“Life, or the world, is being
manifested in this moment. It was not manifested billions
upon billions of years ago. It is manifested at this moment,
instantly and may be known as such.”
This world appears to be very solid,
like the horse, but it’s a spontaneous creation, subject to
the conscious process. At every moment, the visible worlds
are utterly dependent upon the Divine, who is the present
and continuing creator, not the one who made everything long
ago in some unique and magnificent power.
The Birth of Responsibility
Alan Watts and Chogyam Trungpa
DEVOTEE: Why and how did we fall into
this condition, this miserable condition?
FRANKLIN: People like to fabricate
mythologies. You would like to hear some sort of “creation”
myth about this suffering, or some sort of philosophy that
explains why it came about. When something is “explained”,
when its “name” is known, then you feel free to forget or
exploit it. But it did not “come about”. It is presently
happening. It is not a matter of something that happened.
There is nothing hidden in time or space that is making this
affair of suffering occur. It is not happening as a result
of anything. It is a spontaneous, present activity for which
you are entirely responsible. So, truly, it does not make
any sense to try to describe some means or other by which it
might have come about.
I have said, however, that there is
a sense in which this specific activity that is your
suffering, this contraction, is a reaction to life, to
conditionally manifested existence. For every action there
is an equal and opposite reaction. The entire event of the
manifested, or conditional, cosmos arises as a spontaneous
event, a single event. The universe is the original action.
But for every action there is necessarily an equal and
opposite reaction. So this process of which I have been
speaking is, in a sense, the reaction to conditionally
manifested life.
