Consciousness is always in a state of full disclosure no matter how diminutive it appears disguised. The meaning of this amplitude is only approached when the magnitude of its ground is plumbed and finally fathomed. This ‘ground’ is an encompassing field within which consciousness unfolds, arises or is entertained. This field has no defining spatial or temporal parameters. Time and extension is that which it sets before itself but its own dimensionless features can never be an object of presentation unless consciousness is intuited to be equally bereft of the time and space by which it is defined. To arrive at that juncture - to look in that mirror is, as Hui Neng suggests, to see the features of our face before we were born. In western terms it is to comprehend something of the dimensionless singularity from which the universe has proceeded. Logicians will argue that much of what follows is tautological and void of logical content. We will agree and suggest that this very void is that of which we write. We will further argue that it is the key to understanding the pattern we take to be ourselves at the extremity of what that understanding might mean. It is therefore, a paradigm and if tautological, the Tautological Paradigm.

Berkeley intuited that events could not sustain any claim to reality unless they, in some sense, were beheld. (I) To sustain sounds of trees falling in an empty forest he imagined an eavesdropping God who was alert to pastoral mishaps. Berkeley was a bishop and can be forgiven the gentle nepotism that sought for deity employment in the calamitous 18^th century. Being more secularly disposed we shall locate the manifest of creation in the nexus of our own unconscious. The unconscious has a long history predating the limitations to which Freud subjected it. In Sophocles we find it brooding in the chorus, in Shakespeare we find it producing a ghostly dagger -- in Dostoevsky, the ecstatic dementia of Roskolonkov.

Thoreau suggests something of the meaning we seek when he suggests

that every sentence has two sides:

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"One faces the world, but the other is infinite and confronts the gods "

(2)

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The unconscious, (that which we take to be the hidden), is embraced by a universe of disclosure. Whatever its disguise, the universe can do none other than disclose the contents of itself, to itself -- its content is itself and can be none other. The supposedly undisclosed is the intimate other with whom we slowly tango and thereby, conceive the fecundity of the cosmos. The world is structured in many frames of temporal and spatial embodiment. The conscious field of a fly is demarcated by different dimensions of space and time than that of a chess master. The sensitivities of any given species describe different endowments that in some measure are their raison d’être. The vision of an eagle, the hearing of your pet mongrel, the radar sensibilities of a hungry bat are all instances of measurable vagaries discerned in the non-human realm. Radio frequencies paint a far different portrait of the sky than that with which the palette of our eyes is familiar. We are of the odd prejudice that believes the world is as it appears and only rarely appreciate how our brains sculpt the contours of creation.

Our computation of time is decidedly anthropic. The Mayfly arises in a dawn only to drop thereafter, in the twilight of a single day. Its lifetime is measured in a rising and setting of the sun - its progeny secured in the fertile commingling of corpses. There are members of the Bristle Cone Pine family that predate the birth of Christ. They as little note the fevered passing of human generation as they do the turning of another fall. We can also discern varying degrees of sensitivity to space and time among members of our own species. A wine expert can detect dozens of variations to what generally would be diagnosed as a definitive cabernet. The Eskimo discerns a subtly of snow that appears only as sludge or powder to the holiday skier. The Yogi is little surprised to find Lysgeric Acid capitulating arenas of consciousness with which he has long been familiar. (3) These differences allow consciousness the possibility of disclosure.

What we conceive as other than ourselves - minds, things, places or times -- is as intimately ourselves as that of which we are conscious. The multiplicity of our differences arises in an equivalency of ground. That ground is an encompassing field extending throughout the cosmos. It is all encompassing because it is without the limits that can be contained in consciousness - without given parameters of time and extension. It is that not ostensibly disclosed because it is that which is exclusively disclosed. Its apparent diversity when viewed through the immediate lens of the eye, the reaching lens of Mt. Palomar, or the probing eye of an electron — however we believe them participant in our consciousness, are our consciousness when so participant. That a friend or lover has a consciousness apart from our own is inferred but not directly known by us. That a falling tree thunders to the forest floor is inferred though not directly known to our experience. What we think of as our mind is not conscious of itself as it beholds its contents. The mind is always "behind" any content or disclosure and identical to it.

