Monday, December 27, 2004
An emptiness that is so full...
That emptiness you feel is ok. That empty feeling is healthy, spiritually. It’s ok to feel empty when you’ve achieved your goals. Empty is open. Empty is open to the next lesson. If life is a question, empty is the clue toward the answer we never quite reach.
And still we fill the empty with things and worries and goals and schedules and counterfeit answers. We disguise the empty with the illusory. But the lesson lies in the fact that the illusions always crumble and decay and yield the empty. Our journeys always lead us back to this place. When we finally achieve our goal and remove our blinders, we find we’ve come full circle and haven’t gotten any further from the familiar shores of emptiness.
I say the shores of emptiness because the whole of the empty is like an infinite sea. Most of us fear it and doubt our ability to find anything in it, due to its empty appearance. The shores are threatening, but if we have made the circuitous but ultimately fruitless journey on the hard ground enough times, some of us get wise or reckless or desperate and we dive into these calm open waters and feel the paradoxical warmth fill us.
We find that an empty sea can be pretty damned deep, and full in a different way than the cold hard dirt. And we never go back, for we’ve seen through the first all-important illusion: we’ve learned to learn. We’ve learned to walk with awareness and see that an appearance of progress isn’t progress at all if it takes us in circles and makes us feel unhappy. We’ve learned to leap with an intuitive faith into the silent, empty, open sea. We look over at the shore and see it for what it is- a humility and wisdom teaching mind game in the shape of a maze disguised as a world, continually changing to meet the next move of the student. In the the freedom of the empty full sea, we learn to swim and eventually to dissolve into the truth of an infinite idea.
And still we fill the empty with things and worries and goals and schedules and counterfeit answers. We disguise the empty with the illusory. But the lesson lies in the fact that the illusions always crumble and decay and yield the empty. Our journeys always lead us back to this place. When we finally achieve our goal and remove our blinders, we find we’ve come full circle and haven’t gotten any further from the familiar shores of emptiness.
I say the shores of emptiness because the whole of the empty is like an infinite sea. Most of us fear it and doubt our ability to find anything in it, due to its empty appearance. The shores are threatening, but if we have made the circuitous but ultimately fruitless journey on the hard ground enough times, some of us get wise or reckless or desperate and we dive into these calm open waters and feel the paradoxical warmth fill us.
We find that an empty sea can be pretty damned deep, and full in a different way than the cold hard dirt. And we never go back, for we’ve seen through the first all-important illusion: we’ve learned to learn. We’ve learned to walk with awareness and see that an appearance of progress isn’t progress at all if it takes us in circles and makes us feel unhappy. We’ve learned to leap with an intuitive faith into the silent, empty, open sea. We look over at the shore and see it for what it is- a humility and wisdom teaching mind game in the shape of a maze disguised as a world, continually changing to meet the next move of the student. In the the freedom of the empty full sea, we learn to swim and eventually to dissolve into the truth of an infinite idea.
