As objective perceivers, we have a sense of who we are. We have a sense that we are a person with ideas, history—we are who we are. You know who you are; you are whoever you happen to be. However you see yourself is how you are. That’s all it is.
And we have a sense—unless you’ve been involved with metaphysics for a long time, unless you’ve been practicing Buddhism for a long time, and not just in time, but I mean you’ve done something with the practice, you’ve evolved—until that has happened, we have a sense that we choose to do what we do in life. We have a definitive sense that, “Well, I’ve chosen to do this. That’s why I’m doing it. I’m meditating, I’m involved with the spiritual quest, I’m exploring other dimensional realities, I’m exploring enlightenment, I’m trying to become happy and free from pain or guilt or depression or various ailments of the psyche, I want endless ecstasy,” whatever it might be.
But we have a sense that we are participating in metaphysics and the metaphysical experience voluntarily. We’re doing it because we’re doing it. We’ve chosen to do it.
As you go much further in metaphysics, you discover that that’s not true at all. The reason that you’re engaged in metaphysics is—there’s no reason, you just don’t have any choice. You couldn’t stop, no matter what you did. You’re held by power. Now, this is a very different view of life. In other words, we believe that we are all—people are created equal and we have free choice and all that sort of thing. It’s very big these days—on the earth—the idea that you can just go get yourself a four-wheel drive and a cute guy or girl and a house and a job and you can kind of do what you want to. This is very American, but—very egotistical, very centered around self.
I like independence and I like that idea, but to be honest with you, in metaphysics, we see as metaphysicians, we perceive that it isn’t really we who ever decide anything. It’s power that decides things. It’s power, if I can enter into the world of the American Indians for just a little bit here, who believe that there’s a force that binds life together. There’s something that makes everything what it is, and we call it power. In Buddhism, I guess we’d call it karma. But let’s be American Indians for a minute, since we’re in America. They were here first.
Power. Power binds us to something. You see two people together. They’re in a relationship. They don’t like each other; they’re bored with each other. Why do they stay together? “Well,” they’ll say, “because, God, I wouldn’t know what else to do. I really don’t want to meet someone else; it’s inconvenient. We have children,” whatever it is.
But it’s really power that holds those people together. And when the designs of power change, those people will separate and there’s nothing they can do in the meantime about it. There’s not a thing they can do. Nothing. Zero.
Now this goes, again, contrary to the grain of the American and pretty much the common 20th, 21st century view of life where we can all just do what we want to. We can start a factory, we can drive a car, we can make our life what we would like it to be. But the ancients believed that that isn’t true. Within a certain framework, within certain parameters, there is free choice. But the parameters, we have no choice about. Where we’re born, the conditions—we don’t choose that, it just happens. Beyond that, we just think we’re choosing.
But there’s a power that brings us to things, and there’s a power that lets us move away from things, from people, places, experiences. And what you learn to do in metaphysics is to accept. That’s a tough one. Because everybody is convinced that they can just go do whatever they want. Yeah, you can shop in any supermarket coast to coast. You have that choice. You can shop in Arkansas, you can shop in California, you can shop in New York, New Mexico. You can shop anywhere you want. Major choice. They’re all about the same, needless to say, the supermarkets.
What we learn to do is to accept where we are and what we’re doing and we learn to try and understand that there is something to be gained from experiences, be they pleasant or unpleasant. You’re in a pleasant experience, you want it to last forever, and it doesn’t—naturally. You’re in an unpleasant experience, and you want it to go away, and it lasts forever. That’s how it is, right? So we believe that experiences are inescapable, that power holds us; it binds us, just like it makes us who we are.
In other words, why are you? That’s like, why a duck, you know? Why not? Why are you? No, why are you? Why? I mean that’s the first metaphysical question you’re supposed to ask the great guru if you ever meet him. You go, “Oh great guru”—that’s the B.C. syndrome, you know, B.C. Comics? They have these little great guru comics once in a while? And they climb to the top of the mountain, and the guru’s up there—they always call him “great guru,” you see. “Oh great guru, what is the meaning of life?”—that sort of thing.
The first question you’re supposed to ask anybody if you ever meet anybody who’s far up is, “Why am I?” Not who. You know who you are; you are who you are. You already know, I mean, no one can tell you who you are. You might discover that there are parts of yourself that heretofore you have not encountered. But “why?” That’s the question that everybody wants to know in this little span between life and death—why?
