Life in a complex biological amplification unit

As human beings we are aware of two states.  The first is coming into being, namely, our birth.  The second is our eventual entry into non-being or death.  What we have no knowledge of is what we were before coming into being and what we will be after the death of our physical body.  It’s a big blank for us.

To give the above more context, if you can imagine that we are like a radio signal with no location, the coming into being is finding our particular radio.  Our death might be when the station is switched to another station of a different frequency, or the radio we are amplified through is destroyed.  This is meant to suggest that we only know who we are when we have psychophysical bodies to work through.  This, however, is an incomplete picture of what is going on.  It would be much better to know ourselves as a nonlocal radio signal so that if we became radioized we would not be terribly alarmed if the batteries in the radio went dead!

I admit this analogy is far from perfect, but it moves us to a place of thought we should consider.  As we sit in meditation and inwardly focus on our mental world and its contents what are we usually aware of?  We are aware of thoughts and their subsequent change, including mental images.  We are also aware of the influence of particular emotions and feelings including their subsequent diminution over time.  Might we say that this mental world of which we are aware is the result of amplification, being what the body, like a radio does?  But what now of the unamplified part of us? the real nonlocal part of us which is our Buddha-nature (the part which is not born or dies); which only true meditation can cognize.  But you answer, without any hesitation, it doesn’t really exist.  

But this is not the way the mystic or the Buddha’s mind works.  They understand that this amplified worldly existence, in which we seem situated in a highly complex biological amplification unit—which is of short duration—is not who we really are.  And they are also sure of it because the more of them is not in this body—and what is not in the carnal body is luminous, self-existent, and immortal.  In such a state, the support or basis of ordinary reality is radically shifted in favor of the extraordinary and the nonlocal, which is also the undying spiritual substance of existence.

Briefly, this is what we read when we read the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra.  The Buddha is telling his followers before he appears to die that he is truly disincarnate even before he dies.  He says:

“O good man! The Tathagata, already, since innumerable, boundless asamkhyas of kalpas [aeons] ago, has had no body supported by food and illusion, and he has no body where there yet remains the result of illusion. He is the Eternal, the Dharma Body, and the Adamantine Body. O good man! One who has not yet seen “Buddhata” [Buddha-Nature, Buddha-Essence, Buddha-ness] is called the illusion-body, the body supported by various kinds of food, and the body where there yet remains the result of illusion” (trans. Kosho Yamamoto; ed. Dr. Tony Page, The Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, p. 18).

Unfortunately, for unawakened mortals, they are such in virtue of clinging passionately to what is illusory, supported by food, impermanent, not the self (viz., the Five Aggregates) and suffering!  They are a radio signal attached to the radio, unaware of their true freedom.

Comments

[Susan Law]

Nice extended metaphor, imho.

[Sally Strange]

Uhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, Dr. Tony Page, which you quote is (...).

And whats more he moved last year to Thailand (...).

Yeah.. (...).

(...)?

PS: (...)

[Sally Strange]

is this your excuse for a metaphysical illumination of the process by which descent of being becomes coordinate with temporal existence?

Me thinks thou needs a study of Plotinus "on matter (and embodiment)" and Plato about the material logos )mimesis) and ananke of noetic proodos of the nous/citta to which is necessitated both the how of descent, but also the means of being coordinate with embodiment.

Get thee to a library.