Sunday, 13 December 2009

Emptiness

Suffering, whether physical or mental, is the result of negative deeds, words and thoughts - taking life, stealing, deceit, calumny, and so on.

Negative thoughts arise from cherishing and wanting to protect oneself, attitudes that flow naturally from the notion of a lasting and unique 'I'. The belief in a self as an independent entity is just one particular aspect of the reification of phenomena.

Recognizing that the self we're attached to isn't a truly existing entity, and dissolving our attachment to the substantiality of phenomena, it's possible to interrupt the vicious circle of suffering.

Such analysis leads to a knowledge which, for all that it's inner knowledge, has no less immense repercussions on our relationship with the outer world and the influence we have on it.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.113

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When I flowed out from God, all things declared, "God is!" Now this cannot make me blessed, for thereby I acknowledge myself a creature. But in the breakthrough I stand empty in the will of God, and empty also of God's will, and of all his works, even of God himself - then I am more than all creatures, then I am neither God nor creature: I am what I was, and that I shall remain, now and ever more!

Then I receive a thrust which carries me above angels. By this thrust I become so rich that God cannot suffice me, despite all that he is as God and all his godly works; for in this breakthrough I receive what God and I have in common.

I am what I was, I neither increase not diminish, for I am the unmoved mover that moves all things. Here God can find no more place in man, for man by his emptiness has won back that which he was eternally and ever shall remain.

[Meister Eckhart]
Meister Eckhart, p.221
Found in 'Psychology and the East' by Carl Gustav Jung, p.158-9

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Posted by Forever Becoming at 16:55

2 comments:

  1. The Original Nature

    There's been no fall, and there isn't any sin, there's only a forgetting of our original nature, a state of somnolence or amnesia.

    Once that nature's forgotten, a distinction between self and others appears, along with all the powerful ego-centred tendencies related to either attraction or repulsion that make negative emotions and intense suffering flare up.

    When you're not aware of the true nature of things, you believe in their apparent mode of existence. The duality between self and other, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, and so on, develops and triggers a whole chain reaction of negative mental factors.

    This is ignorance, and appears as a covering layer that conceals our true nature from us and makes us act in a way that goes against our deep nature. It's a deviation, like a mirage that attracts the mind toward what's harmful to ourselves and others.

    [Matthieu Ricard]
    The Monk and the Philosopher, p.204-5
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  2. There are experiences and disciplines which may help me to imagine what it would be like to have this habit of thought. Under LSD, I have experienced, as have many others, the disappearance of the division between self and the music to which I was listening.

    The perceiver and the thing perceived become strangely united into a single entity. This state is surely more correct than the state in which it seems that "I hear the music." The sound, after all, is Ding an sich[the thing itself], but my perception of it is a part of mind.

    William Blake [...] knew that the Poetic Imagination was the only reality. The poets have known these things all through the ages, but the rest of us have gone astray into all sorts of false reifications of the "self" and seperations between the "self" and "experience"

    [Gregory Bateson]
    Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.469
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