The Universe Between

This seems to be the week for me reminiscing about all things ’60-ish. I recollect in the 5th grade awaiting anxiously to receive and read Alan E. Nourse’s marvelous sci-fi thriller—The Universe Between. As there was only one copy in the school library, it seemed an endless wait to finally be able to relish the feel of holding this little masterpiece (for the boys in the class this was, at the time, the piece de resistance). I’ve included here a little pic showing our class—I’m the one on the top, third from the left wearing my favorite “Barnabas Collins” (of Dark Shadows fame) suit and vest—something I was really into at the time to salvage my sanity from the real monsters in that class.:-)

Nourse’s work remains even to this day, a little classic in its own right as to the nature of inter-dimensional reality. It’s a riveting tale about piercing the veil between parallel universes—the protagonist, Bob Benedict, is able to cross this threshold by merely turning through a strange corner, a wrinkle in time if you will. Yet, what he discovers in that parallel dimension is the dangerous reality of “The Thresholders”—inter-dimensional beings who would prefer nothing less than to dismantle our own perceptional reality and send it spinning off into a void of oblivion. Quite a mind-bender at the time, written during an age of consciousness-expansion; actually this tale is about how our own feeble little perceptions prevent us from realizing the True Nature of Reality.

The Awakening of Faith Shastra centers on the self-realization of One Mind, yet within this formulation there is an intersecting theme between the One Deathless Principle (Unmoving—nothing really needed to be negated) and the fluctuating nature of the karmadhatu…that apparent flux between phenomenal and noumenal. Going even further still, it is reflective of what we know today as a holographic model—in this sense, all that is interdependent is really a reflective reality and manifestation of the One Mind—Dharmadhatu. This really bursts the bubble of any differentiation in the ultimate scheme of things as all the apparent inter-dimensional fluctuations are just fragments of one Universal Whole (Monistic Mind). A lot of the sutras are a testament to this reality; there are numerous references in the sutras to a wide and diverse range of inter-dimensional realities and even beings—as innumerable as the infinitesimal grains of sand in the Ganges. Movies like Star Wars are not far-off from imagining that wide array of beings who attend the sambokayic sessions of the Buddha. And yet, we must never lose sight of what really lies “between” all these wild imaginary figments of the animating principle—the Luminous Unborn Mind.