The Fool's Word

As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

This passage in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is probably one of the most vivid depictions of ephemerality ever produced in the written arts. It says really, that all is perishable, or temporary, no matter what we do. But just because they are temporary, that does not make things any less valuable. The transiency of life, is the same as its splendour.

We go to great lengths in preserving something, and then we get anxious, depressed or generally sad when they disappear from us. We don’t on the whole like it very much that our lives are fleeting. Some people even think that death is a serious problem, and that we ought to “fix” it. Fix nature’s decay. Which is ridiculous to me.

Ever since the dawn of time, human beings have observed this decay and asked the question whether there is anything eternal that endures. And modern science would tell you there isn’t. The Big Rip, or The Heat Death of the universe will happen some day. And we get bothered about that.

But as I’ve observed my own life, especially in the past few years, I’ve had this intuition that there is this element of continuity in all things and events in the universe. That a pattern’s appearance and disappearance, implies its reappearance. And I tend to feel that the same thing will be true of the universe. That its disappearance is but a link in a chain that spans all through eternity.

And this idea is very much prevalent in Hindu thought. They call it the Days and Nights of Brahma. Where every inbreathing is the creation of the universe, and every outbreathing is its undoing, until it moves into a “cooldown period” called pralaya. And then it starts up all over again. And this goes on for forever and ever.

It is not entirely unique to their philosophy, but it may be that they were the first people to depict the cosmos as a series. But it reminds me also that many astronomers now are beginning to see this as a possibility. It makes zero sense to me to think that the universe came out of literal nothing. Nothing can come out of nothing. You have to have something to have something. But then again, this begs the question I’ve been wondering for a long time: how can a first cause be at the same time causeless, and its own cause? It seems logically impossible. And yet, that is the Ultimate Principle or Brahman in this cosmology.

True, logic does not even begin to touch true eternity. It has its limits, such as that you can’t have a system of logic, which defines its own axioms. The consistency of an internal logic always has to be defined in terms of a higher system. And so how do you apply a higher system to the already highest point? See, you can’t explain things by their cause alone. If you keep asking the question “how” long enough, it becomes an infinite regression at some point, in which you’re left with nothing; the question vanishes along with the cause.

And so you can think this long enough until you come to the realization that all finite things are explained only against the background of the ever-lasting. That’s how they are able to “flip” in and out of existence. Which is the very nature of a wave or a pulse. It flickers in and out, in and out. And this prompts another point of view to my mind.

There is a general feeling among people who say that the distinction between good and evil, as an example, has to be an eternal distinction to be important. And this is false. To say that a finite distinction is of lesser importance, is a highly hypocritical thing to make. Because after all, your own organism is not eternal, yet it is important. So the distinction between good and evil, does not have to exist in eternity to matter on this level of being.

And the reason people insist that it has to be eternal, is that they have a personal vendetta against all wrong-doers. And that makes certain sense. Punishment has to be attributed to those who transgress the rules. But note that “rules” is also a finite concept. But imagine if good and evil really did exist in eternity and were not temporary game rules, how horrible and dire things would be. We would have hells in which people would suffer literally for all eternity, as is the case with Christian Hell.

And this strikes me so horrible as a concept, that I’m choosing to wipe my ass with it. Nothing will last, except the ever-lasting. So I’m making the claim that everything in this universe, is temporary. But what underlies the universe, is what I can only point to with the term non-dual. It is at the same time ephemeral, and yet eternal. That is to say, our real identity is the eternal aspect.

So cheer up. We’ll be here for a while.

T.F.