activity.”
Farid al-Din 'Attar, the Sufi poet, saw this too:
“The whole world is a marketplace for Love,
For naught that is, from Love remains remote.
The Eternal Wisdom made all things in Love.
On Love they all depend, to Love all turn.
The earth, the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars
The center of their orbit find in Love.”
Thus, for naught, do we try to obtain this loving-union, for we are this loving-union. Mere gravity
exemplifies allurement in the cosmos.
The ground of Being is stillness, emptiness, and “the journey out of emptiness is the creation of love”, writes Swimme. This, of course, accords with the famous hadith, “I was a hidden treasure. I loved to be known, so I created creation.” But not all would describe creation as an act of love. Physicist Sir James Jeans has said, “If the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must have been an act of thought.” Many other physicists and Vedantins, and most Buddhists, would describe the world in this manner. Per Ramana Maharshi: “In fact, what is called the world is only a thought.” Yet, truly, whatever one insists on coloring, with language, as either thought or as love, has a more basic description as an interaction or an experience.
An experience necessitates both experiencer and the experienced. By way of Wolfgang Pauli: “The concept of consciousness in fact demands a cut between subject and object, the existence of which is a logical necessity, while the position of the cut is to a certain extent arbitrary.” Actually, the position of that cut proves itself completely arbitrary. According to Erwin
Schrödinger, “Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” There exists no objective reality, nor any subjective reality. These conceptions fail in the face of a subject-object unitive reality, in which one Being plays all roles. As such, we belong to the simplest possible universe, experiencing itself. To model our human life in this manner, seeking a conservative essentiality, we may cut off or avoid extraneous information and divisive activity. Such a manner recalls Ramakrishna, who would cry in agony to see a newspaper lying on the table.
Perhaps Ramakrishna had intuitive perception of how operate the forces of nature: gravitation, electromagnetic, the weak and strong nuclear forces. Each of these forces involves the exchange of virtual particles between elementary particles (for example, the exchange of virtual mesons between protons and neutrons). Those particles known as “virtual” have such a designation, as they do not fully exist. They seem to come from nowhere, but having such a short life-span, bypass the conservation law of matter. However, virtual particles not only cause the physical forces, but in any interaction with elementary particles, all the particles involved have been reborn. The proton which exudes a virtual meson has taken the place, in existence, of the proton which had not yet exuded any virtual particle.
The same holds true for us, here, on the human level of existence. With each interaction, in each passing moment, we die and someone new takes our place; a continual rebirth. Swimme
describes how we become “moon-people”: “When you look at the moon, you are absorbing the
moon just as the ocean absorbs minerals… interaction with the photonic shower creates a new
quantum state. This means that when you stand in the presence of the moon, you become a new creation. The photon’s interactions have entered into the quantum state of your entire ensemble, and you are, through these interactions, a moon-person.” And so too, by avoiding the
newspaper, one avoids becoming a world-news-person, a hometown-section-person, a business- person, a crime-person or any other sort of inky-smudged person; lost, for a time, to the more immediate life experience, which knows no such conceptual division.
Though, in comparison with fire, Swimme does not contain our Self within the phenomenal
interactions: “What is the flame? Is it the light given off in all directions? The wax as it combines
with oxygen? The chemical products resulting from this combination? ... The flame organizes all these different materials into its own persisting process. A flame is an image of unseen
organizing activity… [a] power that spontaneously erupts and shows itself whenever it is able to.” The flame then, is the organizing activity, more than just the sum of the conditions which make its appearance possible. The example of a flame finds sub-atomic parallel with S-Matrix theory, in which particles occur along “reaction channels” within a network of interaction. The particles here have existence only as intermediate states, and different particles can occur due to differing conditions within the same interaction, such as an increase in the amount of energy available. The S-Matrix theory, then, finds basis with events – the organized activity – of which particles manifest only as an image.
And so, under the right conditions, tuned to the proper reaction channel, the moon-person event occurs, appears, lingers and yet moves on. So too with the inky-smudge person, and so too with the astrophysical; flowing into the black holes from which nothing escapes, then flowing out from the white holes (quasars) in which nothing remains. This vital flow moves onward, unstoppable, in all forms; though we try still to grasp at it or shrink from its path. Yet even the sun dies, losing mass, as we feed upon its photonic energy and heat radiation. And so too we die continually, cell by cell, fuel for new life – some cells even killed by the sun’s gamma rays – while we ourselves radiate metabolic body heat into the environment. And even for light to strike at us, photons which were a part of our skin, hair, nails, etc. ricochet into the room, where they will intertwine with any observer.