Some people are pissed off and they say, “Well, why is there death? Why are babies born only to die and why are people crippled and why is life unpleasant? And what kind of a God can it be…?” complain, complain, bitch, bitch, bitch. We send them to the complaint department. You know, there’s a complaint department you can go to and you can complain and someone will listen and say, “Well, gee that’s too bad. Uh, we’re sorry.”
But in reality, the question that you first ask the great guru, you say, “Oh great guru, why am I?” It’s a reasonable question. “Why am I? Why? How did this happen? How did I come to be? How do I have awareness—this thing that is called life? How can this be?” And the great guru will kind of laughingly look at you, because you’re used to this kind of question in the guru biz, and depending upon the sense of humor of the teacher, they will give you various answers. But basically what they will tell you is, “Well, it just couldn’t be any other way. That’s just how it is!” It’s like the people in the complaint department. It’s the same answer. There’s nothing you can do about it. This is how it is; this is how life is.
It’s power that made you this way—you see, always blame it on someone. Blame it on power, blame it on God, blame it on creation, blame it on a past life. Well, your past lives made you this way. But the American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say, “Power binds us together.” Power, for a while, makes us what we are—perceivers—luminous perceivers of reality. Perceivers of being, perceivers of states of consciousness. And perception is a reflection of self. All we are able to perceive is a reflection of our perceptual field. There isn’t anything else; there can’t be anything else.
All perception is self-reflective. What we see is a mirror. Eternity is a mirror, and we’re seeing ourselves wherever we look. If we are unhappy, we’ll see an unhappy universe. If we’re happy, we’ll see a happy universe. If we’re very sexual, we’ll see things in sexual terms. If we’re metaphysical, we’ll see things in metaphysical terms. If we’re physical, we’ll see things in physical terms. But what is the universe really? I mean what is life?
In other words, if our only method of perception is self-reflection, then we can never know what life really is because we always see it as a reflection of ourselves. You look in the mirror and all you can see is the person who’s looking in the mirror. That’s the nature of the mirror, it just reflects. Life reflects, just like a mirror. It reflects your mind. You don’t think of it that way since life doesn’t happen to take the form of a mirror; it’s not visible.
Life is invisible. The illusion is that what we’re perceiving is in some way not a reflection of self. We don’t see the mirror. What would it be like to be looking into an invisible mirror that reflected things, but you couldn’t perceive that the mirror itself was there? Do you see what I mean? That’s what life is. Life reflects the field of attention that we’re in. The field of attention is the software, and therefore it quantifies everything in its own terms.
In self-discovery, what the teacher does is allow the apprentice to get outside of the field of self-reflection and see life directly. We call this awakening. And what we see is that there are endless planes of attention. Endless realities. Endless mind states. They’re like collections of atoms and protons and neutrons, nuclei. They just go on forever. They’re plasma, they’re fluid, they’re alive.
And what we see is that the universe is made up of an endless ocean of life itself. It is an endless ocean of itself. And for a time it binds itself together in particularized forms, and those forms have perception and they perceive themselves as being separate. They think, “Oh, I’m separate from this because I perceive it.” If you can perceive something, you’re separate from it. That’s how perception works. “I am perception. What I perceive is separate.” You can’t really perceive self. Oh, you can perceive your physical body or something, but you can’t perceive essence of self; it can’t be done because you are the one who’s perceiving.
You can look in a mirror—that’s all you can do, is look in a mirror. There is nothing else you can do but look in the mirror of self, in the mirror of karma we’d say in the Far East. Because karma is the sum total of who you are from everywhere you’ve been. The mind state you are in is karmic. Meaning, it’s related by a causal chain of existences, of moments, of particles of timelessness, if you will. It’s hard to put these things into words. It’s impossible, in a way.
So existence creates itself in any way that it chooses to—for no particular reason. No reason that we could assign to the world of human reason, logic, deductive and analytical “let’s find out, ask Mr. Wizard”, that sort of thing. There’s no way we can possibly understand anything. But we can see things. We can perceive things. And we can wonder. We can just be in a world of awe and wonder. That’s the best we can do.
Most people are not in the world of awe and wonder. They’re in the world of deadness. Their perceptual fields and bodies are completely self-reflective, and all they see is themselves wherever they go, and the universe revolves around their self-reflection.
