To see a piece of stone, in this instance a block of blue quartzite from Brazil, one of Earth’s hardest materials, become a flowing stream, an ocean, figuring in the event horizon of absolute voidness nondual with relative reality, is an ephiphanic experience.
Shakyamuni Buddha, as is any buddha, is a fully accomplished super-scientist, having supremely accomplished the ultimate goal of all true scientists, namely the accurate and complete knowledge of the ultimate nature and relative structures of reality. It has never been easy for ordinary, misknowledge-driven humans or gods to understand or even imagine what such an experience might be, as even Siddhartha was not sure there could be such a thing, until he realized it himself personally and became a perfect buddha. I say “is” about him, Shakyamuni, since he never dies or leaves the world of his fellow beings, even though he might withdraw his emanation of a particular embodiment then or now to give a certain teaching in a specific historical situation.
These things are very hard to believe, as most of us grow up and are both subliminally and consciously schooled in a dogmatically materialistic worldview, which causes us to believe only in the evidence of the coarse senses, hard matter, mechanistic causation, a randomly accidental, meaningless, purposeless cosmos where the ordinary, self- centered, mostly unconsciously driven human being is the only standard of awareness, and there is no possibility of understanding reality fully, no such fully comprehensive awareness that, when compared with such ordinary tip-of-the-iceberg awareness, is like wakefulness to dream or even deep sleep. We cannot accept mind over matter, the
extraordinary, the miraculous, and we have no expectation of some truly astoundingly magnificent evolutionary possibility for ourselves. We can bear such a dismal universe, of course, only because we are sternly assured that just by dying, we will simply cease to exist and so will not regret the uselessness of having struggled to live for a short while.
This is where the “Tibetan Sun” shines for us in an unique and powerful way. It is miraculous. It is stone—quartz, one of the hardest natural stones, close to a diamond—yet it is swirled into a dynamic flow, bearing a promise of a miraculous reality of infinite energy available to satisfy all need, shaped by the stronger force of the unbreakable diamond of the void’s clear light of love and bliss, the essence of the creative energy of the artist. This infinite energy of the voidness/relativity event horizon interface, the true ultimate level of subtlety of the universe, lies beyond the black hole level where the materialists are trapped. It may be approached by the quantum physical and mathematical construct called “quantum vacuum zero point energy field.” Its event horizon emerges as the “Tibetan Sun.”
Why “Tibetan?” Tibet is the high plateau, around three miles high, where around a century ago, a laboratory of super-hi-tech human mental and physical development was hidden. It was brought there to be preserved for today, from the India of 1,000 years ago, where the “inner” or “mind” or “soul”—subtlest mind—sciences were developed beyond anything discovered anywhere else on the earth. All the energies of the civilization treasured there held an inner, mind-produced, solar energy for positive transformation. This energy is now needed to restrain and re-balance the global trajectory toward the imminent destruction of all life in our times. This apocalypse is being caused by our powerful materialist technologies’ exponential magnification of the harmful energies of greed and hatred in the forms of consumerism and militarism. We need a realistic, systemic, credibly magical spiritual, “inner,” or “mind” science and technology/art for mind-transformation, to go to the root of the problem in our individual and therefore collective minds,
transforming our delusions, greeds, hatreds (fears), arrogances, and jealousies into the positive energies of realistic wisdom, joyful creativity, gracious contentment, empathetic altruism, and blissful love and compassion. Such widespread positive mental atmosphere in our societies can yoke the material technologies back to the task of enhancing all life, rather than destroying it.
The great Indian scientists in the Buddha’s “inner science” tradition used the word shūnyatā for the ultimate voidness or emptiness that guarantees and makes workable the universal relativity they discovered. The very word shunya (void, empty) is also the word they used for zero, as they also invented the decimal system we all depend on. So the “Tibetan Sun” and the related works of its chosen artist present to us an icon of the transformation of our global culture into a true civilization, where inner and outer are balanced at last, individual peace translates into universal peace and the thriving of each one hinges on the thriving of every other one. This may be called “basking in the warm and healing light of The Tibetan Sun!”