“No matter how far down we go, we find holons resting on holons resting on holons.
Even subatomic particles disappear into a virtual cloud of bubbles
within bubbles, holons within holons, in an infinity of probability waves. Holons all the way down.
q: And all the way up, as you say. We never come to an ultimate Whole.
kw: That’s right. There is no whole that isn’t also simultaneously a part of some other whole, indefinitely, unendingly. Time goes on, and today’s wholes are tomorrow’s parts. . . .
Even the ‘‘Whole’’ of the Kosmos is simply a part of the next moment’s whole, indefinitely. At no point do we have the whole, because there is no whole, there are only whole/parts forever.
So the first tenet says that reality is composed neither of things nor
processes, neither wholes nor parts, but whole/parts, or holons—all the way up, all the way down.”
Ken Wilber, “A brief history of everything”
“Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infinite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.”
Carlos Castaneda, “The Wheel of Time”
“Indra’s net” is an infinitely large net of cords owned by the Vedic deva Indra, which hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. In this metaphor, Indra’s net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels.
In the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, which follows the Avatamsaka Sutra, the image of “Indra’s net” is used to describe the interconnectedness of the universe. Francis H. Cook describes Indra’s net thus:
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering “like” stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.”
The Buddha in the Avatamsaka Sutra’s 30th book states a similar idea: If untold buddha-lands are reduced to atoms, In one atom are untold lands, And as in one, So in each. The atoms to which these buddha-lands are reduced in an instant are unspeakable, And so are the atoms of continuous reduction moment to moment Going on for untold eons; These atoms contain lands unspeakably many, And the atoms in these lands are even harder to tell of.
Book 30 of the sutra is named “The Incalculable” because it focuses on the idea of the infinitude of the universe and, as Cleary notes, concludes that “the cosmos is unutterably infinite, and hence so is the total scope and detail of knowledge and activity of enlightenment.”
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