To suggest the interdimensional unconscious is identical to the measurable quantities of the discernible world is to modify our notion of placement there within -- to modify our notion of the enfolding field, there without. Sir Arthur Eddington speaks eloquently as a physicist to this point:

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"We have found that where science has progressed the farthest the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own." (2a)

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Hints of a more expansive grasp of the unconscious are suggested by Jung’s realm of the collective unconscious. This is an arena of shared unconsciousness. Jung believed this collective unconscious to be a storehouse encoding the history of the race.

Fourteen hundred years earlier, Vasubandhu conceived the "Alaya Consciousness" to be this same repository. Contrary to the claims of empiricism there were suggested realms of knowledge which transcended our experience. Beyond the experience of the days of our lives is that which links us to lives past and lives future. That linkage extends to what we believe the past to have been and what we imagine the future to be. Beyond what is present, the imagination can lay no greater claim to the reported past than it can the imagined future. The bias of history reveals no more of reality than the postulates of prediction. The past is no less speculative than any anticipation – Thucydides’ Wars no less a postulate than the conjectures of Nostradamus’ Centuries. Once we remove space and time from our deliberations an equality descends on the reported past and the arriving future. Either is manifestly present and beyond the necessity of explication.

Any moment of what one remembers the past to have been shares with any other the prerogatives of the eternal:

"…We had the experience but missed the meaning."(4)

Any line we draw between one moment and another is an arbitrary exercise. We create the passage of time and it is a masterpiece of illusion. We can no more realistically separate one moment from another than we can a mountain from its skyline. Wittgenstein spoke of eternal life belonging to those who live in the present. He was not speaking of what we take to be duration – but rather a quality beyond the measurement of time. However fleeting we believe its passage – time abides, it is we who know departure. Any moment is irrevocably linked to every other back to and including genesis. Each moment is identical to the moment when time began. Emerson speaks of that identity in which all time shares:

"…one vast picture that God paints on the instant eternity."

(4a)

In Bertrand Russell’s "The Analysis of Mind," he infers that there is no logical inconsistency in supposing that the whole of creation came into being within the last fifteen minutes - with our memories thrown in as part of the bargain. In deference to Russell this was not a belief he entertained very seriously. In terms of our argument we shall suggest that the difference between fifteen minutes and fifteen billion years is not as lengthy a duration as one might otherwise suppose. When duration dissolves we find ourselves in a center seat for the clarion call that In the beginning heralds creation! In a discussion of the world as measured by physics, Lord Russell speaks of the difficulties that, as well, companion a world beyond the bound of measurement:

"It is extraordinarily difficult to divest ourselves of the belief the physical world is the world we perceive by sight and touch; even if, in our philosophic moments, we are aware that this is an error, we nevertheless fall into it again as soon as we are off guard. The notion that what we see is "out there" in physical space is one which cannot survive while we are grasping the difference between what physics supposes to be really happening; but it is sure to return and plague us when we begin to forget the argument. Only long reflection can make a radically new point of view familiar and easy." (5)

The Hindu believes the universe to begin in a dream of Vishnu. In further dilations he will explain that the constituents of the dream are equal to the dreamer. There is little discernable distance between that dream and one that begins in the violent stirring of a dimensionless singularity. In either instance we are shackled to our origins – our paternity linked to any singularity encountered in the brain. Evolution is the desire of the quantum to view itself in a cloud chamber at Cern. The vastness of that chamber is only measurable from within. Time and extension are inseparably embedded in any system to which the presumption of measurement is made. To preserve even a diminishing faith of a God that "does not play dice," Einstein had to alter the parameters of time and space to a degree that might’ve sent deity back to the gaming table.

