to feel its own grandeur

"Us, these beings that have been created, that are looking up at the Milky Way, we are in fact products of the Milky Way. It's the Milky Way looking up at itself and wondering what it's all about. What does this imply about somebody like Walt Whitman admiring a beautiful sunset? ...Walt Whitman is a space the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur. Instead of our eyes being the result of chance mutations can we see them as created by the cosmos in order to perceive itself."

from Bodhisattva of the Biosphere, by David Loy on Buddhist Geeks

This is a passage from the keynote address to the 2013 Buddhist Geeks conference in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Along with much of the rest of the talk it represents an advanced view of spiritual practice in the modern, urban age. I would question, however, some of the assumptions implied by the language as it goes on, especially when he talks about humans choosing to live a certain way (to make the world a better place, for example). If we are the cosmos regarding itself through the agency of the human body, with all its interconnectedness with everything else within the totality of our formless essence, then how can we have separate agency, a concept implied by the term choice? As with other similar podcasts (Secular Buddhist, Present Moment, Daily Evolver etc) the discussion is rooted in political and social concerns and is primarily interested in psychological and physical wellbeing rather than spiritual enlightenment, which unfolds under the cosmos's own volition and reveals the lack of individual agency in our actions and thought as we transcend the limited mind.

The focus of discussion on limited concerns is often presented as a way to avoid the disconnect an emphasis on transcendence and other-worldly escape can produce, and to root practice in relationship with the world as it is. But true transcendence implies that we are embedded in the world of form - it cannot occur if we are not. It arrives after we have exhausted our attachment to gross physical objects - a naturally-occurring process of experiencing desires at their most intense and moving through them to a new perspective where we become rooted and yet unattached. Then we express the reality through our body, practising loving kindness, not as a choice, but because it is our nature. Talks like the above demonstrate a lack of a fully evolved perspective among modern practitioners, and though they represent an unfolding of our collective awareness, they are limited in their message.

pic from here

there is really no sky

"Experience has the knack of fooling us on a regular basis. We see the sun setting every day, but we know very well the sun never sets. It is the earth rotating backwards, which gives us the experience that the sun is setting in the horizon. The sky looks blue, but we know that there is really no sky and neither is it blue. There are many such examples where our experiences are false. The same is also true of how we visually perceive the world. Science has taught us that the light is reflected from any object in this universe that we observe, and travels to the retina in our eye. There are 120 millions rods which are sensitive to black and white and there are about 7 millions cones which are sensitive to color. These rod and cones convert the incoming light into an optical signal. This optical signal is transmitted to the visual cortex in the human brain. This is the end of the journey of the perception process. There is no explanation as to what happens to the optical signal and how the brain decodes the optical signal and reconstructs our visual world. Science also never tells who is at home within the brain who finally sees the reconstructed visual image. Who is final observer of this image? I guess this idea of the final observer has always been outside the bounds of science because there is no way to empirically record the observer’s existence. Anything “subjective” is discarded in the scientific world." 

This well presented observation goes to the heart of our deluded sense of the world. But the idea that we encounter the world as individual objects experiencing phenomena that are obviously not occurring is embedded in our everyday language and thoughts, through common speech acts, through educational discourse, through legal procedure and scientific and philosophical enquiry. All literary text manifests the same and amounts to the expression of a state of ignorance, from popular fictions to the so-called great works. Where do we ever encounter a scene in which a protagonist is truly seeing the world the way it is? And is it ever possible to write such a description?

Pic from here