Perception of Change

However, perception of change and transformation is different on the boundless dimensions than in normal egoic experience, revealing the relation of dynamism to Being or true nature. We understand this relation exactly, precisely, and completely when we experience this dimension of dynamism. Phenomena, both external and internal, appear similarly to the previous three boundless dimensions; but here the characteristics of dynamism and change dominate the experience, giving us the opportunity to experientially understand their relation to Being. The dimension of dynamic being is a boundless dimension, appearing as an indivisible and infinite field of consciousness and presence. All forms, external and internal, appear as forms that this conscious presence assumes. The fact that all forms are basically shapes and colors that Being assumes changes our perception of change and transformation, and our view of such processes. We begin to gain an entirely new and different perspective on all processes that involve time; these processes include not only change and transformation, but also development, growth, maturation, evolution, decay, decline, movement, action, behavior, functioning, expression, speaking, thinking, and so on. We begin to understand time—its flow and the origin of this flow. The new perception and understanding are unexpected and exhilarating. This perception is reflected in the insights of many ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 349

Change and Movement

From the perspective of the dimension of dynamism, it turns out that there is no such thing as movement. Since there exist no separate objects there are no objects that move. There is only the appearance of movement. We have discussed this in terms of inner objects in chapter 6, when we were exploring the changes of inner experience. But in the boundless dimension of dynamic presence we experience Being not only as a boundless field of presence, and see all manifest forms—both inner and outer—as expressions of this presence, but, furthermore, this presence is dynamic and mutable, perpetually changing its appearance. The various manifest forms are nothing but the patterns and shapes that this infinite fabric of presence takes. There is no such thing as a separate object that moves in space from past to future. What has been seen as a moving object is seen here as a manifestation of a particular location in the field of presence, a shape that keeps appearing but in different locations, giving the impression of a moving object. We go back to our example of the cinema screen from chapter 6. We see a man moving across the screen, but in fact there is no movement. The totality of the picture changes from one frame to the next. Because this change of the frames happens gradually, and because the change occurs faster than our eyes can discern, we see a continuous picture of a man walking. Yet, we know it is a picture that is simply changing from one instant to the next. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 349

The dimension of dynamic presence reveals that Being is not only the ground and ultimate constituent nature of everything, but that it is the only thing that changes. In other words, change is never local or individual; it is always universal. The totality of the universe, in all of its dimensions, changes as one indivisible Reality; the perception of these changes, when combined with ignorance of its true nature, gives us the impression that there exist objects that move and change. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 351

Continual Creation

One of the most common ways of perceiving the phenomenon of universal transformation is the recognition that objects do not move from the past to the present. Such movement depends on reification and absence of the perception of the unity of Being. It also implies the belief that each object is old, that it has existed from some certain moment in time, and now time passes on it, this way changing or moving. We instead see the object coming into existence each moment. It comes into existence and passes away as a new object takes its place. The new object looks exactly identical to the one before it, or almost so. In other words, the object is always being replaced by a newer version of itself. The movement is not from the past to the present, but from nonexistence to existence, from nonmanifestation to manifestation. This way the object is always new, for time never passes on it. Since the new object is identical to the one before it, and the change happens too quickly for the eye to discern, we can easily believe it is the same object, and then conceive of the concept of time to account for its changes. Yet in reality, the object is coming into creation continually; it is being continually and newly created, instead of being created—coming into existence—at some point in the past and after that existing in time. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 352

Timeless Translation

Going back to a particular object, we see how change and movement occur. There are several possibilities for the eternal recurrence of the object. Let us view the body of a cat. This object is always coming into appearance, as a new body. The new body may come into being as exactly the same as the one before it. We say the cat has not changed or moved at all. Or it may come into being with a slight change, a change that keeps increasing each time a new body comes into being. We say the cat is moving in place. It is simply changing its posture and moving its limbs. Another possibility is that the new body will come into being in a slightly different location of space. Each time it comes into being it also appears with slightly different positions of its limbs. The cat keeps coming into being in different locations, with different postures, giving us the continuous impression of a cat walking. The situation is actually more total than this. It is not that the cat appears in different locations in a particular room. The whole room, with all the objects in it, is also continuously coming into being. The whole scene is continually coming into being, including the observer, and the inner experience of this observer. It is one total picture, nothing excluded, always and continuously coming into existence. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 353

Universal Transformation

It is simplistic, even mistaken, to think of nonmanifestation as the forms existing somewhere and coming into manifestation through the manifesting power of the dimension of dynamic presence. This would simply be a process of vertical translation, modeling the process of universal manifestation on the physical view of reality. Being is much more mysterious and magical; it simply manifests what is potential to it, in effect, creating it out of nothing. Forms exist in potential, the way a tree exists in the seed. But there is not even a seed, just the mysterious emptiness of true nature. Before manifestation, there is only the unmanifest, the absolute mystery and depth of Being. Furthermore, manifestation is always new. It is not like the universe is manifested and then continues in time. No, it is always manifesting, in different forms and shapes, giving us the impression of change and motion. Manifestation is a similar process to creation, but bypasses the dualistic reification possible in the view of creation. Such reification is possible, and quite common, in the view of creation because creation is easily viewed anthropomorphically. In addition, manifestation is a universal process. The totality of what is manifests at once and continues to manifest with local variations of forms. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 355

