Ananta (Infinite), Avijnata (Unknown)

B. Alan Wallace invites us to consider the Great Perfection:

 “Imagine that you are in the midst of a prolonged non-lucid dream, unaware that you are dreaming, and you devote yourself single-pointedly to the shamatha practice called settling the mind in its natural state.  When you withdraw your awareness from all sensory appearances in the dream, all appearances dissolve into the substrate and your dreaming mind dissolves into the substrate consciousness.  Now imagine that you return to the dream and practice vipashyana, probing the nature of all objective and subjective appearances.  Finally, when you achieve a non-conceptual realization of the emptiness of inherent nature of all phenomena, all appearances again dissolve into the substrate, not because you have withdrawn your awareness from them but because your non-conceptual mind no longer imputes existence on any of them.  Your mind again dissolves into the substrate, but instead of apprehending the mere vacuity of the substrate, you directly realise the emptiness (Skt. shunyata) of all phenomena, also known as the ultimate reality (Skt. dharmata) and the absolute space of phenomena (Skt. dharmadhatu).  This is nirvana itself, and according the Buddha the phenomenal world of samsara would not exist without it.”  

Wallace B.A.  Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, Buddhist Radical Empiricism.  Columbia, 2012, P 142.

The mind is like an endless energy flow.  A river constantly changing.  The Buddha wisely said we do not enter the same river twice.  Moments of stillness in the waking state are rare for us in the West.  The relentless pace of everyday life does not give us much space for inner work.  If we are open to the experience there is a gravitational pull toward the infinite.  The desire to let the mind descend into the bottomless pit.  I remember when I first read on Jung’s journey to discover the collective unconscious.  He was sitting in his study at Bollingen when he let himself drop.  His mind descended into the spiral of unknowing deep into the depths of human archetypal history.  In this deep place he saw the formation of the psyche as it emerged from the primordial and took shape through lived experience of the world.  The archetypes emerged as environmental adaptation.  But this phylogenic history does not tell us the full story.  It is the story that underpins the coarse mind we regard as the self.

 The Eastern traditions tell us another story.  One of infinite depth and potential.  They tell of an energy form which Mahayana Buddhists call the Mindstream (Skt. citta-santana) which is endless and not tied to the body or the world.