But someone who is a Buddhist, someone who is a metaphysician, someone who is an Indian, a mystical Indian, is aware that there are many mysteries, and mysteries are not riddles. Mysteries are places to go with your mind. You go into the mysteries. And in the mysteries everything turns inside out, everything flips. You step into the mystery of the mind, and there are billions of minds, there are billions of selves, there are billions of worlds and dimensions. You go into them and you become them, and you’re never who you were. You never were who you thought you were anyway, so there’s no loss.
There are endless realities. William Blake wrote a poem called “The Mental Traveler,” and that’s really kind of what we are. We’re just a mind that travels. We travel through perception. And we just perceive ourselves in variant forms and variant conditions forever—unless the perceiver can awaken to that fact, realize that everything that they’re seeing is a self-reflection. Therefore, it’s sort of like an endless jigsaw puzzle that you can put together in endless ways but it always comes out the same way, because you’re the one who puts it together and you can only put it together in the way that you know, and there’s a limited number of ways that you know.
You will put this puzzle together in every lifetime. But you can only put it together in the way you know. And the way you know a thousand lives from now won’t be intrinsically different. It may have a slight different order, coloration. This puzzle, in other words, the grooves in the puzzle, you make them what they are; you fit them together. And eventually you create a picture of yourself. Your life is a reflection of your perception of yourself. Everything you do is predicated upon that.
As a person matures, and we say they “get their life together,” that simply means that their self-reflection has become more complete, to the point where it strangles you. You get your life together, so you’ve got the house you want, you’ve got the car you want, you’ve got the job, you’ve got the family, you’ve got the body, the money. When you’ve got it all you’re completely fucked. Because what you’ve done is mirror yourself in physical form. You’ve trapped yourself in your self-reflection which is why it’s boring, you see?
In other words, life is just masturbation in a sense, mentally. What people do is they just create a world out of their self-reflection. Then they wonder why they’re not happy. The illusion of happiness is that, “if I can only create my self-reflection, I’ll be happy.” But anyone who’s really done it, anyone who’s able to create a self-reflection, knows that it doesn’t make you happy. It’s terrible because once you’ve done it, once you get everything you want and it doesn’t make you happy, the illusion that happiness will come when you pull it all together fades and you are left with a situation of unhappiness.
In other words, what keeps us going is the belief that tomorrow will be different, but suppose it won’t be? Well, it won’t be. No life will be different; eternity isn’t different if it’s always just a self-reflection. Death does not end self-reflection, it just changes it in an incremental way. But in the next life, the aggregate of the self reassembles and we are pretty much who we were.
So, metaphysics is the study of how to shift the self. How to get outside of the self-reflection and to just gaze with awe and wonder at the countless universes, the countless celestial radiances of mind, of life, of enlightenment, nirvana, or God—whatever you want to call it. Power.
All the universes are bound together by a web, a matrix, which is our perception. And our perception actually has colors; it has bands. We call them bands of attention. As we go deeper and deeper into the world of meditation, we are able to travel along the luminous bands, just like you travel along a highway or a road. We’re able to follow them into far-flung realities of mind. I don’t mean cellular constructs of the human brain, but I mean the dimensional realities of infinity, which are endless and numberless. The days of infinity are endless. Its hours cannot be counted or found on a clock. There is no direction. There is no north, south, east or west. These are just concepts. Infinity is forever, everywhere, all at once. And that’s all there is.
So we climb outside of the field of self-reflection. Just a little—if you go too far it’ll blow your mind. I mean it’s strong out there. If you go out too far beyond the bounds of attention, there are things in the universe, in the universes of mind in the inner worlds that it’s best sometimes not to deal with unless you’re very, very far along. In other words, you can go into the flux of the universe, we would call it parinirvana, where things become what they are like this moment that we’re sharing together right now. There’s a place this moment comes from, where it’s made. Actually, it’s like a big factory where they make moments, where they make realities, where they make infinities. You can go in there and you can turn into the flux and throw yourself back into it and come out somewhere else. It’s like warp drive, you know? “Star Trek.” You just snap it through warp drive and you come out in a different part of the universe.
But that’s too much for some people. It’s too strong for the perceiver. The mind has to be very luminous to be able to do that. The sights of infinity can be too strong. They can scorch the soul. It’s best to take infinity on a little at a time. So metaphysics is a process where a teacher shows you how to gradually step outside of the self-reflective bubble of attention.
