"Because "form" (rupa) must not be confused with "thing-ness" or materiality, since each form is the expression of a creative actor or process in a beginningless and endless movement, whose precondition, according to Nagarjuna, is precisely that mysterious "emptiness" (or "plenumvoid," as it has been aptly called) expressed in the term Sunyata.
In this experience of timeless reality beyond the realm of opposites, the relative is not annihilated in favor of the absolute nor is the manifoldness of life sacrificed to an abstract unity, but the individual and the universal penetrate and condition each other so completely that the one cannot be separated from the other. They are as inseparable as time and space, and like these they represent two aspects of the same reality: time is the dynamic aspect of individual (and therefore incomplete) action and experience; space is the sum total of all activity in its ever-complete and therefore timeless aspect.
The incomplete, however, is as necessary and important an element as that of completeness. It is that which supplies the impetus, the desire for completeness, for perfection. This impetus is the very essence and the conditio sine qua non of life. Therefore Novalis says in one of his "Fragments": "Only that which is incomplete can be understood and can lead us on. What is complete can only be enjoyed." And at another place: "All illusion is as necessary to truth, as the body to the soul." (Is not this also the function of maya?) If we modify this thought with regard to the concept of time, we might formulate it thus:
Transiency is as necessary to immortality (or to the experience of eternity), as the body is to the soul, or as matter is to mind. And in saying so, we might note that these are not irreconcilable or totally exclusive opposites, but rather the extreme points in the amplitude of the swinging of a pendulum, i.e. parts of the same movement. By becoming conscious of the inner direction and relationship of our transient life, we discover the eternity in time, immortality in transiency -and thus we transform the fleeting shapes of phenomena into timeless symbols of reality.
Liberation is not escapism, but consists in the conscious transformation of the elements that constitute our world and our existence. This is the great secret of the Tantras and of the mystics of all times. Among modern mystics nobody has expressed this more beautifully than Rilke, though few may have recognized the profound truth of his words, when he said:
Transiency hurls itself everywhere into a deep state of being. And therefore all forms of this Our world are not only to be used in a time-bound (time-limited) sense, but should be included into those phenomena of superior significance in which we partake (or, of which we are part). However, it's not in the Christian sense, but in the purely earthly, profoundly earthly, joyfully earthly consciousness, that we should introduce what we have seen and touched here, into the widest circumference. Not into a 'beyond' whose shadow darkens the earth, but into the whole, into the universe. Nature, the things of our daily contact and use, all these are preliminaries and transciencies: however, they are, as long as we are here, our possession, our friendship, participants of our pain and pleasure, in the same way as they were the trusted friends of our ancestors. Therefore we should not only refrain from vilifying and deprecating all that which belongs to this our world, but on the contrary, on account of its very preliminary nature which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in the innermost sense. - Transformed? - Yes, because it is our task to impress upon ourselves this preliminary, transient earth in so deep, so painful, so passionate a manner, that its essential nature is 'invisibly' resurrected within us.
This resurrection takes place in every act of retrospective insight and spiritual awakening, as we have seen in the process of the Buddha's enlightenment. It is an act of resurrection, in which the ultimate transformation takes place and in which all causes come to rest in the light of perfect understanding and in the realization of sunyata, in which all things become transparent and all that has been experienced, whether in joy or in suffering, enters into a state of transfiguration. Then all the worlds of the universe hurl themselves into the invisible as into their next deeper reality," a reality that is ever-present within us, beyond time and space.
~ Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Two Aspects of Reality
"Lama Anagarika Govinda (1898-1985), the founder of the Arya Maitreya Mandala, was a scholar, mystic, writer, painter and poet. As Robert Thurman remarks, Lama Govinda is "undoubtedly one of the West’s greatest minds of the twentieth century, among the Pantheon that includes with Einstein, Heisenberg, Wittgenstein, Solzhenitsyn, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama." (Introduction to The Way of the White Clouds).
He was quite critical of Tibetan Buddhism, which he considered invaded by demons. In 1931 he went to a conference in Darjeeling to convert Tibetans to a more pure form of Buddhism. In nearby Sikkim he met the Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche (1866–1936), who completely turned around Govinda’s opinions. From then on he embraced the Tibetan form of Buddhism. After founding his order in 1933, for three decades he lived a secluded life at ‘Crank’s Ridge’, outside Almora in northern India. From here he undertook travels through the remotest areas of Tibet, making large numbers of paintings, drawings and photographs. These travels he described in his book The Way of the White Clouds. In 1947 he married a Persian speaking photographer Li Gotami.
In the 1960s he began travelling around the world to lecture on Buddhism, and settled in the San Francisco Bay area in his twilight years, where he was hosted for a time by Alan Watts. He died in Mill Valley, California."
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