If we believe ourselves to be exclusively located between the top of our scalp and the tip of our toes - shallow are the mirrors that we have looked within. If, on the other ‘unclapped’ hand, consciousness is endowed with all space-time referents - time and dimensionality will be seen to melt away. It is in this sense that a grain of sand manifests the universal field and that in Japan in the century of Dante, Dogen would assert:

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at each and every moment." (5a)

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No measurement is possible in a system that is always identical to the system being measured. We are in the habit of believing that consciousness is something that we have, like fingers, backaches, or the shining new car and its attendant monthly payment. Our sphere is further believed to be a receiving set that tunes in frequencies to which we are sensitive. We not only see ourselves as separate from these frequencies but also believe our receptivity to be of limited range. Aside from an occasional panoramic view, the average experiential confine is measurable in the viewing distance to a television. And there, if by chance, we find an astronomer musing on the aimlessly expanding cosmos our allotment of consciousness seems meager, indeed. Slender is the thread by which we hang or which shall shortly hang us. "As flies to wanton children so are we to the Gods." (6) They’ll turn off our telephone or kill us for sport at the slightest provocation. It would appear that the suffering the Buddha saw was hardly worth the candle with which he proposed to light the path. Golgotha, not worthy a sound-bite on the evening news. Jesus was nailed to the branches of a Christmas tree. Siddhartha nearly starved beneath a ficus – the sacred pipal that companioned the miracle of his birth and his bodhi.. Two trees and the whispering expiation of sin and suffering. Both held that the consciousness of which they spoke was all encompassing - all things are Buddha-things & the spirit of Christ is found under even the lowliest of stones.

The world is a complexity beholden to the many definitions that so declare it. These vast storehouses of knowledge allow but little space for spirit, so it is a modest comfort to know that it might be close at hand: "pickup a piece of wood and you will find me there." (7) It was, as well, a useful directive to rest from the six days of creation to contemplatively assess what one had wrought, on the seventh. The world seems to allow as little time for reflection as it does space for spirit. In suffering and sin we are bereft of both.

Language was believed by Wittgenstein to picture the world. (8) Heidegger suggested it was, as well, the "temple of being." (9) As he came to have greater faith in poetry than in his own analysis he looked for what was spoken to say more than what was said. This most celebrated of western thinkers tipped his cap to Daisetz Suzuki as more succinctly stating what Heidegger had spent in a lifetime’s explication. The incident is recorded in William Barrett’s introduction to Zen Buddhism, Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki.

"A German friend of Heidegger’s told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of Suzuki’s books; ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.’"

Foremost among Heidegger’s concern is the question of ‘being.’ Why is there something rather than nothing? It is a question more likely to arise in solitude than in a sermon. It is only fundamental for those for whom the question is percipient. To pass the question off to God is, at best, a subterfuge. If one’s notion of a supreme being is one that is separate from yourself and with whom you plan to idly converse, it seems likely that you will find him as bemusedly puzzled by the question as is the creation in whom it arises.

That there is an attendant anxiety arising with the question is easily surmised in the swiftness in which one seeks an answer. That the answer found will often not address its fundamental nature is again witnessed in the game of ‘musical pews,’ that many are found to play on a hopscotching regular basis. Fundamentally one must find the answer in a core-sensibility. It is only there, that it can be said to be fundamental. It is only when you make the consciousness of Christ your own that you might discover yourself to be the Buddha. To marvel at the Parthenon is to have hewed its marble and raised its stone.

Heidegger was fascinated in the relation between ‘being’ and the nothing that it seemed to belie. We will find this a particular fascination with varying Buddhist schools that we shall later wander amongst. The question of ‘being’ only arises for those who think it’s thought. Some feel that it is a question that should be left behind in the college dormitory. (10) It is, as well, a question probably not much on the minds of pregnant women, lawyers in litigation, accountants in tax season, or engineers hoping upon hope that the damn rocket doesn’t explode upon lift-off. That it attends each of these and any other aspect of ‘being who we are,’ is whereby we begin to sense its fundamental nature. The question of being is a calling in which each participates. Most must be forgiven for they know not what they do. It is, perhaps, in acknowledgment of the "time being out of joint," that the question arises at all. It is in our desire to forgive the world for its good and bad and ourselves (for that same plentitude) that we begin to suspect their equivalence.

"Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither.