That’s how the American Indians refer to it. They say that there’s a bubble of perception and all of our lives we’re looking into that bubble thinking that we’re seeing life, and we’re just seeing our own mental self-reflections. But it’s possible to open the bubble, to step outside of it and for a brief moment, the luminous perceiver who’s within the bubble, who always thought they’ve been seeing life directly and not realizing everything is a self-reflection, steps outside of the bubble.
They look outside and they see forever. And that reorders us. It so changes us, it’s startling. That causes the luminous perceiver to run like hell back into the bubble and close it up and batten the hatches down and seal it with super glue and anything you can get your hands on, and say, “No way, Jose! I want everything that’s familiar! My life, my world, my body, time, space, I need these things! Aaaa! Aaaa! Aaaa! I don’t exist, I’m not even an anything.”
You know when you get out there real far, boy, and what the luminous perceiver thought was far was like, two inches. It’s like in Beetlejuice, when they open the door and they step outside, and suddenly they’re in the world of the sandworms? They’ve stepped outside maybe a foot and a half past the door. But in this other dimensional reality it appears that they’re going on forever, and they think they’ve been out there for maybe several hours and they’ve only been gone a few seconds. So when you go into the other worlds, when you go into the luminous dimensions, it’s very different than here. You really have to have your act wired. You have to be very strong. Your mind has to be in the right shape. Because otherwise when you get out there, what you see will drive you mad, just make you crazy. I mean, I don’t know if it’s crazy, you’re just seeing other orders of perception, but no one around here will understand what you have to say. And it’ll be tough getting a job. Because you’ll be babbling about, “There were 50 billion universes walking through my mind,” and it’ll sound like you’re on LSD or something but you’re not. LSD’s a drug. This is reality. This is the reality of what existence is.
When you step beyond the boundaries of human perception, what is there? There’s infinity. The trap of words is that we believe them. The trap of words is that we say something and the thing that we say we believe—is. We say something, we say a word, and we’re convinced that the meaning of that word is the reality. A word is a symbol. So the word “infinity”—the trap of the word “infinity”—is that when I say infinity you already know what that means, therefore you’ll never know what it means because you will let it go at the understanding of the word that you currently have. See what I mean? Because you know what that word means. You have a concept all worked out. You have a file inside your mind for that word. And when I say the word, you just look at the file. I could say the word now, I could say it a year from now, you’ll just look at the file. The only thing that can happen is, experience can change that.
I can say the word “Africa.” And if you’ve not been there, you’ve got a file for Africa. So you will look at the Africa file. Jungle, seen some movies—Tarzan, elephants, South Africa, you know different ideas might come to mind. You’ve got a file with various data on South Africa, East Africa, North Africa, West Africa. But if you got on a plane tomorrow and you actually went to Africa and you spent several months trekking around Africa, and you came back and I said the word “Africa” to you, you would pull out a different file.
The trap of words is that we’re content with them. Words are the death of metaphysics. But the funny thing is, we use words in the teaching of metaphysics. It’s one of those weird contradictions. The trap of words is when someone says “meditation, let’s have a great meditation,” or the word “enlightenment;” we have already preconceived what that means. We’re very certain we know what enlightenment is. Therefore, there’s no need to go any further.
So when I say, “Well, God, there are countless dimensions and universes and infinities,” you go, “Oh, right, OK, got it.” You just—real quickly we whip out all those files for those words, we look at them and go, “Got it, got the reference point, check the map, yep, OK. Infinities, worlds, sure.” And you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. You haven’t been to Africa. I mean, I’m talking about existent reality beyond your self-reflection. Beyond your self-reflection. It’s not a physical place you have to go to. Beyond your self-reflection is eternity.
In other words, it is the mind that weaves the dream of life, that convinces us that what we see is what is apparent and what is real, and that there’s nothing else outside of our perception. But I can assure you, as a practitioner of Buddhism, that there are ten thousand states of mind, at least, give or take a few billion, which can be seen and experienced and known, and each one goes on forever, and in each one you’re something else forever.
So metaphysics is a process where we go on journeys. We travel. We’re mental travelers. We travel step by step. Not too far too fast. Step by step we travel into other dimensions of mind and gradually we gain new orders, new understandings of what life is and what we are. We have an awakening where we see that we are, oh gosh, I couldn’t tell you; there are no words for it. If I give you words, you’ll be satisfied with those words, and you’ll think, “Oh, well, I understand that now, I don’t have to go do that, I understand, I can appreciate intellectually what he said.” (Rama laughs.)
