Navigating the infinite worlds of our mind

Nothing about our lives or our identities is fixed. Pretty much everything we see, hear, or think about is transient, constantly changing, gone pretty much the moment we think it.

Carrying on from this article: Quantum leaps in consciousness. 

If we haven’t really given much thought to the continuum of consciousness – and how it survives the death of our physical body – we may well assume that this life is the only life we’ll ever have. But I think we owe it to ourself to check if that’s true or not because, if it’s not true, if there is life after death (and before birth!), this has a lot of existential ramifications. And a deep bearing on whether we experience happiness or suffering.

The multiple versions of Jason in the show Dark Matter challenge not only the notion of one permanent, unchanging self, but a real and therefore most important self. If there are countless worlds and countless versions of “me”, which one is the most real and important? Surely none of them is intrinsically more important than any of the others, let alone all the others? Why do we think that this current life is the most important life we’ve had or will ever have? The significance of this particular fleeting human life depends entirely on what we plan on doing with it. As Geshe Kelsang says in the The New Eight Steps to Happiness:

What is the ultimate, supreme goal of human life? We should ask ourself what we consider to be most important – what do we wish for, strive for or daydream about?

This is not an abstract question, nor one that we can ask ourselves just the once, because day after day our answer determines the choices we make that day and therefore the direction our life is taking us. Each Jason’s personality and trajectory is created by his different choices, those decisions or intentions affecting his future in every moment. It’s the same for us.

According to Buddhism, the real meaning of our precious human life is to attain inner peace in general, as that is the real cause of happiness, and the supreme inner peace of enlightenment in particular. Enlightenment is defined as the inner light of wisdom permanently free from all mistaken appearances that bestows mental peace on each and every living being every day. If we choose enlightenment every day, we will be setting ourselves up for a future that is blissful and beneficial beyond anything we previously imagined.

Which world do you choose?

What a strange thing to consider, imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. ~ Dark Matter

If you were in an endless corridor of possible worlds, which door would you walk through, which world would you choose? What world CAN we choose at the moment?

In a few hundred months or sooner we will be lying on our deathbed. We’ll be about to absorb into the clear light, our very subtle mind, in which all the appearances of this life will permanently disappear. The door of this life will close behind us and that will be it. From the clear light a whole new body, identity, and world will then arise like a dream, all created and shaped by our consciousness and karma. So this is not an abstract question – it is quite possibly the most important question of our life.

It’s terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches off into a new world. ~ Dark Matter

How did you get into Dharma?

How did you get into Dharma, if you are into it? For me, due to two unwise 16-year-old decisions that led to suspension from my school but also an encounter with what I am sure was a Buddha emanation (a story for another day), I was told in my Oxford interview that I would have to apply again the following year when I would be “more mature”. I wasn’t feeling it, anyway. So, after a gap year, I opted to go to York University instead, the only university that wanted me, in the city where, as it happened, Venerable Geshe-la had just established his first Center, Madhyamaka Centre. The rest is history, as they say.

One of my friends in Florida went to a bookstore because he wanted a physics book, but it just so happened that a Kadampa was giving a bookstore talk in that section. A bit irritated, he thought he’d just sit there and wait …  and here he is, 25 years later. A friend in Denver was the Tattered Cover bookstore manager organizing a Kadampa bookstore talk one evening … fast forward ten years as well. A very long-time beloved Kadampa called Mark was working as a youth in the warehouse in London that was responsible for distributing Tharpa’s books, and one day accompanied his boss for delivery to Madhyamaka Centre. Again, here he still is. I’d love to hear your story. How easily could we have missed it?

The power of mental intentions

Our mental intentions have ripple effects over the course of multiple lifetimes, not just one. As I mention in this article, Making karma work for us, we have free will when we understand the law of karma and start to create the causes we want for the reality we want. Otherwise we remain “tightly bound in the chains of karma, so hard to release”, as Je Tsongkhapa puts it, and have no options – we may as well be subject to fate or predestination.

In one episode, one of the characters chooses a world where everyone has empathy; and it is indeed a warmer, kinder, and more highly functioning Chicago they find themselves in. What if we chose a world in which we are the ones with empathy – indeed with universal compassion and bodhichitta? Or, better yet, the union of compassion and wisdom – the perfection of wisdom – choose a world made of that? Or, best of all, choose the higher perfection of wisdom, a world created by bliss and emptiness, the Pure Land of Keajra?

