Empty, But Oh So Full

Tuesday Book Group

Hi Folks,

There is still room in the 5-week Zoom group I’ll be starting up on February 25th, exploring my new book, In Every Wave, the Entirety of the Sea. Meetings will be held on Tuesdays, 10 - 11:30 am Pacific time, and will run from Feb. 25th to April 1st (no meeting on 3/25). If interested, please email me at john@johnastin.com (no cost though donations are welcome).

EMPTY, BUT OH SO FULL

While there’s much talk in spiritual circles about getting oneself into the “present moment,” there isn’t really something we could even call, a moment, at least not one we could ever grasp hold of and know, “Oh, this is what the moment is.” And yet despite this, we have all these unbelievably complex and elaborate maps—scientific maps, philosophical maps, political maps, metaphysical/spiritual maps, and on and on it goes, books upon books describing this present reality that turns out to be here for no time at all. Now, isn't that amazing?

I was a social scientist for many years. Scientists are all about trying to figure out cause-effect relationships, endeavoring to understand what happens to one thing when another thing is present. Within what I call the seemingly describable world, it does seem that we can make certain predictions, like if I jump off of a building, and it's high enough, well, splat, I'm dead on the ground, the jumping having led to my demise. That all seems to be true and in one sense is. We seem to operate within those frames of reference that imply bodies and other objects in motion and in complex interrelationship with one another.

But there is another frame that can be discovered, one that reveals the impossibility of definitively mapping or rendering what’s here. How to realize this? By simply feeling the unstoppable flow and dynamism of life and seeing that what we imagine we’ve mapped is literally no longer here.

For example, if I were to read the words I’m writing right now out loud, the birth of those sounds would also be their death. The words being spoken would be disappearing, the very second they emerged from my mouth.

To be sure, this other frame I’m pointing to flies in the face of conventional, consensus reality. But it also flies in the face of much of what is spoken about in spiritual circles for none of things we hear about, like self-identity and grasping and believing in the mind’s narratives, and all the elaborate strategies to extricate ourselves from these seemingly problematic things we are somehow bound up in can be found since there are no findable things. In that sense, reality itself is already free of anything and everything because no things can be found to exist. From that perspective, there's nothing bound nor anything binding…

As an example, consider an experience we seem able to describe, like breathing. Take a few breaths and now tell me, what exactly is breathing made of? Can you determine what it is, its essence? Can you grasp hold of what makes the breath, the breath? Something is there, undoubtedly. But it’s impossible to pin down exactly what that is.

The bottom line is that what’s present literally transcends anything we could ever think about it.

Now ironically, the way to discover the transcendental nature of what’s here, the fact that what reality is cannot be determined, is to go to what's most concrete in experience. Don’t go to some abstraction, go to the feeling of the moment which is not an abstraction. It's here.

Take the sense of touch. It's palpable. Put your hand on something and feel what’s there. It's very concrete, right? Something is there. And yet, even though it’s clearly there, you can’t say what it is that’s there. That concrete feeling (of touch or breath or anything) is empty of essence in the sense that you cannot identify what it is. Paradoxically, even though it’s concretely present, it cannot be found because the minute you try to put your finger on what it is, it’s no longer there!

Strange as it may sound, the moment is simultaneously here but not here, existent but non-existent. What appears, appears vividly, as what we call body, mind, people, the world. Everything, vividly here and yet impossible to find, impossible to identify what it is and, in that sense, not here at all.

This is the “equalness” of everything sometimes spoken about in certain traditions. Even as everything appears different and distinct, it is all fundamentally equal in its infinite emptiness and un-findability.

At the same time, this emptiness is so full, full of all this apparent quality and texture and flavor and richness. It’s such a paradox that this rich appearance, in all its diversity and complexity and sometimes seemingly problematic nature, can't be pinned down as being anything in particular, even as it appears.

It's free—free of identity, free of name and label and description and map-ability. It just transcends all of it. And that's what we are. We are this transcendental infinity as is everything, and we are that period, without having to do anything for that is our nature.