Cosmos 201 – The Psychic and The Zen Buddhist Monk

Cosmos 201 – The Psychic and The Zen Buddhist Monk August 30, 2016

[Note: this is the second half of a two-part short story]

Photo courtesy of Pixabay
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Next to the doctor the college girl, too, was thinking up her own cosmology.  She lived to recognize love and sensuality and creativity wherever they could be found.  “What if each universe is androgynous – penetrating itself, receiving its own seed into its own womb, expanding and then expelling its baby universe through a black hole!?”  The thought gave her goose bumps of pleasure.  “Evolution, then, may be the ecstatic love-making of an adult universe with itself, which will eventually, result in a brand new baby universe.”  She smiled to herself and thought “Gee, I hope the Religious Right don’t condemn it as a deviant sexual practice!”  She remembered that the universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old.  “So” she figured “Our pubescent cosmos is just now becoming sexually active.  What an adventure lies ahead of it.  Pretty soon it will be writhing in the orgasm of conceiving its first-to-be-born.”

The college girl hugged herself and sighed aloud in satisfaction.  Nobody, except the Zen Buddhist monk, noticed.

The psychic was aware that an interesting shift had happened in the carriage since that chance remark of the “newspaper man.”  She had covertly watched the auras of her companions expand and change colors.  Moreover, light seemed to arc from each person’s aura to the auras of the others – like cosmic dancers in a creatively choreographed holographic display.

She gave herself up to her own part of the dance.  “Just as a cosmos births new universes, does each soul birth new lives through reincarnation?”  She had no doubt they did.  But what she now wondered was “Since time is an artifact of human consciousness, and really doesn’t exist until we manifest on the physical plane, might a soul, who had just finished a lifetime in 20th century America, decide, after a Bardo respite, to incarnate the ‘next’ time in 13th century Africa?  Why not, indeed?  If incarnation is the experiment of learning to love in the many configurations of human experience (e.g. gender, ethnicity, skin color, I. Q. level, religious affiliation etc.), it makes perfect sense that Spirit possesses Fast Forward, Rewind, Cut, Copy and Paste functions.”

She smiled in the glow of where the dance was taking her.  Another sudden insight gripped her “Oh” she thought “If time is, indeed, part of the illusion of manifestation, why not parallel lives?  Why not lives as a female Egyptian slave of 2500 BCE, as a male American politician of 1800 CE, as a gay Italian man of 1960 CE, and as a Celtic Druid of 400 BCE – ALL AT THE SAME ‘TIME’?  Modern business protocol might call it ‘multitasking’.  Why not, in fact, as the Hindus taught, an Atma, who remains steadfast and unattached, while its Jiva dives repeatedly into a myriad of simultaneous incarnations?  Perhaps there are three levels of the process, all occurring at once!  Firstly, the Atma – eternal, unperturbed, unmanifest, disincarnate – watching without attachment, aversion, fear or anger.  Secondly, Jiva, in its bardo states, between incarnations being debriefed and preparing for its next safari.  And, thirdly, the time-circumscribed, spacesuit-inhabiting entity, simultaneously learning in parallel incarnations, all at once.  Thus, when the heart-broken, bereaved young wife anxiously asks ‘Will I see my beloved after I die?  What if he has already reincarnated?’ the answer is ‘of course you will.  You will meet him in the bardo state and in a parallel joint experience.’ ”

She smiled again to herself and wondered, “What if, right now, I could be simultaneously aware of all of the fellow travelers with whom I am sharing parallel bardos and incarnations?”  She looked about the carriage.  “Is this group” she asked herself “here by chance or by design?  How is each of us experiencing ourselves and the others in the parallel situations?”  She attempted to radiate recognition to her companions.  The Sanskrit phrase “Tat twam asi” (That thou art) leapt to mind.  “Of course” she thought, “we are all one to begin with, and to end with.  But wouldn’t it be cool if we could remember that occasionally!”  From the corner of her eye, she fancied she saw the Zen Buddhist monk nod his head in agreement.

“What would that recognition do to the illusion of separation?” she wondered.  “Would it vaporize it and dissolve it, and extract from it Self-Realized beings?”  Her mind went back, once more, to the black-holes-in-space conundrum.  “What if, like Self-Realization, black holes are very efficient recycling devices that take a massive physical object, like a planet or a star, and thoroughly pulverize all its matter, reducing it to its DNA, which it then hurls into a brand new environment to begin a whole new evolutionary journey?!”

“Is the universe, then, merely birthing itself?  Manifesting its own recessive genes?  And is each black hole an opportunity to birth a different version of itself?  Perhaps, all the black holes in a universe are the channels for it to simultaneously birth the different permutations and combinations of its own DNA?  Since the cosmos is the ‘manifest’ dimension, then each universe is merely the articulation of a different possibility.  So the ‘original’ universe is not a universe at all, but the unmanifest void of all possibility.”

Just then the carriage lights went out for a few moments, as subway lights sometimes do.  They were in a tunnel at the time.  Utter darkness enveloped them.  The only sensory feedback was the rattling of the couplings between the cars.  It was easy to imagine the dark womb of nothingness.  She clapped her hands as if to applaud the synchronicity of it.  Nobody detected the sound of it – except the Zen Buddhist monk who sat beside her.  “What is the sound of one psychic clapping?”  It would make a good koan.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

The monk was as aware in the darkness and of the darkness as he had been of the light and in the light.  He, too, had been sitting in contemplation of the black hole.  “If a black hole cannot be seen in the light, can it be seen in the dark?”  He had an image of a black hole.  It seemed like a vehicle by which a universe might turn itself inside out, rather like what happens to a glove when you take it off.  As he watched the image, he saw the universe re-reverse itself.  The question arose “Did it use the same black hole to re-reverse itself as it used to reverse itself?”  He sat with that for a while.  In his mind, he heard one of his students ask, “Master, if that is how it is with universes and black holes, kindly tell me does the re-reversed cosmos go back to where it started or does each folding and unfolding cause new manifestations?”  In answer the master peeled off the glove from his right hand.  It had fit perfectly.  As he retracted his fingers and thumb, all of the finger sheaths turned themselves inside out.  He held it aloft for the students to see.  He handed it to one of them, the questioner, and said “Put it on your hand.”  Since it had been a right hand glove, to begin with, the student attempted to put it on his own right hand.  Of course, it did not fit – for now it was no longer a right hand glove but a left hand one.

“What is the sound of one glove clapping?”  he asked aloud of his companions in the carriage.

Nobody answered, except the Zen Buddhist monk himself, who said nothing.


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