featured photo | Daniel Mirlea

What do we do if our hearts are heavy and our minds can’t find the light around and in us?

Ever since fleeing Montreal in my early thirties, like a vagrant escaping a burning building, I haven’t settled into any one belief system.  I wouldn’t have survived without the spiritual traditions that found me along the way, but I’ve made no firm commitment to any one of them.  I seem to be afraid of the repetitive states of mind that fall over me, like snow piling on pine boughs, and I need to feel free to shake myself loose, whether I actually do or not.

For the past 40 years, I keep returning to a vision of Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku, which offers no articles of faith.  Time, Space, Knowledge (TSK) asks nothing of me but to be interested in myself and my world.  In this vision, Space is the openness of the cosmos that allows everything to appear; Time is the dynamic that breathes life into that everything; and Knowledge plays in time and space like radiant candles illuminating a cathedral.

Yet, like a bird returning to its cage:

“We stay on the surface and never probe too deeply into how feedback from the world around us is possible, or how object and subject communicate with one another, or how awareness is able to be aware.” – Tarthang Tulku, Gesture of Great Love

Tarthang Tulku has written many books exploring the TSK vision from every angle.  I find myself refreshed and empowered by their radical reimagining of experience, as if I’m taking a canoe out onto a mountain lake in the early morning: into a space that is not saddled with objects and their identities; a time that is not separated into an inaccessible past, a fleeting present, and a future that never arrives; in which a quality of knowing is as available as wind and sunlight.

The TSK vision has kindled my interest in several areas of scientific and spiritual exploration; such as the insights of modern physics (quantum theory) together with the ancient realization of Buddhist masters that everything is connected.  In the 1980’s, I read Fritjov Capra’s The Tao of Physics; more recently, the Dalai Lama’s Universe in a Single Atom, and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, where I’m finding evidence of how deeply relevant the TSK vision is for our time.

The Field shares research based on quantum theory into the integrated coherence of everything, with each part in instantaneous communication with every other part.  Researchers have recorded evidence that sub-atomic particles fill all of space even where subatomic potentials don’t stick around long enough to form the building block of atomic matter.

In reference to quantum theory equations about the universe, and perhaps accounting for illusive dark matter:

“These equations stood for the Zero Point Field—an ocean of microscopic vibrations in the space between things.  If the Zero Point Field were included in our conception of the most fundamental nature of matter, they realized, the very underpinning of our universe was a heaving sea of energy—one vast quantum field.  If this were true, everything would be connected to everything else in the same invisible web.”  – Tarthang Tulku, The Field.

The TSK vision uses a comparable image of a field to express an open, allowing space, a dynamic time that is not separated among past, present and future, and an environment that has not been shattered into objects known by a subject.

Years ago, my friend Dan was at the Albuquerque Veterans’ Affairs when Stephen Hawking came in. Hawking didn’t yet need the power chair or the talking computer system that my friend, Foster, with whom I started a non-profit serving people with ALS and MS, also used (allowing both men to live productive lives for decades).

Dan asked Hawking: “What color is a black hole?”  The astrophysicist then scribbled five pages on the spot about how subatomic particles randomly disappear inside a black hole, reappearing outside, and thereby escape the prison of unbreakable gravity.

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I can’t shake the feeling that as an individual I am helpless to escape the terrible grip of the black hole of an economy that is inflicting pollution, extinction, and climate instability on Mother Earth and all her creatures.  In response to that feeling of powerlessness, I read the ecological works of Joanna Macy and others and wrote a novel, Gaia Awakens in which I imagined humanity awakening to the delusion of separation and learning to work together.

The Field goes on to document the work of physicists, biologists and others, discovering that

“On our most fundamental level, living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy, continually exchanging information with the inexhaustible energy sea.” – Tarthang Tulku,The Field.

What if quantum operations truly are the manifestation of cosmic integration, a symphony of quantum potentialities that fill all of space, where there is no need of handshakes because everything is already integrated with everything else?  But,

“What is the use of such a secret inside of time, if you can’t find it?”  – Tarthang Tulku, Gesture of Great Love

Quantum togetherness feels like a metaphor that uses physics, energy, matter and subatomic probabilities in place of the language of mystics and poets, where subatomic particles are the eyes that see every leaf fluttering in autumn winds, and hold every sparrow when she falls.

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If everything is connected in its very being, why am I now trying to communicate with others bobbing along beside me?  If every drop is already communicating with every other drop, and every subatomic particle that vanishes and reappears again alongside its companions, is already resonating with every other one, why do I sometimes feel alone?

If everything is present in one unified wholeness in which threads of coherence connect everything together, why do I cleave to the kind of time in which causes generate unexpected effects and beginnings inevitably lead to endings?  Whatever I might be tempted to speculate, I can’t deny that the experience that generates intentions, hopes and regrets shows up within a time that remembers a past, anticipates a future, and looks out from moments–as through the bars of a cage—with no hope of relocating safely elsewhere.

Why do I care whether a quantum web underlies the subjective world in which I live?  Why do I care whether past, present and future are just my subjective way of looking at the unbroken unity of time, and that space is the underlying whole from which objects break into view?

One answer is that anything that allows me to question the ‘reality” of the world of suffering, isolation and polarization is its own reward.  Besides, how real is a “reality” based on preestablished perspectives that systematically exclude the possibility of experiencing life afresh?

I have been given a boat to carry me across this ocean that allows me to sail in search of understanding and care.  If space is wherever I find myself; and if an all-embracing field comes into view when I move beyond my own narrow concerns, then why don’t I sail into that open sea?

Knowing the cost of polarized preference and resentful rejection, the vision that everything communicates with everything else invokes a sense of coming back home, where I don’t have to struggle for acceptance.

But when my son, Jonathan, took his life at the age of 27 six years ago, because he couldn’t find a field in which he could feel at home, I lost some of my willingness to believe that whatever happens is for the best.  Living in a world where leaders rob others of the benefit of their labor, we have reason to stand apart from such mean-spirited deformity of character; even if our lives are unavoidably woven from the same tapestry of being as theirs are.  

I have friends who talk about divine order and the power of prayer.  Their vision of a sacred field embracing seemingly separate things lets me hope that the good can find a home in me, if I keep faith with the time, space and knowledge that has brought me here.

Perhaps we have popped up in this grand coherence, so that we can bear witness to the sadness of a cosmos in which so many beings suffer needlessly.  Perhaps the field isn’t waiting for us to add our contribution, like a symbol scored in the second movement, but is leaving us space to rise and fall in harmony with the unbounded waves of this greater Being.

While the grammar of ordinary life is couched in subjects and objects, as time on a tread mill, and knowledge filed away in familiar categories, anything that shines a light on another way of looking at ourselves, at our world and at our experience, is like a candle in the dark.  The web of quantum theory, TSK’s all-inclusive vision, and heart-felt allegiance to life itself, each reveal a gateway into the heart of human being.