form and emptiness

even emptiness is empty

223

Oh dear.

Just when you had it figured out – the riddle about form and emptiness – just when you had Emptiness nailed, labeled and pigeon-holed, along comes another neti-neti.  It turns out Emptiness is also empty.  How so?

It has no independent existence.  It’s not a place, a form, a state, a fundamental arrival zone.  It has no reality apart from the presence of the absence it connotes.

If it had a form or location – if it could be experienced – it would have to have a subject experiencing it.  What would that subject be?

So forget Emptiness as some kind of ultimate Reality.  There is only, only, only this timeless unfolding, interweaving, interrelating Everythingness.

But before mind kicks in and gives Everythingness the Emptiness treatment, don’t forget that it, too, is …

well,

empty.

~

the still point of the turning world

221

“…the still point of the turning world…” *

What lucid and luscious imagery this collection of small words evokes!

The “still point” is what I refer to as the unknowable dimension called ‘n’ by mathematicians, scientists and the [odd] mystic!

wild wideawakeness – to the n (nth)
now
this
here
is the still point of the turning world

And “the turning world…”?  The world of appearances put together by mental technologies:  perception, languaging; the world of me and mine, others and theirs; the world of time and space, in which it can all tickety-tock along.

~

After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
~ The Four Quartets, Quartet 1 ‘Burnt Norton’ by T. S. Elliot

a mute ‘eureka!’

37

the ‘pearl’
is often misunderstood

many take it to be the realization of
‘no-self’ –
in spite of the peculiar absence of a
self that could realize a no-self!

it’s not about self or no-self,
illusion or enlightenment,
form or emptiness
duality or non-duality

it’s about the cessation of all such notions

it’s about a mute ‘eureka!’
beyond the reach of the notion-spinner
thought-weaver, experience-craver
yet more intimate than one’s own skin

~