You have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s like the desert. We were talking about the desert earlier, and I was describing metaphysical adventures in the desert that we have when we go to the desert to meditate. Immediately, if you haven’t been there, you pull up the word “desert” and look it up, “Oh yes, cactus and shrubs and (Rama laughs) that sort of thing.” And you don’t know what I’m talking about—the occult experiences that are had in the desert where the universe collapses in upon itself and billions of realities spill out through a giant hole called reality. It changes your awareness of things.
Metaphysics is a process whereby we awaken, step by step, to larger understandings of existence. And those larger understandings of existence change our self-reflection. This is the key. They change our self-reflection. And that self-reflection is important because the self-reflection is sanity. The self-reflection is the ability to function in time and space. It is the function of memory; it is the function of choice. But the thing that creates that self-reflection, the thing that holds it together is power. Power makes it that way, the power of the universe.
The reason the man and the woman are together is because they fit each other’s self-reflections. But power is the thing that holds the self-reflection. Things change when the self-reflection changes. So when I say that power causes something to be or power causes something not to be, what I mean is power causes the self-reflection in which the self binds. The only way to change the way we put together the puzzle, let alone to throw it away, is to completely change the self-reflection. And to change the self-reflection is a very complicated thing. It’s a very complicated thing because even the concept of changing the self-reflection is bound by one’s self-reflection. We can only conceive of changing the self-reflection in response to our concept of self-reflection, which is predicated on our concept of self, which is a self-reflection.
You’re in the funhouse with all those different mirrors. You’ve been walking around in it so long that you’ve forgotten what you look like. Or suppose you grew up in a house like that where all the mirrors were distorted? Suppose every time you’ve looked at yourself, it’s been in one of those funny mirrors and you have no idea of what you really look like, or if the mirrored reflection is what you really look like, you see?
So, “Is there a substantial reality that’s constant?” That’s the second question. If you say, “Oh great guru, why a duck? Why me? Who did this? How? Why?”—you know, how now brown milkshake, or whatever it is—the next question is, “Well, what can I do about all this? I mean is there anything to do?”
OK, we exist forever; there are countless infinities; infinity has bound me together for a while in this situation, in this life. There is no free choice, but I can enjoy the ride or bitch and complain depending upon whether I want to make myself miserable or happy. But my self-reflection has trapped me in the life that I’m in. And as long as it’s constant, I can’t change my life.
Well, the obvious answer is to change one’s self-reflection. If you change your self-reflection, you change. You become someone else, and reality changes since reality is only your self-reflection. But you can’t change your self-reflection because you’ll try to change it in such a way that is a self-reflection. You see? That’s the trap. So that’s why the teacher comes in and says, “You’ve got to be kidding, you’re a mess!” The teacher comes in because the teacher is outside of self-reflections but can see them and steps in and out of them because they’re interesting sometimes. But a teacher is someone who has taken their mind much further than you have. They’ve gone into the void further. They’ve seen the luminous realities. No one has seen them all. No one has seen them all. But they’ve seen more than you have and they understand the trap of self-reflection.
What the teacher does is gradually—over a period of time, really over a period of years—enable the being to change their self-reflection by compacting their life, strengthening it, getting all the junk out of it, learning to be happy, free and strong, and then gradually, again I use the word “gradually,” stepping into other dimensional realities—very specific ones, where for a while we will stand and gaze with awe and wonder at the universe.
It’s like looking at the sun. You can glance up at it, but if you look too long, you’ll go blind, even though it gives us light and we couldn’t see without it; it’s one of those funny contradictions. Look at the thing that allows you to see and you’ll go blind. That’s how infinity is. You can’t look at it for too long or you dissolve. The bands of your attention break. But if you look at it in specific ways, as you become stronger and stronger by changing your life a little at a time, you’re able to step in and out between the realities of mind and you can become something or someone much more conscious.
It is possible, in other words, to become someone else. This is what all metaphysics teaches us. Otherwise why get involved? Metaphysics is not religion. Religion is the complaint department, where you go and complain and someone says to you, “That’s too bad.” That’s religion. Or they tell you what you want to hear: “There is hope; there is anything you want; you can put some money in the basket and we’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” All our complaints and all our hopes are based upon who we are. But if we can change who we are—not just to being another human being or in another crappy situation, and we’re just exchanging one crappy situation for another—but if we can change who we are as a perceiver, if we can go beyond the human level to the divine, if we can have a mind like God’s, you see, that’s worth doing. God’s mind is endless. It reflects all realities. It is all realities—and beyond them.
