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15.03.2008
Publication
date for The Blissful Brain
The Blissful Brain
is published by Gaia Thinking. For more information on how
to order your copy, please click
here.
13.05.2008
The
Blissful Brain, St Mark's Islington, London
This evening event was chaired
by Dr Shanida Nataraja, author of The Blissful Brain.
Shanida was joined by other popular speakers, including Laurence
Freeman OSB, Director of The World Community for Christian
Meditation (WCCM), and Kim Nataraja, author of Dancing
With Your Shadow, a book on the stages of meditation
and the path towards the integration of Self. For more information,
please click
here.
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Interrelatedness
of All Things
The interrelatedness of all things is a prominent
feature of the Perennial Philosophy. As we have seen, this
states that there is an Ultimate Reality that gives rise to
and transcends our physical reality. The limited reality that
we can apprehend with the five physical senses is seen to
be embedded within, and sustained by, a limitless Ultimate
Reality.
One of the essential principles of mysticism
is the awareness that all phenomena are manifestations of
an all-pervading and interconnected Ultimate Reality, and
accordingly should be viewed as being both interdependent
and inseparable. In Hinduism this Ultimate Reality is referred
to as Brahman, in Buddhism as Dharmakaya, in Taoism as Tao,
and in esoteric Christianity as the Godhead. In all of these
traditions, transcendental experiences of the Ultimate Reality
are associated with a sense of all-pervading unity. The distinction
between “self” and “non-self” dissolves, and the ordinary-state
perception of this and that are viewed as an illusion. In
both Hinduism and Buddhism, the mystics refer to the Ultimate
Reality as the Void. The Void is seen to be formless, but
not empty; all matter is derived from it, and therefore it
is viewed as the source of all life, a source of infinite
potential. In the West, the word “void” is derived from the
Latin word vacivus meaning empty. However, in Christianity,
the “void” or “emptiness” is seen to be plenitude or “fullness”.
The idea that every single component of
our Universe contains information about all of the other cosmic
components is mirrored in the philosophy of the 5th Century
Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. He proposed that nature was
built up of an infinite number of minute parts, invisible
to the eye, and that, contained within each of these minute
parts, there are the fragments of all other things i.e. “the
whole exists in each tiny part”. Similarly, in the Avatamsaka
Sutra, the Ultimate Reality is pictured as being holographic
in nature.
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