Claude Needham, Toward the Green Hall

Whose Web Page Is This Anyway?

Ok, let's take this slowly from the beginning.... there is something about eternity that each one of us is unable to tolerate; if we could, we wouldn't be experiencing time and space at this very moment. Truth is, while you are reading this page (and of course you are quite sure that you arrived here while cruising the WorldWideWeb) you are actually in the eternal state. The problem being that there is some particular something about eternity which you are unable to tolerate, so you have invented and developed time and space in your struggle against it.

By sheer accident, or perhaps calculation, every now and then you fall back into eternity, or perhaps you simply run out of energy and are unable to struggle anymore, so you fall back momentarily. Or maybe you fall back for a long time, what we call death, and then you once again accumulate the energy and the momentum to fight against eternity. In a nutshell, you recur, you put on the same video in order to have another go at it.

There is something about the Real World that we are just unable to tolerate. We have the habit of running away from the eternal situation in the direction of life and death. Eventually, of course, we always wind up returning. We escape into the relative world in search of something, some tool, some method, anything that will help us tolerate eternity. What awaits us on the eternal level can't be changed; hey, by definition it is unalterable, it'scby definition absolutely eternal.

Unfortunately for us, time and spaces seem to be the answers to this never-ending dilemma of ours. That's where we go to escape from something that we think is even worse. Given the limited vision of our human biological machines, given our lack of special attention, time and space are the only things we are able to interpret, .

I hate to type these words, but... as it turns out, time and space are an illusion, a total rip-off, complete bullshit from beginning to end. The only truth is THE TRUTH, what really is. So when we run out of energy, we fall once again into what is, which is to say, into exactly what we have been struggling against, struggling to flee from.

This "what is" is the "what is" from that famous Sufi mantra, "You can't change what is, but you can learn to like it". Although this may seem like a simple sentence, it holds a very strong idea, touching upon what it means to be a Buddha, no more and no less.

To stop struggling doesn't mean that the world is going to disappear. It will surely change in character, but it can never disappear, because Creation is always there. It occurred, and it can't dis-occur. It was done, and it can't be un-done. Just ask any 12th century Rabbi. Nevertheless, Creation wasn't created with the aim of being a refuge, a place to run into and hide from Eternity. Creation was a reaction to the Void, and exists in the same way that something once said can never be un-said, although God knows we certainly are trying to.

There may actually be a way to un-say something, but up until now, no one has ever discovered a way to do it. We keep on searching, but up until this very moment, while you are sitting there reading these words, whether or not you believe that you know where they are coming from, (either from a computer far away from where you are, from cyberspace itself, from your own computer screen, or perhaps your very own imagination), there has never been any way to erase or delete.

You can turn the volume up, or you can turn it down, but you can't turn it off; and the reason for this is very simple: once something exists, it exists forever, as if it had always existed. YOU might remember a moment or time when IT did not exist, but IT does not remember a moment or time when IT did not exist. Practically speaking, IT has existed forever. And once something exists, it exists forever. And the reason for this is that it is occurring in Eternity, and in Eternity, the flow of time is an illusion. Time doesn't flow, and because it doesn't, because of the fact that all of existence is eternal, once something exists, well, it exists. It doesn't get used up, it doesn't run out, it doesn't get lost, it doesn't get turned off, it doesn't wear out, it doesn't disappear, it isn't consumed, neither can it be forgotten out of existence. There is no entropy in the Creation, only an apparent entropy due to the appearance of change. This apparent change is produced by our apparent movement through the eternal Creation. In truth there is neither movement nor change.

So who am I? Who is writing or has written this page that you are apparently reading at the moment? Who is speaking to whom? Who is writing to whom? If you're standing, please sit down and face the fact that you may never get any answers to these questions, because you will always have that tiniest of suspicions that this page might have been written by someone other than yourself. You will always create that element of doubt: "Hey, maybe there really is someone else out there..."

But there's no doubt at all. It's impossible that there is anyone else out there, and if you take a really close look, and I mean a really close look, you might see that. When the day comes, if it ever does, when without any fear you abandon this hope, you will then have stopped struggling against Eternity. These two things more or else go together.

One part of your struggle against Eternity is your hope and belief, well, as infinitesimal as it might be, that there really is someone else out there besides yourself.