So enlightenment means having a mind like God’s. It means your mind is God’s mind. It doesn’t mean you are God, that’s rather an objectification of the file word “God” where you just become the president of the company as opposed to somebody who works on the line stacking boxes—you become the CEO. You’re God. You can tell people what to do. You make more money, live in a bigger house. That’s [the file word] God.
The mind of God is reality without limitations—perception not limited to its own field. That’s what we call enlightenment. And to have that mind, to be the perfect mind of the universe, that’s the only thing really worth doing because all other self-reflections trap us and cause us pain. In other words, self-reflection is painful because it’s a condition of limitation and any condition of limitation vis-a-vis the experience of endless freedom is painful.
Personality is painful, be it good or bad. Bad is more painful than good but even good, even the religious seeker, the person who’s kind and doesn’t eat squirrels and stuff, you know, particularly raw, while they’re still moving, “A good person, he hasn’t eaten a squirrel in a week; he’s changed.” A religious person is trapped by religion. A perfect person is trapped by perfection. An occultist is trapped by the occult. A human is trapped by the human. A squirrel is trapped by squirrel traps. You know? There’s always something trying to eat you; that’s what I figure.
The mind of God is our topic always, in the world of Buddhist mind. The world of Buddhist mind, in its more advanced stages, as we like to call them—because we like to think well of ourselves and consider ourselves to be advanced—in the advanced stages, we go beyond time, space, life, death and Newsweek. We experience. We play in the infinities of mind. We gain a level of control of our mind so we can dissolve the mind and bring it back and forth between different dimensional realities, reshaping the mind from moment to moment, not as a subjective thing that’s out there; it’s not a carving that we’re making.
We ourselves are transmuting the reality of our perceptual field, and there are endless, beautiful and perfect universes—and there are some that are also pretty gross—that you can spin your mind through and your mind becomes those universes. Or you can go beyond universes to parinirvana, to the dissolution, where there’s no beginning, end or field of perception other than the universal field of perception, which again, is one of those words, file words, that you’re going to get trapped in.
Now you think you can understand what I mean, when in fact all you understand are what the words mean. What I mean has nothing to do with words. I’m talking about experiences. Hard core, hands-on reality. You’re talking about words and they’re two different things. The trap of words is that we’re convinced that we understand. If we’re convinced that we understand, we’ll stop with understanding. There’s no need to go further. Why go further? “Well, I understand what you’ve said. That implies that I don’t have to do any more since I’ve understood.”
So you go and see the great Buddhist teacher, and the great Buddhist teacher or the not-so-great Buddhist teacher or downright lousy Buddhist teacher—that’s me, the downright lousy Buddhist teacher—says something and now, “Oh yes, I’ve understood.” So now you are morally obliged to do absolutely nothing since you’ve understood. The lesson is complete. All you’ve understood are some words, which have nothing to do with what the man was alluding to, which is that there are countless infinities that exist forever inside your mind and that your mind is countless infinities, but you’re trapped in a tiny little self-reflection.
You’re standing in a closet, and you’ve been in it so long that you can’t remember that there’s anything else, that there’s a huge house with lots of rooms and there are lands outside the house and planets and universes and creations, and there are all kinds of things. But your self-reflection is a little closet, and you’ve been in it for a long time. You explore the closet over and over, and there’s a sense of newness when you turn from one wall to another since you haven’t seen that wall for a little while, and you call that the new. But you’re just going around and around in the same old closet, and in every life it’s the same old closet, a few different things hanging in it but it’s really the same old closet, sometimes a little bigger, because your self-reflection brings you into the same incarnation.
What is incarnation? Incarnation is self-reflection. The way that the universe we’re in is constructed is a reflection of ourselves. We picked the dimension according to our self-reflection. Why is all this? Why a duck? It’s just because it’s that way. But in other words, I can’t give you a very good answer. I could give you an answer that will placate you and then you’ll look no further. I’d rather frustrate you. Then maybe you’ll inquire beyond words. None of this has anything to do with words. There are only experiences. But words can buoy up experiences and words are part of reality that we deal with.