Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00060)

Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in a
high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all
around....Woods climb steeply on both sides of the
valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; facing
you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the
mighty, glacier tipped peak, its smooth snow fields
and hard-edges rock faces touched at this moment with
soft rose colour by the last rays of the departing
sun....

According to our usual way of looking at it,
everything that you are seeing has, apart from small
changes, been there for thousands of years before you.
After a while....you will no longer exist, and the
woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for
thousands of years after you.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of
nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle
which remains quite indifferent to you? ....For
thousands of years men have striven and suffered and
begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A
hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this
spot; like you, he gazed with awe and yearing in his
heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you, he
was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain
and brief joy like you do. Was he someone else? Was it
not you yourself? What is this self of yours? What was
the necessary condition for making the thing conceived
this time into you, just you, and not someone else?
What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this
"someone else" really have? ....What justifies you in
obstinately discovering this difference - the
difference between you and someone else - when
objectively what is there is the same?

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly
come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the
basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that
this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you
call your own should have sprung into being from
nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather
this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially
eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all
men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this
sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal,
infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in
Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same
baffling question: which part, which aspect are you?
what, objectively, differentiates it from others? No,
but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you
- and all other conscious beings as such - are all in
all. Hence, this life of yours that you are living is
not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in
a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so
constituted that it can be surveyed in one single
glance....

...now, today, every day [Mother Earth] is bringing
you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of
times, just as everyday she engulfs you a thousand
times over. For eternally and always there is only
now, one and the same now; the present is the only
thing that has no end.

======Erwin Schroedinger, pgs 96-7 (quoted in Quantum
Questions, 1984, ed: Ken Wilber)

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