If I was standing in that corridor about to go to a new world, which I will be before too long, what exactly would I be trying to think? What karma would I be trying to ripen?! What world would I be attempting to conjure? I would need the so-called five forces to be operating at that time:

1. The force of motivation
2. The force of familiarity
3. The force of white seed
4. The force of destruction
5. The force of aspirational prayer

In brief, the force of motivation, both during our life and at the time of death, involves keeping a strong wish to achieve our spiritual goal. The force of familiarity means becoming familiar with Dharma through consistent practice. The force of white seed refers to creating as much merit or good karma as possible. The force of destruction involves purifying as much negativity as we can. The force of aspirational prayer is constantly dedicating all our good karma to the attainment of our goal. These five forces are explained in Living Meaningfully, Dying Joyfully. As I lie on my deathbed, I need to be motivated by a pure and powerful mind and able to slip into a groove that I have familiarized myself with throughout my life.

Mandala offerings

Talking of the force of white seed, when his wife asks Jason where all these parallel universes are, he tells her that they are right here, right now, just electrons away; and if we had a flexible enough consciousness we’d see them.

This reminded me of offering hundreds of thousands of mandala universes in our hands without our hands getting any bigger or these worlds getting any smaller. When we fully realize the union of appearance and emptiness – our consciousness does become that flexible through training! – we’ll see all these world systems directly and simultaneously, as a Buddha does. In the meantime, we can imagine. Knowing that these worlds are all mere appearance of mind, with no existence from their own side, we can know they all exist in our hands and we can offer them to infinite Buddhas in their infinite Buddha Lands. We can feel that the Buddhas accept them and are delighted, and offer that pretty much infinite merit to all living beings, that they might enjoy such Pure Lands. This is one of my favorite practices because it is mind-expanding, blissful, and uplifting. You can read all about it in Joyful Path of Good Fortune and Great Treasury of Merit, or watch Gen-la Jampa talk about it here.

Everything is illusory

Pretty soon, and unsurprisingly, the characters in Dark Matter are finding it difficult to determine the difference between illusion and reality. Are all these worlds, each grains of sand on an infinite beach, equally real or unreal?!

Amanda: I feel like my world is vanishing.
Jason 2: Do you think you would ever forget it completely?
Amanda: I can see it getting to a point where it doesn’t feel real anymore.

And what ever made their original world, “home”, more real than all the other worlds – other than their grasping at it as such? As one of them asks:

If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?

Buddha’s answer would be, we don’t. There is no inherently existent I or mine. Every world we have ever entered in life after life is mine by conceptual imputation, labelled “mine”, but never inherently.

Of course every world appears real to them, as do all our worlds to us, lifetime after lifetime. It is totally overwhelming and hard not to grasp at each one as the truth, the only reality. This self-grasping also leads to attachment and other delusions. For example, Jason’s desire above all else to return to his “home”, clinging to a specific version of reality, puts him at odds with any happiness he could be having in the present moment with the woman he is with, and leads to a lot of pain and confusion.

We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglass. ― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

This is why we need to be working toward a direct realization of the truth, emptiness – that the things we normally see, or the things that normally appear, do not exist at all. Only emptiness appears as it exists.

Union of the two truths

Geshe Kelsang gave the following reasoning during the London transmission of the Oral Instructions of Mahamudra in 2014.

1. If something exists, it must be true.
2. Only emptiness is true.
3. So, if something exists, it must be part of emptiness.
4. Therefore, the things that exist must exist within emptiness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because it’s brilliant. True means that there is no discrepancy between appearance and reality. Here’s one thing I’ve been considering. If something is fake, does it exist? If someone pretends to be your girlfriend online but in reality is out to syphon away all your money, like those slave laborers in Myanmar, does that fake girlfriend exist? If my body, for example, appears to be inherently existent but in fact lacks inherent existence, does that fake body exist? I don’t think so. Conventional truths are falsities, only true for self-grasping. By convention or agreement, they have a relative validity compared with non-existents; but they don’t really exist. (See more about this in the Ultimate Bodhichitta chapter of The New Eight Steps to Happiness.) For a Buddha, all conventional truths appear empty, which is very different to how we are seeing them!

I’ve been trying to imagine lately what appearances look like if they don’t appear to exist from their own side, if they appear empty. It’s fun to think about. I have to start this contemplation from the starting point of having meditated on emptiness or I don’t get anywhere. But we can get a very pleasing sense of what Geshe-la said not long before he passed away:

All phenomena their own emptiness appears as themselves. Otherwise all phenomena do not exist at all.

There is nothing there to grasp at; the only truth is emptiness. All our worlds are emptiness in disguise, as he says in Tantric Grounds and Paths:

Although forms appear to have their own characteristics and exist in their own right, if we examine them more closely we find only emptiness. This emptiness is their real nature, but it appears as form. Forms are therefore manifestations of emptiness.

This realization of appearance and emptiness is what we have to aim for if we are to break out of that samsaric box into total transcendent freedom, and help everyone else do the same.

Over to you in the Comments box below, I’d love to hear your take on any of this.