CHAPTER 7

 SOMETHING AND NOTHING

All theories about the formation, origin, or evolution of life and the universe ignore a simple and devastating fact.

If you stand outside your house and look around you and think about all this life, you will eventually come to the matter of its existence. At all.

As in, how come life EXISTS?

Forget its progression.

Existence is the key.

How come existence exists?

A painter gets a clue. He looks at a blank canvas all the time. He knows there is nothing there. And then, some time later, he looks and there is a completed painting there. He made the painting. He created it.

Life is created.

But we are all barraged with the idea that what is around us is an ant-like progression, from A to B and so on.

Small accretions added on to other accretions.

This is not the whole story. This is not even half the story.

If you can imagine a condition of Nothing, then you are on the road to grasping the power of creation. YOUR CREATION OF WHATEVER YOU CREATE.

That is what the core of Tibetan philosophy once articulated, and when you strip away the inessentials, you get to the idea of the void (when you are creating nothing), and the idea of universe (when you creating something[s]).

But if nothing, the concept of nothing, eludes you, it is harder to grasp the idea of the real power of you creating.

Some painters employ tricks to get from nothing to something. The action painter De Kooning, for example, would paste pages from newspapers on his large blank canvases, or paint numbers on the white space---just to get started.

One of the significant methods of RD was to impart the idea to people who lived in the space-time continuum that they, the people, were always in mid-stream. Always in the middle of things. Why? Because it�s much harder to grasp the idea of a beginning (nothing) when you feel you are being assailed by events already in motion. It�s harder to conceive that you are a creator who can invent something from nothing.

And if you can�t conceive that, you�ll inevitably downplay the power of your imagination.

Here is another way to look at these things: are you trying to work your way from the bottom to the top, or are you are looking down from the top?

In actuality, you need to be able to do both. You need to be able to shift your perspective.

If you are ALWAYS seeing yourself in a struggle from a lower position to a higher, you will fall prey to various delusions, the most central of which is that you are embedded in a continuum that keeps adding little accretions of substance and idea and struggle and conflict.

Now, here is one of the most important factors to understand about RD. I�ll frame it as a question. WHO CAN, AGAINST GREAT ODDS, ACHIEVE HEROIC THINGS INSIDE THE CONTINUUM?

Remember the Greek gods? From their home in the clouds, they put mere mortals into dire circumstances down below---AND THEY WATCHED TO SEE WHAT THESE MORTALS COULD DO.

Jason, Odysseus---these men succeeded against tremendous odds.

The gods were pleased.

The gods were entertained.

THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN TRULY BE HEROES INSIDE THE CONTINUUM ARE THOSE WHO ARE EMBEDDED IN IT.

Would it be heroic for Apollo to climb aboard a ship and sail through storms to find a golden fleece? Of course not. He could dispel a storm with the wave of a hand.

Do you see?

RD has �staged a great play,� it has embedded immortal beings in a continuum (these beings would be us, stripped of our consciousness that we are immortal and infinitely powerful)---and then we have a chance to be heroes within the context of the continuum.

And RD can be entertained. They can see something unique. Human beings pitted against great odds. Failing and succeeding.

How can you have a great play if the protagonist is far superior to his circumstances from the outset? Where is the drama in that?

But it�s a sucker play nonetheless. Heroes, dupes---whatever. Embedded is embedded. If you are totally stuck in the continuum and are playing out your life as a struggling would-be hero inside the continuum---and if THAT IS ALL YOU ARE DOING---then you end up losing.

The great adventure is learning to get out of the continuum and then learning how to get back in without being trapped. In, out, in, out.

The figure of Merlin is a prime example---he tutored the Roundtable figures, a few of them, to the best of his ability, given the fact that they were largely embedded in the continuum. He himself was not of the continuum (nobody is) and was well aware of it. He moved in and out; he COULD move in and out.

Humans who are embedded within the continuum are unique. Only they can �entertain and inspire the gods� with their heroic acts.

But, as I say, ultimately it�s a sucker�s game for the embedded ones.