centre of it. No Peter died!

It seems paradoxical. And perhaps that is the best way to leave it until we are enlightened. On the one hand the world unfolds as it does in everyday stories, but on the other if we investigate it we find nothing in there.

This is why the Indians have the word Sunyata. It is often translated as "emptiness" because when we peer deep into the world there is nothing there. But we mustn't forget we were peering deep into something and that something is "full." I mean you enter a well and climb down and down at some difficulty and then reach water. Okay you wanted the water, you found it, but you had to climb down a well. Likewise to see emptiness there must be something that is empty! You must have been lying on the floor dying for you to investigate and see that actually there was no you in there to die!

Often first step is to call the world an illusion and then throw it away and imagine standing in blank space. The other is to imagine it solid and surrounding us. They are sides of the same much more subtle coin.