Dynamic Presence

When we experience the process of universal transformation as a flowing and unfolding presence, we begin to recognize the dimension of dynamic presence itself. The various ways of experiencing universal transformation in the above discussion reflect how we experience the coemergence of dynamic presence with the other boundless dimensions, and the degrees of subtlety of experiencing these dimensions. But when we experience it specifically as the flowing and unfoldment of presence we come upon the particular dimension of dynamic presence, at least in the logos of the Diamond Approach. Our experience focuses here on the dimension of true nature responsible for change and movement, which provides us with a more complete and detailed understanding of the changeability of existence. We experience ourselves here similarly to the soul, as a flowing and dynamic presence, teeming with energy and pulsing with power. Yet, we are not a limited soul, but a boundless presence that is dynamic and vital, full of life and creative power. We may actually recognize here that the qualities that our soul possesses, those of flow, unfoldment, dynamism, potentiality, creativity, and morphogenic transformation come to it from this boundless dimension of dynamic being. The Inner Journey Home, pg.358

The Only Doer

In other words, there is only one doer, one mover, and that is true nature. Furthermore, the universal doer has only one act: the act of continuous creation. This doer does not take individual or specific actions, for it is not an entity in the space-time of manifestation. It is the force that in one unified act manifests the totality of existence. What we call action, doing, behavior, and functioning are actually imaginary things. In reality, there are no such things. More precisely, we may experience the unity of Being moving our hand, or circling the earth around the sun. It is accurate to think it is the action of the one doer, and not any particular individual being. This subtle and rare perception is still not completely accurate, for we are not seeing the unity of all actions, all movement, all changes. When we see the unity of action, as in the dimension of dynamic presence, we recognize that it is not a doing, but simply the manifesting or creation of all Reality as one unified fabric. This unified fabric is always unfolding, and unfolding in a pattern. We discern some of the dynamic elements of this pattern and call them action, behavior, and so on. In reality, there is no such thing as one person moving her arm, nor even God moving the person’s arm. The expression “movement of the arm” is simply a convention that abstracts out a particular subpattern from the universal dynamic pattern and reifies it as such movement. In other words, individual action is a reification of a subprocess of the overall unfolding of the universe, inseparable from this overall unfolding. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 361

The Pattern

The manifest world unfolded by the creative dynamism of Being possesses certain characteristics that humanity has seen as harmonious and orderly. Modern science relies on this order for its research in discovering, understanding, and applying natural laws; spiritual traditions rely on an inner order that makes sense of inner development. In other words, it is important to realize that appearance is not chaotic or haphazard. It is the universe that we perceive and within which we live, the universe that our science has recognized to faithfully follow natural laws. Manifestation appears orderly and meaningful, changing and transforming in orderly and meaningful ways. It unfolds within an order that we recognize as both meaningful and harmonious. The dynamism is constantly unfolding the universe in a particular orderly pattern. The unfoldment is a patterned unfoldment, and its pattern is the universe we perceive. This implies that dynamic presence has its own ordering and organizing principle that manifests the world always in what we recognize as the natural order of things. We may think of the functioning of this dimension of true nature as it unfolds the universe in what we consider an orderly fashion, as a fashioning and ordering of the universe. In fact, some of the ancient traditions thought that the creative ground orders, runs, and steers the flow of the universe, besides bringing it into existence. This was exactly how the ancient Greeks understood things to be, and called the ordering principle “logos,” or reason. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 362

The Logos

We have discussed how the characteristic of change is present in all the boundless dimensions, even though the logos is the specific dimension of creative dynamism. We can experience the logos from the perspective of any of the other dimensions; that is, we can experience the pattern with love, knowledge, or nonconceptual awareness dominant. We can see the pattern nonconceptually, without recognition of the meaning or significance of its specifics, or we can see it with knowledge and discernment of these details, or we can see it as the force of love that generates the universe and makes the world go around. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 364

Harmony

We have been exploring the pattern of the logos, the order immanent in manifest reality, seeing how it is the ground and basis of rationality, reason, thinking, speaking, and language. But how does this order appear in experience, and what are the qualities of such experience? Such experience is the principal realization of the dimension of the logos, for it is the direct experience of the logos. We feel a sense of presence and fullness, at the same time that we are aware of powerful dynamism and the sense of flow. The full presence is boundless, infinite, and at the same time luminous and alive. It is a conscious presence where awareness and the fullness of presence are inseparable, making up one unified field of consciousness. We experience all of the world of perception as the forms that this presence assumes at various regions of its expanse. All forms and objects are nothing but the field of presence itself, but with differentiating colors, shapes, and qualities. At the same time we perceive the sense of flow as the flowing out of all of these forms, not from one place to another, but from depth to surface, and more accurately, from nonmanifestation to manifestation. We directly feel the whole infinite field as a fluid fabric, flowing at all points of its expanse. We perceive the flowing as the changes and movements of the various forms in the field of perception. In other words, the flow is not only of the existentiating outflow of the medium of the logos, but also of the progress of all phenomena. We see the changes of the weather, the changes of the environment if we are in motion, the movement and changes of all objects around us as we move and they move, the changes of the body as it moves and gestures, the flow of our words if we are talking, the flow of our thoughts and feelings, the unfoldment of the inner states of presence, the unfoldment of the qualities of the boundless presence of the logos all around us, and so on. But we see it all as one flow, as one fabric that outflows, or continuously manifests. The Inner Journey Home, pg.370