Nothingness, what modern physicists call non-matter, is the essential stuff of which the universe is made, exactly as the Vedas proposed thousands of years ago that all manifestation derives from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the only existing form of eternity, the Void. The void is empty in the sense of non-thing, the thing is not there; but don’t get me wrong, it’s not a mere empty nothing—empty, yes—but a creative void. We must remember this distinction in the context of what is now being discussed.
The seed of a tree is nothing more than a container of that creative emptiness. Crack a seed. What do you find? Empty. When the seed rots in the ground, that void begins to sprout into a tree. The tree will blossom, bear fruit and, falling to the ground, it will become a seed again, thus returning to its origin, the void. This cycle of existence the Hindus have called Samsara, the wheel, and its cessation, Nirvana – the extinguishing of the fire of a lamp. ‘Nirvana’ is a Buddhist expression that has its origins in Hindu philosophy, but why the seed of Buddhism failed to sprout in India is another story. (It went from India to China, and from there to Japan).
The no-mind, or nothing, is thus the beginning of everything and the end of everything. From nothing arises what Tantra (that is, the technique) calls lack of origin: from lack of origin arises non-memory; from non-memory memory arises. This is the Tantra tree, the sequence.
Nothingness means that everything is potential, nothing is yet actual. Existence is fast asleep in the seed, resting: the unmanifest state of being. The second state is originlessness: nothing has originated yet, but things are ready to become real: a pregnant state, ready to be born at any moment. He is very very ready; in that sense it is not similar to the first state.
The third state is called non-memory. The child is born; the experience has become real. The world has entered, but there is still no knowledge: non-memory. This is similar to the Christian concept when Adam lived in the Garden of Eden: without knowledge; he had not yet tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. This is the state in which every child lives at the beginning of his life. For a few months the child sees, hears, touches, tastes, but no recognition arises, no memory is formed. That is why it is so difficult to remember the first days of our lives. We can trace our memory back to the age of four, or three at the most, and then all of a sudden there’s a blank space. Because? We were alive, in fact, more alive in those first 3 or 4 years than we will ever be again. Why isn’t there the memory of those years? Because the recognition was not there. The impressions were there, but there was no recognition.
That is why Tantra calls this state non-memory. You see, but by seeing no knowledge is formed. You don’t accumulate anything. You live moment by moment, you just slip from one moment to the next, you have no past, each moment arises absolutely new. That’s why children are so alive and fresh, and their lives are so full of joy, delight, and wonder. Little things make them so happy. Everything for them is bright. His eyes are clear, dust has not yet collected; your mirror reflects perfectly. This is the non-memory state.
And then comes the fourth state: memory, the mental state. Adam has eaten the fruit of knowledge; he has fallen, he has come into the world. From no-mind to mind he passes into the world. No-mind is nirvana; the mind is samsara. If you want to go back to the source, to that primordial innocence, to that primordial purity, then you will have to go back. The steps remain the same, only the order has to be reversed. Memory will have to dissolve into non-memory. Hence the insistence in all meditations that the mind be dropped, the thoughts dropped.
Go from thought to non-thought, then from non-thought to non-origination, and then from non-origination to no-mind. There is a lot of technique involved, clarified in detail in Tantra: the ‘how’? That’s another topic. Understand the concept in simple terms; we come from the ocean of eternity, from the void to the origin, we live in Time in Samsara, traveling through countless lifetimes because we don’t seem to learn from our past mistakes, and when we finally do, we return to our source, the void. It is cyclical, like a wheel that goes on and on.
The pattern can be traced throughout nature. For example, the waters of the Ganges have an identity of their own, as long as they travel through various rivers, tributaries and sub-tributaries, into straits, assuming new names in the process, to finally fall into the sea, Bangal Bay, far, far away from their place of origin, the Gangotri, in the Garhwal mountains of the Himalayas. (By the way, Gangotri is the mouth of a cow, in the shape of a gargoyle from which the waters fall in trickles, but its true origin remains a mystery.) “According to Hindu mythology, the goddess Ganga, the daughter of heaven, took the form of a river to absolve the sins of King Bhagirath’s predecessors, after his severe penance of several centuries. Lord Shiva received Ganga in his matted locks to minimize the impact of his fall.” (Source: Wikipedia). Minimizing ‘impact’ has a deep meaning; the waters would then have penetrated the Earth and gone to hell, falling, as it did, from the heavens. Symbolic, but very significant.
By falling into the sea, even the goddess loses her identity, a difficult concept for many Westerners to grasp. How does a goddess lose her identity? Use Ganges instead, if you want. The drop has now become the ocean. And the beauty is that it’s not just the ocean that contains the drop, the drop also contains the ocean. The immensity is not two. He is One in his unity! When you reach your source, you have arrived. From origin to nothing is the other half of the cycle. And then. . .
You are again infinity.
You are again the eternal.
No-mind is eternity; the mind is time. Do you see the connection?