The Mind and Emptiness

      The biological nature of the human mind is to make distinctions, to separate the reality of One-ness into pieces. Without the boundary that separates a naked tree branch and the winter sky, we would not see the branch and the sky as separate objects. In order for a thing to exist it must stand out from something else. There must be boundaries; lines that separate one thing from another. The questions that arise from this simple but obvious fact are these.
      What are all the different objects carved out from? If we had a different computer (brain) for processing the raw data from the world around us, one that did not require the carving out of distinct and therefore seemingly different objects, what would there be? The answer of course is an undivided whole - the One. Do you see? The One contains all the parts, and the parts are no different than the whole because they are never separate from one another. The appearance of separateness is just that: an appearance. Individual things cannot actually be separated from the existence of the whole or they too would not exist.
      Each of our senses employs the identification of differences in order to function as they do. We are able to see objects, hear sounds, smell odors, and taste tastes because the human brain, along with the rest of the human organism, has the ability to compare, to differentiate variations of sound, color, taste, and smell. However all these apparently separate variations are inseparably linked with one another for their very existence.
      The process of creating a ruler or odometer in the measurement of distance, a spectrometer in the measurement of light, or a scale in the measurement of weight or music is about choosing where we want to put the line. Nature has no miles or inches, no separation of ultraviolet and white light, ounces and tons, sharps and flats. In reality each is, and always will be, inseparable from the whole: a seamless whole. It is the process of the human mind that draws these distinctions and for good reason. We need these criteria to function comfortably in our world. We are biologically hard-wired to do so, it’s the nature of the organism, but it’s only part of the story.
      Each of the individual "things" that are the object of our senses must be carved out from a larger whole, and that whole is “the One” that cannot be named, the ground of our being. Only when we forget that these separate entities are distinctions of convenience do they become a problem. Let’s take a closer look.
      Individual "things" are created when the human mind draws its distinctions based on the givens of brain chemistry. At the psychological level, individual things are distinguished one from the other by their name or function (also a name). In this way each thing achieves the appearance of separateness as well as its meaning. Each thing is made to appear more concrete and its distinctiveness is cemented firmly in place.
      However, let’s imagine for a moment that we could eliminate naming and abstract thinking from our neighbor’s mind. He or she would no longer compare, judge, or measure one thing against another. What would remain after the naming stopped; when distinctions were no longer made? The answer is ‘no-thing’, or the ‘One’. All the “things” he had previously seen, heard, felt and otherwise sensed through his physical senses, would remain unchanged but they would no longer be set out against one another creating what we agree upon as reality. No-thing is all things; everything (every thing), contained in the body of the "One". To complicate things even more, at this point in our recognition of the meaning of "Oneness," a name is no longer useful and it too must be jettisoned. This is because there would be nothing to compare to this "All-Without-An-Other" and since everything is all-inclusive in this "One", a name is no longer necessary.
      Let’s try an experiment to help clarify my point. Say we’re sitting in a coffee shop in front of a large window beyond which is the objective world and we are not part of it. We are just viewing what is beyond the glass barrier as if looking out the window of a space ship and it is not our world; it is an alien world we have never seen before. As observers, or aliens to this world, all the things we now see and recognize, we do not recognize. Ok, come on stretch yourself. If I can imagine it, you can too.
      Let’s assume for our experiment that what we are seeing is as follows. At the very bottom of the window opening there is an asphalt drive that goes across right to left in front of us (or left to right depending on your point of view). As we move up the window we see a cement sidewalk, then a two lane street, and beyond that another sidewalk, all forming horizontal lines across our view. This accounts for the lower half of our picture and the remaining top portion is filled in by a wooded area with evergreen trees, bushes and other types of multicolored plants and trees. In the center a dirt path connects the sidewalk beyond the two lane street to a small, red, wooden cabin situated in the longitudinal center and the latitudinal top of our picture.
      If I have described this scene adequately you have a picture of it in your mind, and can imagine it as it is without naming each individual thing mentioned. Since this scene is of an unfamiliar planet all that we see is…what? We don’t have words for all the things I’ve mentioned. I was able to mentally paint this picture for you only because we agree on the names of the objects I placed in the scene.
      Being from another planet we’re without benefit of these names, we don’t know what any of these objects are. We don’t even have the names of colors, up and down or left and right for direction, or any of the objects noted. We are not privy to anything except the raw data observed through the window. Again, we don’t have names or functions for anything we see.
      In our little experiment it is important to recognize that the scene itself is not altered when we move into our imaginary position as alien; the scene remains exactly the same. So imagine you are this alien and answer these questions. Are there still beautiful and ugly objects? What exactly do you see in this now alien scene? A collage of sorts? An abstract of raw data perhaps? The scene itself doesn’t change when we drop our words for particular things, colors, or directions. Everything remains exactly the same and yet to us it’s not the same any more, is it? One minute we are looking at a coherent scene made up of a multitude of distinguishable, identified parts, and the next minute we have no clue whatsoever to what it is we’re seeing. Would I think a perfectly formed evergreen was beautiful if I didn’t know what a tree was? How would I determine that a red house is ugly or beautiful, if "red" and "house" are not objects of my world?
      If there were no human beings in this world what would remain? Did you say the world “as it is?” That’s right - suchness. Without the human mind there are not things as they are named but, things just as they are; is-ness, the One. So without the process of discriminating thought there would be No-thing. But wait, is that actually right? Would there really be no-thing? Remember I didn’t say nothing; I said "no-thing."
      There would be no individual things apart from others, which means there would be all-things…in Oneness. This is the meaning of Emptiness of Zen.

