Henry: I was puzzling through what has been happening in Iran and Israel lately and it became apparent that there were a few questions I didn’t have answers to, and I could see that I was kind of hiding from that fact. I realized that I was hiding because I wanted to play the role of someone that is ‘in the know,’ so I could prance about and say important-sounding things about world events. But the truth is that I don’t know much about what is happening on the other side of the world. I found this ‘void’ very threatening, and fortunately I remembered that this was a wonderful opportunity to be attentive to what was happening.
As I watched closely the void evaporated leaving me simply where I was, in the dim midnight light of my house. I could see that my posturing was just a way of ‘building myself up’ to avoid the void, but here there was no need to leave – everything is already here. (link)
Hi Henry,
This is an excellent report of what exquisite awareness-cum-attentiveness can do (link) – the “void” that at first felt “threatening” transformed into “everything is already here”. This feeling of the “void” can happen in many nuances and situations – a ‘lull’, boredom, not knowing what is going to happen next, feeling foolish when an old pattern is seen as no longer applicable. This is the door to naiveté and can, as in your report, lead to the full realisation that nothing needs to change because “everything is already here”.
Perhaps you even experienced that you are already here, in this eternal moment of now, the only moment you can actually experience.
This excerpt of a correspondence might give you even more (experiential) insight about “everything is already here” –
CLAUDIU: […]. Another related thing i’m not sure of is from the transcript of one of the audio taped dialogues.
On a phone now so no link handy. But Richard was saying how the nature of infinitude is that it is always here and now. Thus to be here now is to be everywhere at once. I’m not sure what to make of this ‘everywhere’. China for example is pretty far away so how can I be in China if I am here? It makes sense that on the way to china I would also be here. But not that everywhere at once includes china right now. This train of thought already seems silly as I’m typing it out but I’m left without an answer. Ah well! Something to reflect on next PCE. […].
RICHARD: G’day Claudiu, You are, presumably, referring to this:
• [Richard]: ‘The actual experience of the infinitude of space and time is to be ‘everywhere all at once’, because all time and all space are right here … and right now. There is nowhere else but here and no time but now. Anywhere is everywhere and everywhere is anywhere’. (Richard, Audio-Taped Dialogues, Infinitude is the Boundlessness).
It is better explained in ‘Richard’s Journal’. Viz.:
• [Richard]: ‘The purity of life emerges from the perfection that wells up constantly due to a vast stillness which is utterly immense in its scope and magnitude. This stillness of infinitude is that something which is precious. It is the life-giving foundation of all that is apparent. This stillness happens as me. This stillness is my essential disposition, for it is the principle character, the intrinsic basis of everything. It is this universe at its genesis. It is not, as it might commonly be supposed, at the centre of everything … there is no centre here. This stillness, which is everywhere all at once, is the be all and end all of life itself. I am the universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being’. (pp. 179-180, ‘Richard’s Journal’, Article 25, ‘Peace-On-Earth Is Not The Be All And End All Of Life’; for context see: (Richard, Selected Writing, Actual Freedom).
Thus if you think of it, initially, as the vast stillness which is ‘everywhere all at once’ (as in, there is no centre to physical infinitude) then, when following a train of thought about the audio-taped dialogue regarding the actual experiencing of that vast stillness – where matter-as-energy is the source of everything apparent (i.e., matter-as-mass) – as being a flesh-and-blood body’s essential disposition it will make more sense. (Richard, List D, Claudiu2, 28 May 2013).
Cheers Vineeto