A Vijñāpti-Mātra Origin Story
In the beginning the unconscious created the mind and the body.
And the body was without form or function; and darkness was upon the face of the mind.
And the forces of life welled up from the depths of the waters.
And life thought: let us eat light, and it ate light.
And life tasted the light, that it was good: and the life followed the light out of the darkness.
And life grew in the day and withered in the night. And there was evening and morning for many days.
And life began to build a membrane in the midst of the waters, to let the membrane divide the cell from the waters.
And life made the membrane and defined the self, which was within the membrane, from the world which was without the membrane: and it was so.
And life called the membrane order, and the waters were called chaos. And there was evening and morning for many days.
And life searched through the waters for light to be gathered into a body, and the body emerged from the light: and it was so.
And the body could touch the Earth; and the gathering together of the body called forth consciousness ; and life had created order from chaos.
And consciousness divided its body into ancestors and descendents, mothers from fathers and fathers from mothers, containing in each the seed of itself; and it was so. And the ancestors brought forth descendents through the body, whose seed is contained in itself, each according to its ancestry: and consciousness had created order out of chaos.
And there was evening and there was morning for many days.
And life read patterns from the light which fell upon its membrane, to measure itself by the day and the night; and the patterns were signs for seasons, for days, and years.
And the patterns in the membrane gave rise to meaning upon the face of the mind: and it was so.
And there were two great lights; the sunlight would mean consciousness, and the moonlight would mean the unconscious: the stars had meanings also.
And life set their meanings into the patterns of its membrane, and all that was within,
And the meaning of light was day and order and consciousness. And to divide the light of consciousness from the darkness of unconsciousness, life created meaning out of pattern. And there was evening and there was morning for many days.
And life prepared to arise into every moving creature that has life, and every fowl that
flies above the earth, and into every kind of being.
And life became great whales, and every living creature that moves, emerging from the waters, into every kind of being, the kingdoms of life were formed this way: and life had created order out of chaos.
And life was fruitful and multiplied, and filled the waters of the seas and the fields of the Earth.
And there was evening and morning for many, many days.
And life prepared to arise into every living creature and culture, as descendents
dependent upon their origination: and it was so.
And life was incarnate in the beings of the earth, every living creature with body and
mind. And life proliferated in forms, each according to their kind: and it was so.
And life was incarnate in humankind, who took dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth.
In the image of life, humankind made meaning: order and chaos we made it. Symbol and speech made we it.
And humanity said, let us be fruitful, and multiply, and remember our culture, and its meanings: and this will give dominion over the forms of the mind, and over the patterns of nature, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And humanity wrote, Behold, I can depict the world of mind from within the world of Forms. For all the mind can be written, and writing is eternal, and thus the mind is eternal.
And humanity wrote of word and essence, of self and non-self, of process and reality, of the void and the dark.
And we saw every thing that we had made, and, behold, it was beyond good and evil.
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day of May, 2018.
References
Barrett, Emotions as Social Reality
Lusthaus, What is and Isn’t Yogacara
Ong, Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought
Tomasello, Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious
Honor Code
I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment. Chris Diak