Thoughts on Emptiness

      Emptiness generally refers to a negative; an empty place. We don’t do well with negatives. They represent not having; a nothing which carries no value and value is usually given only to things that have substance. I wrestled with statements that described all things as empty. It seemed to defy logic. If it is a thing, how can it be empty of an essence, or core something, that made it substantial and solid as it seems to be?
      What could be meant by the statement, the self is empty”? If the self is what I mean by me then would that not be equivalent to saying that I do not exist? Or does it mean that this entity called self doesn’t exist? And if so doesn’t that lead me back to my own non-existence? But how could that be if I’m sitting here typing? Troubling questions to be sure.
      I remember those early months and years of toying with this idea of no self and finding myself puzzled and yet strangely believing that it was true; but how so? I just didn’t get it. The lucky thing for me was that I didn’t just dismiss this idea like I had so often in my life when I came upon something I wasn’t prepared to understand. My pattern was to simply judge it as wrong and dismiss it on the unconscious premise that if I didn’t understand it, it just wasn’t true. I came to realize later, after allowing for the fact that I might not be emotionally or intellectually prepared to understand some things, that if I just put these ideas up on a shelf somewhere in the back of my mind, I might grow into them.
      Somehow I knew this idea represented thinly veiled truths that spoke to me, and I just needed to give myself time. What a liberating thing it was to have done. It allowed be to suspend disbelief until I had gathered enough perspective to see some things differently. There is a character named Adrian in the foreign film Lucia, Lucia who, in awe of a beautiful semi-arid landscape, says to his friends, “A true journey of discover isn’t about changing our surroundings but about changing the way we see.”
      At some point my way of seeing changed and I was enlightened to the fact that emptiness refers to every aspect of our universe. The solidity and substance of the objects of our senses are the result of our mind. As I have stated earlier, this is due to the electrochemical processes that determine what we are capable of seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling. All the seemingly substantial objects in our lives are, in their concrete form, empty of anything that is unique to them alone.
      All things arise in a dependency with others and while it appears that the table is solid we find upon very close inspection that it is empty of anything other than a co-emergence of raw data and our sensation of it. Thus emptiness actually speaks to a dependent-arising of all things, as well as the absence of any one thing that is the core constituent of the desk upon which I write, the food that I eat, or any of the seemingly solid things that are processed through my senses.
      Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. This is one of the Zen statements that relates not only to the thing we refer to as self but to everything we experience as well. Emptiness is the natural condition of all things in that it is an ever changing amalgam of all there is inside and outside of our world of form. Form is the result of our sense organs and the narrow scope of their ability to process raw data. Once again it points us directly to the fact that we create the illusion of our solid world through the operation of our senses. Emptiness is the absence those discreet aspects which we believe constitute the body of individual things and at the very same time points us to the wholeness or connectivity of all things in the One.
      If nature were an organism and were able to see itself, it would recognize itself in total; a completeness, containing all the varied forms that we create through sensory discrimination of raw data (experience) plus all that we are not privy to based on the biochemical entity that we are. An entity severely limited in its ability to process the data available in the universe. See the previous post titled The Mind and Emptiness, and the mind experiment therein.
      Emptiness is a statement about the universe and ourselves that is upstream of the limited ability we have to translate raw data into recognizable sensation. Our universe of things, or form, is empty of discreet entities that reference the name we have given what we perceive. Form is the partial truth we comprehend with our senses, when in fact its real nature is “Oneness.” The One that has no need of name - for nothing is left out - and this totality denies a comparison. We are part of that One…but only a part. And it is when I acquired the new way to see the meaning of Emptiness that I was able to see myself as but a part of the great mystery of life.
      Maintaining a loving and compassionate perception of the world is important and it’s my responsibility. It requires my constant attention to the truth of Emptiness. It is the manifestation of what might be referred to as a Divine Principle. A principle that embraces all things as part of the single process that supports all that we know about the world - and so much more that we are unable to understand. Meditation allows me to touch those quiet moments when this truth shines clear and bright upon my path.

