From The Selfward Facing Way Chapter 2 ("Multiple Concepts, A Singular Wholeness"):
Something quite wonderful is occurring at this stage of our human story. We are now developing a quantum understanding of reality, based on mathematical principles (and backed by discoveries in astronomy and molecular biology as well as other fields of natural science), to reflect and confirm what the greatest saints and sages ever known have been telling us all along.
Essentially, we are
coming to understand that the only thing here is infinity in all
directions.
Looking into a telescope, you know that “the universe” spreads out before
you without any identifiable end point.
Your looking may reveal all sorts of mind-blowing phenomena: planets and
stars, sunspots, nebulas, comets, meteor showers, black holes and
galaxies. As you look, and in each
moment, the Earth is hurtling through space in its orbit of our Sun at about 67,000 miles per
hour. This figure does not even take
into account the speed of the Earth’s rotation or the speed with which our
solar system is rotating in the Milky Way (490,000 mph or something crazy like that). Yet because of gravity, we and everything
else here are held “in place”! These forces and the
unfathomable power be-hind them are almost unspeakable. Countless trillions of light years are in
operation, simultaneously in this very instant, engendering a perpetual
multiplicity of cosmic events.
Being aware of these unbelievable forces, it becomes evident that this
activity of the universe extends forever.
Whatever you cannot see is here, too, the immensity of which exceeds far beyond what can be observed, detected
or measured.
This is a pretty
huge realization!
Looking through a microscope to the inside of
your body or that of any other sentient life form, you can perceive an equally
mind-blowing universe. Bearing witness
to the intricate diversity and complexities of the living organism bestows an
awe that is unsurpassed. And we also
know that the stronger the capability of the micro-scope, the more we can see
of what’s really going on in there.
Increasing our magnification of what we are able to view on the inside reveals there is also no
end to life going in this direction, in the very same way there is no end when
a telescope is pointed “outwards.”
Inside and outside, there is only infinite space.
The big question is:
“What is ‘the looker’ in all of this?”
Where is he/she? Who is the one looking through the telescope or the
microscope? Is not the very possibility
of our beginning to observe and confirm this huge mind-blowing reality—through
advances in technology and scientific understanding—a function of infinity itself? Can something other than infinity be looking
at infinity? What is the delineation
between “inside” and “outside”? Is infinity
not discovering the vastness, the limitlessness, the immensity, the beauty and wonder of its own nature?
If this is true, where
does infinity begin and end in you? Can
there be somewhere in which you are not
in this discovery?
Can you yourself be
other than infinity? Other than wholeness?
Is this not simply reality
as it is?
* * *
Infinity literally
means “never-ending.” Therefore, infinity
has constant never-endingness as its nature.
So in this moment, it is seamless.
It has no demarcations or limits.
Our adopted definitions and beliefs—our concepts—are responsible for
imposing an apparent limit on infinity. But apparent limits are fundamentally
untrue. In mathematical terms, this
means that no matter what number you think of infinity as being, it is always
at least one more. No matter what size
you perceive it to be, it is always bigger.
Since infinity already exists as never-endingness, it is only our
continual discovery of observable aspects of it that can make us think of it as
expanding. The collective learning and
knowledge of humankind deepens through our evolutionary development. But knowledge is the same as infinity in the
sense that all there is to know already exists; we are simply uncovering more
and more of this fact, through the passage of time. What expands is just our apprehension of it—our
confirmation. This process does not
actually change anything, however. The
knowledge of everything everywhere is already complete.
Whenever something
“new” gets added to the knowledge bank in which we store our cumulative evaluation
of infinity’s immensity, we can fall into the trap of imagining this new
concept is somehow better at capturing what is inherently uncontainable. Infinity is too immediate, too free and too
all-encompassing to be grasped in any description or process of
categorization.
Within infinity, every concept that has ever been and will ever be conceived
of arises and disintegrates. Infinity
is that by which all concepts can
appear, without exception, and it remains here unaffected when they disappear
again—as they inevitably do. Infinity is
already everything. It is already one
never-ending wholeness. Reality is
simply, exactly this truth. And it is
permanent.
Can there be
anything else here but this?