On the sub-atomic level, elementary particles leap in and out of existence. From no-thing-ness
comes all things, which go back again into the no-thing-ness. All things sparkling in and out in
this same way. Take, for example, bacteria on a Petri dish, seen through a microscope, which
live and die in the blink of an eye. Or to photograph a roofless human city from a satellite, with
time-lapse photography. To watch the city over the span of generations, we would see the same
phenomena as the bacteria, or as the elementary particles. People born and dying in the blink of an eye. So too with a greater span of time, with our time-lapse telescope pointing outward for this experiment, watching now a galaxy of stars born and dying like bacteria in a Petri dish.
What can stand in the way of this flowing Being? We cannot step into the same river twice; but
we do adapt to the river, as it slides past our feet. This quality of acceptance plays the most
important role in our lives. Without acceptance, we may catch a beating from the “cosmic cops”,
for either clutching that which we must lose or for refusing to carry a load. Though, from such
mistakes, we will eventually learn the lesson. Abraham Lincoln had once paraphrased nicely a
story by Farid al-Din 'Attar: “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent
him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and
situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it
expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!"
‘Attar’s sentence, “This, too, shall pass,” describes elegantly the ultimate practice; referred to
variously as yoga (surrendering), hollow bones (empting), avoda (serving), zazen (sitting),
kenosis (pouring-out), wu-wei (flowing), islam (submitting) or quasars (and black holes, both
ducting). Yes, this essential “letting flow” appears in each tradition we have studied.
Albert Einstein, who spent more years of his life pursuing unified field theory than any of his other endeavors, once said, “A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of application.” I wonder if Einstein had ever read, “This, too, shall pass”, before he, too, had passed. After all, Einstein was to have also said, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
A lot of things might help you in your relationship, but when you try to sift out the most important, your ability to deal with conflict will be at or near the top of the list.
Would you like to experience less conflict? Would you like to feel calmer during conflicts? Would you like to resolve them easier? Here's how:
Remember whatever is happening is temporary. There are several reasons this principle is so important.
When someone assumes their problem is permanent, it can lead to depression, according to Martin Seligman, one of the top researchers in his field.
Assuming that something bad is permanent is one of the biggest contributors to the downward spiral of depression, and depression is the most common psychological problem people experience — and one of the most destructive. Merely being disheartened is a mild form of depression. Although it's milder, it happens more often. When you feel disheartened, you want to stop trying. This not only feels bad, it makes you less capable of dealing well with conflict.
Coming from an entirely different angle, Buddha tried to find out what caused suffering. By his own assessment, one of his most important findings is that when people fail to accept the temporary nature of things, they suffer more than they need to. According to Buddha (and I happen to agree with him on this), this lack of acceptance that things are temporary and always changing is one of the main sources of suffering for humanity.
When Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, he experienced stress, and that is an understatement if I've ever made one! Soldiers were getting slaughtered by the tens of thousands and Lincoln was the one sending them to their tragic deaths. He was a deeply empathetic man, so this tremendous slaughter caused him immense despair and sadness and pain. But it needed to be done, and decisions needed to be made every day. To keep himself calm enough to deal with it, he often said to himself, this too shall pass. He used this phrase as a kind of mantra. He was able to maintain his rationality and carry out his duties at a crucial time in history — largely by reminding himself again and again that whatever is happening is temporary.
This too shall pass. The one constant in this universe is that everything changes. Remind yourself of this and you'll suffer less. You'll get disheartened less often and less intensely. And — back to our original purpose — you'll deal with conflict better.
Say that phrase to yourself next time you feel upset about something. Use it as a mantra. The circumstances that caused the upset will change — maybe not all of them, but some parts of your circumstances will change all by themselves fairly quickly. And remind yourself that your feelings will change inevitably, even if you do nothing to change them. You won't stay upset forever. I know this is obvious to you now, but when you're upset, you tend to forget this important truth.
It's a simple idea, but it can dramatically ease the strain of the moment, making you better able to deal with it, creating less stress in your body, and making you a calmer person to interact with.
Say to yourself in times of stress:
THIS TOO SHALL PASS....
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