The Cause of the Whim
I removed this from the final talk because I felt it was too difficult and slowed the pace.
Why did the Whim happen? And how did it produce time (as a way of seeing)?
Intelligence is the precondition of the desire to know. Hence the whim or desire to know (which was the first desire) needed no cause, as it was the nature of Infinite Intelligence to desire it.
The act of time was a byproduct of this impulse to know, as the very looking for an answer produced (in appearance) the moment after, and the very question and subsequent straining to find something beyond itself to identify with caused in it the appearance of space.
This requires a section in my book that deals with the new way of looking at causation, as the potential latent in preconditions. There is at heart an a priori logic underlying the sequence in the unfolding of schemas, rather than a temporal one.
Why did the Whim happen? And how did it produce time (as a way of seeing)?
Intelligence is the precondition of the desire to know. Hence the whim or desire to know (which was the first desire) needed no cause, as it was the nature of Infinite Intelligence to desire it.
The act of time was a byproduct of this impulse to know, as the very looking for an answer produced (in appearance) the moment after, and the very question and subsequent straining to find something beyond itself to identify with caused in it the appearance of space.
This requires a section in my book that deals with the new way of looking at causation, as the potential latent in preconditions. There is at heart an a priori logic underlying the sequence in the unfolding of schemas, rather than a temporal one.
You write:
ReplyDelete"The act of time was a byproduct of this impulse to know, as the very looking for an answer produced (in appearance) the moment after, and the very question and subsequent straining to find something beyond itself to identify with caused in it the appearance of space."
Quibbling here - - could one not also think something like the following:
"The appearance of space was a byproduct of this desire-impulse to know, with the proverbial breath of the whim curling across the nothingness of Sea, and by the action of the desire-impulse moving “across” anything at all (as described by Meher Baba as moving across), the whim ushered in an abyss of space. Thus, time is an artifact of space (not the reverse) and to the finite mind, is really is a fiction that measures the distance created by space so that the finite mind may navigate in limited lifetimes - to "make sense of things". In other words, if there is no space, there is no perception of time and no need for the perception of time."
Thank you for your thoughts.
DeleteI think all this is deeply connected to Baba's declaration that God gains spontaneously His own infinite consciousness and His infinite unconsciousnes simultaneously, but that this can never be understood or grasped by the mind. What we can conceieve (from what Baba explains) is that there was a "before" and an "after" the surge of the whim and therefore the creation of the apparent universe. But I do agree with Chris's idea that time (as an internal way of seeing for the mind) is a precondition of space (also as an internal way of seeing for the mind). May I suggest that if one focuses on the after-the-surging-of-the-Whim state of mind, then we have to accept that time and space are "externalized and experienced" simultaneously, but if one focuses on the way "seeing itself" develops, then "temporal seeing" is of necesity a precondition of "spacial seeing".
ReplyDeleteThank you Stelios. I simply feel that certainly time could not follow after space in a temporal sense. That would be a contradiction of terms. However, I have always felt that if there is one place for future generations to muse once they imbibe the general gist of this new way of thinking, made possible by Baba's books, it will be the subject of how an event occurred before time, or in what Baba refers to in God Speaks as the "Beginningless Beginning." And I think this is the point where the mind stops, and cannot proceed, and must bow to the authority of revelation. How can a mind thinking through a time lens conceive of a timeless reality? This limit of the mind is discussed in God Speaks.
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