"AN EMPTINESS OF BEING"Published on October 4, 2014
Here is a little poem that popped out this morning, one that I want to discuss with someone, so please humor me.
SEMANTICS
It's not just that being,
Is empty;
It's that there is,
An emptiness,
Of being.
It's never been there.
-- October 4, 2014
Notes: Some time ago now I was given the suggestion by a lama that I respect that I might consider looking at this world as an illusion, like a dream I am having. This is a common suggestion in many dharma texts, but this particular lama made a big point of asking me personally to do this. OK, I have given it a bit of a go and, yeah, this world gets thin, even dreamy at times, for sure some kind of an illusion. I've had this thought on a back burner for a while, but not applied a lot of heat.
All of this time I may have been focusing on understanding the emptiness side of the equation (i.e. being is empty), when perhaps it makes more sense to consider being "AND" emptiness and note that our being may be running on empty, as in: "being" is not (and never has been) there really that much, if at all. That's a twist.
I believe some ancient philosophy tells us that "Our being is in becoming." Well, becoming is not being or not very much being. Looking forward to being; looking back on being. Where and when is just the plain being? Perhaps we never really get there at all. I wrote a longish poem about this years ago called "The Point of No Return." One of my closest friends told me it was not very good, as if that is why I wrote it. It was about the esoteric Sun as the Prime of Life, a huge illusion.
Anyway, this little poem above seems to be the universe's answer, at least for now, to my question. I am not saying this poem is dharmic or that you can read about it in the literature. I am not worried about that. I am just saying that I looked into the mind for quite a while and this is what came out.
The poem is kind of a reverse on what we ordinarily are told, that "being is emptiness." I can read the words, but am not always sure I get all that much sense or meaning out of them, so here I am flipping it, and it makes more sense.
In this poem I am just saying that because being is emptiness, which the dharma points out too (whatever that means), that we may suffer from an emptiness of being. And all this says is that being has always been empty, and never been full. We have never had a "full" being, because it does not exist. Being has always been less than full, verging on empty, or as I phrase it here: we have (and perhaps suffer from) an "emptiness of being." It has always been thin, like a hologram, you know, barely here. It has never been there, so neither have we.
For me this just puts a better spin on it, one that registers somewhere inside without a whole lot of thinking having to go on by me.
Modern astrophysics is sort of saying the same thing when they tell us that the universe is 99% empty. I believe they say that only 0.0000000000000000000042 percent of the universe contains any matter. The rest is empty of anything. Isn't that kind of saying the same thing I am pointing out here, that our great emptiness may be a problem?
Could we be suffering from too much emptiness? Is that the elephant in the room?
Isn't that what everyone worries about,
the emptiness?