The Maze and the Matrix
Superimposed on a trompe l'oeil, a portrait of Lady Vithsquine.
Reflections of a rainbow in puddles in the street blending Escheresque
with colors of an oilslick on the water.
Chaos theory predicts the movements of crowds and weather.
No one knows how termites build their nests
to provide placement and shape so they will survive the climate.
Life is time travel to an imaginary destination that manifests more clearly
as real as we get closer to it over time...like coming upon the pyramids we saw in a photo as a boy.
I always wanted to be a fireman..now I am one... a journey through time and space
We say time passes, but what`s happening is we are passing throught it...traveling in it...no reverse gear.
In order to travel through time to get where you want to go, you have to steer around obstacles...like a car...but since one cannot stop time, one can never really arrive anywhere...it just seems that way to a three dimentional POV.. Which is why the Matrix can never be successful...it is a three dimentional paradigm...while the Maze is four dimentional and plots travel through time and space.
When the tires wear out on our car, we buy new ones. Our body wears out by traveling through time but our mind does not.
That's because the mind is four dimentional...to say the least. Our body dies and we get a new one and continue our journey through time...it's the only explanation that makes sense....why we seem to know people we meet in this life....why a kid can play Mozart....so many examples.
To move through the maze, one has to take a longer, bigger view. If you grew up in a town in Ohio and do things because "that's the way we do them here", you're stuck in a three dimentional paradigm. It's only a box. It could even be two dimentional. We say someone is shallow, lacking depth, Paris Hilton whose mind is the sum of her photographs, two dimensions. No wonder she had "psychological problems" in jail.
To move through the maze, you need a direction, a vision, of where you want to go. Some one knows they want to be an Olympic ice skater from the age of two...they train and are successful. This is an example of how to move through the maze. But that person who knew from a very young age what they wanted to do, started that journey, that movement, in the previous life, at least. It doesn't matter if you arrive at your destination in this life. That's why Buddhists say "the path is the goal." To move somewhere through time, it's important to start the journey. In future lives, the journey continues...the journey through time.
That's why the Matrix cannot succeed. Because a great order has to move through time. Since time is a maze, it is distabilizing to order. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote: "A great order is a great disorder". A Dynasty in China could last a thousand years because time is relative...like the other three dimensions. Time was moving slower then...life was more three dimentional in character. But it was moving faster than the jurrasic era that lasted a couple of hundred millions of years.
So what was the Cambrian explosion? An anomally in the dimension of time. A right angle instead of a straight line.
Ego is a shell for the mind. Self consciousness has only been around maybe fifty thousand years...a very short time. It was perhaps necessary for mind to develop in the other three dimensions. Buddha discovered it was unnecessary...an obstacle in fact. It is an obstacle to discovering the fourth dimension...the movement through time...the path through the maze.
Time is relative...like the other dimensions. It changes in proportion to an algorithm. That's why time seems slower when
we are young...faster when we are older. Historical time follows the same pattern.
It's said that enlightened beings are able to see the past, present and future equally clearly. I feel my teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, was one such person. I would like to give two examples from my contacts with him.
Once I was iin a small room with him alone. Like all of his students, I longed to spend more time with him...so I said it: "I want to spend more time with you." He responded: "We'll make time." To me, this wasn't "Let's do lunch.", a Californian's way of saying "Fuck you." To me, this meant we were "making" time....plotting a course through the maze....planting seeds that would ripen in the future.
Another time, several students were standing around with him after a talk. People used to give him things...little presents.
Someone had given him one of those paintings from Mexico, on parchment-like paper, in day-glo colors...roosters and colored swirls. He handed it to me and said: "Bring this". It wasn't often I was invited along with his entourage, so I held onto it with a feeling of responsibility. We went to someone's house for an informal meal. When we got there, I asked him:"What do you want me to do with this?" He said: "Oh, just throw it over there."....as if it was totally unimportant. I was somewhat confused as to why he had asked me to bring it, if it was of so little importance.....but the memory stuck with me. Now I've been in Mexico a couple of years and It's been very good for my journey. You might think it's crazy, but I'm sure that was a hint that he knew I would be here.
It's also a hint as to how to travel through the maze. There's the Frost poem "The Road not Taken".There's the movie "The Butterfly Effect".The more awake, the more aware, the less we are ruled by fear and habitual patterns, the better we are able to navigate the Maze.
posted by John Tischer @ 10:31 PM
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