ö Ripeness is all." (14a)

We will find that our facility for grasping alternative readings of the world is commensurate with our ability to disbelieve any conceptual notion we currently entertain. The difficulty is in dismantling structures that we believe so manifestly to be the world. If we can come to forgive what we once took for certainty, the world will reveal itself anew. The world will remain standing even without the support of everything we believed to have buoyed it up. This game of dismantling can be played upon any aspect of the world’s supposed history. It can be played on anything we or anyone else proclaims the world to be. The earth is manifestly what it is. This is a tautology. It conveys no information. For information to logically meaningful is to close one’s eyes to the fiction that any proposition can abide meaning without the opposition by which it can be seen opposed. We only doubt what we know, what we are in the supposed judgment of a mythic other or conglomerate who can claim no greater authority than that which we ourselves possess.

"All men go in flocks…they think society wiser than their soul and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the world."

(14 b)

The claims for ascendance will have as much validity as the Northern Hemisphere proclaiming exclusivity of up. Any such proclamation will appear as obvious and hence ‘real’ to those who stand upon their feet, looking up in the assurance that those in an opposing configuration are looking down.

The same ‘knowledge’ will be apparent to those on the opposite side who fail to entertain the relativity of their difference. There is a cogent interdependence bonding the world’s diversity. That diversity is often seen in opposition. In Ethics we draw lines between right and wrong. In religion we are told of celestial wars and discover they have scorched the centuries in terrestrial flame. It matters little that Ishmael and Isaac were brothers. The Middle East suggests that hatred is a deeper bond. The fragments of Yugoslavia have given ample evidence that the taste for genocide was not a Nazi aberration. Up - down; pleasure - pain; hot - cold; sweet - sour; light - dark; good – evil. These are only a few of the opposing pairs with which we adumbrate the world. An allegiance to one or the other results in the absurd or the insane. In the 2^nd instance we wade deep-kneed in carnage betokened by the bloody rigors of our righteousness. The definitions supporting these reside deeply beyond our conscious awareness. We come to know ourselves by the delusion of being solely our body. We occupy different bodies as casually as differing suits of clothes. We don the one and doff the other as the will so dictates. No matter what the seeming strum und drang we lay our bodies down no differently than the sloughing of a skin. This very night, thousands the earth over – are unmade as they go to meet their maker. We take little notice of the change of personnel – the years skate by like sin and we, as well, are shortly ripe for time’s concluding consummation. The temporal plane is wherein what we take to be our living we find to be our lives. It is also the floorboard upon which we two-step with the intimacy of death.

If we have not been grimly reaped before we’re forty we slowly discern the growing outline of our death, thereafter. Midway in our journey we find ourselves in Dante’s dusky wood. We begin to see the vaulting curve of our lives as an arc that has an end. In our first years we discover a voice and endeavor to find something to say. Thereafter the discourse is disrupted by evolution’s demand for progeny. As these depart we find ourselves much further through the dance than when the band first struck up a tune.

If we have something to say it must soon be said. Death becomes a more brooding palpable presence – its outline more clearly defined. That we impart a singular significance to the final choke and rattle is not to acknowledge that death was with us long before the dance began. The face of death is at last, our own. We are death – "… the destroyer of worlds."

(15)

We have been death since the moment of conception. It is not logically expedient that because the dead are buried that in life they don’t abide. Krishna whispers to Arjuna:

"… you can’t kill what has never been created." (16)

We have always been that emptiness from which the whole of life is consequent. We will always be the darkness into which the day descends.

Our ancestors and fallen loved ones have not only entered the dark night of their souls but have, as well, entered the living consciousness of our own. Our shadowed adversary is both child and father to the man. Looking through the window of time be assured that death is a patient assignation. The totality of time is only known in fragments. All time, whatever its duration, abides and then departs. Eternity is a breath that fills the lungs and is of necessity exhaled. The past, however distant, is no less connected to our present than any brevity beheld. The pulse of time abides not only in the familiarity of sequence but in dimensions of duration only few have come to know. Dogen still walks an eternity of earth for his internment knows only the testament of time. Funeral leavings in the Valley of the Kings equally share the instant of our dissolution. The betrothed of silken heaven whisper banns in velvet hells and are paired in pantomimes wedded since the womb.

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Life is beheld by the eyes of death.

Darkness is, indeed, upon the face of the deep and illumination only possible

in the charnel house

of the soul.

(18)

"The evening and the morning" are the first and only day we’ll ever know. The whole of life is a meditation in the mind of death -- the dark side of a mirror in which we fear reflection.

The eyes of death behold the molting world.

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