The Three Shuns

      For much of my life I lived with what I now refer to as the three “Shuns;” Illusion, Delusion, and Confusion. I can’t account for the reason, but from an early age I operated under the Illusion that I pretty much knew all that was important to know. I have vivid memory of a moment in my young life that might have been a lodestar of the adult I would someday be. I was not yet in kindergarten and standing at the door of my parent’s apartment looking through the screen door onto the back hallway. Our apartment was at the end of the hall which angled inward to a point. This made the south wall of our neighbor’s apartment our northern wall. My parents were good friends with these people so neither was disturbed by the other’s sound of living.
      I was clutching a small bow and arrow, now considered at worst a relic and a collectible at best; at one end a rubber suction cup in place of an arrow head and at the other, feathers mutilated from childhood abuse. When the lady next door came out of her apartment and bent down to say hello, I raised my weapon as though I was going to shoot her, imagining myself I’m sure, the brave renegade warrior of radio fame I'd heard about the night before. Kindly, she explained that I had the weapon backwards and that I would shoot myself if I were to persist in my feigned attack. I distinctly recall looking at the way I was holding the bow and realized she was correct but even at that age I refused to give in to the evidence. I stood my ground and shook my head in disapproval. I couldn’t be persuaded to admit my error. And so it would be, the die was cast; I was always right, never mind evidence to the contrary. Lie to you, to myself if I must, but never admit defeat.
      I also convinced myself throughout my early years that I wasn’t afraid of anything. (An exception perhaps were those small fuzzy, or long legged, creatures that skittered faster than my feet could stomp) And there was the notion that somehow life would always unfold as I wished. I've never quite been able to relinquish those childhood illusions.
      If illusions like these are held to tight for too long, they solidify into Delusions; and they have more impact on behavior. One such long held illusion that achieved crystalline form was that I could control the havoc created by my illusions if I just thought about it long and hard enough. Someone, or some thing inside my head, would whisper that my success, defined of course as the way I wanted things to be, was impeded only by other people. If I used my head and drank just enough I would surely find that moment of true enlightenment when all the answers would become clear to me. Not too much; just enough to see through the initial fog of indecision and those troublesome needs of others.
      And finally there was a level of Confusion that grew steadily as long as I pushed on, forever self-assured of this power. It came as a great shock when I realized this confusion was a result of my belief that it was others who needed to change and that in fact, there was no change unless it was my own. I fought hard against this insight and tested it fully to be sure of its validity. But I see now that once the first crack in my armor appeared, the “shuns” were destined for the recycle bin.
      Many years later I came to realize more fully that nothing changes unless I do. Slowly the confusion lessened as I began to trust that my life would unfold perfectly if I were but to accept it, as it is. As I relinquished my childhood illusions I was able to see that fear formed the base of their need to exist. I began to see that living a fearless life was not about being without fear, but rather to living in spite of the fear. And in time I began to see that I could trust that all would be well in the end. That fear would surely be part of my journey, but merely as a piece of baggage that needed to be carried until it disappeared through honest self appraisal and action based on love and concern for others, rather than self.
      As my trust grew stronger I realized that the need for control was just another illusion; a cold, solitary cell, the key to which I alone possessed. And then one day it seemed that it had all but disintegrated. Poof! Like ephemeral particles of a bad dream, the confusion of many years faded into the soft sky of a spacious, open mind.
      I have relapses into that self imposed incarceration even today, but they are but fleeting reflections of what it was like in the past. I find that to the degree that I forsake regular meditation, I increase my chances of once again giving fear the upper hand. It’s a mind cluttered with inane, daily minutiae, grasping after pleasure and pain-free living that becomes blinded to the trust required to find peace. Sometimes all it takes is the length of a red light in traffic for me to return to that open mind-space where all is well in spite of what I might think or imagine I need. Meditation is one very important key to the cell door where I held myself prisoner, and upon those walls are etched the regrets of many years. However a simple key releases me each day, to renew my freedom and continue to build my trust.