A screen that plays no movie
If the absolute is already complete, why did it bother to become a world? The swami's answer is that a blank screen would be a boring and useless thing to be.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 16 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami
Why is there something rather than nothing. In the Upanishadic form, why does the one become the many, and does it at all.
Swami Sarvapriyananda goes to the oldest texts for the shape of the answer. The one, as it were, reflects: I am one, let me be many. A primal impulse to appear. He does not pretend this explains anything, and then gives the version I found I could actually use. What good is existence itself if there are no existing things. What good is consciousness itself if there are no conscious experiences. What good is absolute bliss if there is no joy and no sorrow. The absolute and the manifestation are counterparts. Take only the world and forget the ground, and there is no way out, the problem of evil has no answer, death has no answer. Take only the ground and despise the world, and you have, in his phrase, a boring and useless movie screen that does not play any films.
He is not being flip. He returns to the cinema and says, you are the screen and you are having a film, and that is fine. That is the design. The spiritual goal is not anaesthesia, not being unable to feel. If anything, he says, the enlightened feel life more than the rest of us, and they are still fine in the middle of it.
The Sanskrit for this is jivanmukta, free while living. Embodied, in a world, with a life, and free. He calls it the most extraordinary attainment there is and points out that every saint of every religion was one or was nothing. None of them escaped suffering. Some suffered far more than ordinary people. The Buddha, after enlightenment, grew old, got sick and died, and the claim is still that he had transcended suffering. Whatever transcended means, it does not mean avoided.
He adds, for those who know Buddhism better, that the Gelug synthesis taught by the Dalai Lama ends up very close to this. It is right here. Not a release from the wheel, a different relationship to the ride.
I had been carrying, without examining it, the idea that the end of all this would be a kind of exit. A quieter life somewhere, fewer businesses, less noise. The swami's version is almost the opposite. Same film, same chair, same number of problems on the desk on Monday, and the difference, if there is one, is entirely in what you take yourself to be while you watch.
That is either the most demanding version of the teaching or the most convenient. I have not decided which.