Helix of awareness,
conduit of consciousness.
From the original,
via fontanelle.
Astral source to mental river,
sentience a fractal mirror.
False belief in two,
deduction askew.
Illusion of separation,
errors in perception.
Tag: nothingness.
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ascetic.
Wandering and
wondering.
Empty belly, full heart.
Full days, empty schedule.
The flub-flub of flip-flops.
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chai.
The near-full Moon lay down lunar light all over the arid landscape. It gave everything a milky tone, sharply contrasting with the midnight blue shadows, which ran from the Moon’s gaze. Low shrubs and rolling rocky meadows dominated the plateau here, all bound tight under the Milky Way above—a convex strip seemingly securing the serene night sky. With the scene barely varying in its tone of sparse monotony, he decided to press on until dawn encroached on the horizon.
With the slender fingers of a new day beginning to filigree the morning sky, he acknowledged it was time to pause and set up camp. The hobbled camels made a fuss, as they always do. It was understandable, he empathised with their collective animosity. Several bellowed in contempt, then others signalled their approval of this disapproval with long low lamentations.
As the Moon sunk lower, he began to gather nearby scrub to start a fire. Once the orange flickers had warmed his fingers, he set a brass teapot right into the flames. Covered in dents and scratches—a knowing, a world-weary patina—he had carried it with him for at least a decade now. A small handful of leaves were retrieved from a tin tucked away in a pair of saddlebags slung across an unhappy camel. Boiling water ricocheted inside teapot, the steam announcing that tea was soon to follow. Easily he held the teacup in his hand, holding it up level with the horizon, and directed the spout towards the vessel’s waiting lip. Deliberately he sipped, savouring the smokey essence; a flavour that seemed to transcend time, as if tinged with the experiences of centuries past.
Using the sleeve of his flannel shirt, he wiped the last vestiges of tea from his beard. Kicking away a few of the larger rocks, he laid down a small, intricate yet well-loved rug—the oasis towns in the area were famed for their textiles and carpets—on a flat area of red earth. His tired legs effortlessly lowered him, and then crossed themselves in front of him. As if almost to steady himself—physically, yes; but more importantly, metaphysically—he anchored his palms squarely over his knees. He paused; then emptied his lungs of their last remnants of oxygen. Again he paused, before closing his eyes, and ever so slowly inhaling. As he gently opened his eyes, his vision was filled with the innumerable stars above, though bit-by-bit they were being consumed by dawn’s light. Like a silhouette burned into the eyes from too bright a light, the Milky Way was seared across the sky; though ghostly, two-dimensional. His thinking gradually faded—the cogs of thought, the constant clockwork of analysis, grinding to a halt under the immense presence of the cobalt half-dome overhead. A laminar flow of awareness spiralled upward—inward—into space, into nothingness.
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medusa.
A liquid desert. Oases of life here and there; upwellings of plankton, balls of baitfish, the corpse of a recently-passed whale offering up a feast to other ocean-dwellers. Above and beyond, mellow dunes of waves, blue as far as the eye of the albatross can see. However, there are itinerants, adventurers, those wandering beyond the enclaves and safe harbours of life. Seabirds, sharks, cetaceans, searchers, and scavengers looking for lunch.
Bobbing in an ocean gyre that initially generated strength on the other side of the planet, the gelatinous giant was amorphous under the water, suspended from gravity. Its bell pulsated rhythmically while flecks of blue, ruby, citrine, and indigo were visible amongst the tangle of its trailing tentacles—some many metres long—their ends unseen, beyond the visibility of the open ocean. Embodying surrender, its direction, diet, and desires at the whims of the ocean, accepting things as they come, and go. Apotheosis of ebb and flow. Unburdened by a thinking mind—beyond the grip of of thinking’s manufactured past and future—it experiences all at once; and yet is deathless—a moment-to-moment time traveller, free to roam, unshackled from temporality. Oblivious to an illusion of control, it wanders wherever the ocean sees fit. Sailing both time and space, unimpeded.
For aeons it meanders, having witnessed infinite dawns, each more beautiful, more alluring that the last. Clouds speed over head, while decades pass with equal abandon. Mountains form, impermanent things—all things—return to dust. Change; yet there is no measurement, no desired state, nothing not as it shouldn’t be. Nothing outside of now. Following the currents and winds, as it did yesterday and the day before and the centuries before than.
In the now, everything is as it is.
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0>1
Nothing lasts—an acknowledgement of the way of things, the indefatigable efforts of entropy. Desires, aversions, feelings, thoughts, opinions—all fleeting, lost eventually to the fading memories of time. Yet, knowing this, we still place such importance, such vehemence, upon these things; conveniently forgetting they are impermanent, yet our lust for permanence is insatiable.
Decision by decision, brick by brick, we build lives on shifting sands, sandcastles to be washed away in the tide. Thoughts—despite being constructed in ephemera, the past and future—appear as fact, monoliths of truth, add the illusion of control and safety to an existence that contains neither. And so we masquerade—peacock-like charades of how successful, how beautiful, how intelligent, how kind we are, while internally our thoughts and emotions churn amongst the uncertainty.
Paradoxically, contentment can be found in the nothing—beyond thoughts, decisions, preferences. For in the present—absent of past and future—anxiety, doubt, fear, separation of self, cannot exist without anything to cling to; without an imagined remnant of the past or an imagined glimmer of the future. In this sense, nothing really is greater than something. In the nothingness—the great suspended unknowing of mind before thought exists—is the abode of contentment.
There is no thing greater than nothing.
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vessel.
Old frail fingers raise a tea cup to the weak light of the morning—a bony tripod, fingertips tenderly rotating the vessel; all the better to admire the colours, cracks, patina. The worn and wabi sabi in all of its perfect, imperfect beauty. Chips and cracks call to mind memories and stories, while patches of buffed glaze highlight preferences, familiar spots of fingers and palms. Black lacquer a mirror to the morning light, slicing as it was through the crisp air. It could be said that many things define the tea cup—both this one, and all cups. Material, colour, shape, texture… Consider for a moment, however, what it is not. It is not solid. Arguably, a feature of all vessels is their hollowness, their utility tied to their ability to be filled, to hold myriad liquids or trinkets, materials or miscellanea. Similarly, one measure of a mind is its ability to hold things; ideas and intricacies, patterns and possibilities. And of all of Nature’s vessels, the mind has the ability to hold the greatest variety of things—the number and scope of which are limited only by imagination.
The grassy notes of green tea fill the air, a laminar flow of hot tea connects teapot to tea cup. After the cup is completely filled—not one drop more able to be balanced on top—the worn hands set the teapot down, gently and with reverence. A vessel that is not empty is no longer a vessel—it has become a storage apparatus. Unable to be filled, it has abandoned its function. A full mind is like a full tea cup—unable to hold anything more, unable to function as a vessel, unable to function as a mind. A vessel must be emptied, as is its purpose.
After taking one long sip, downing the hot fragrant tea in one mouthful, the lacquered cup was set down gently on a heavy wooden table. An empty vessel is also the epitome of potential, of almost countless possibilities, being able to hold whatever is found across the breadth of time and space. Potential in its emptiness. So, too, an empty mind—the shimmering radiance of the Sun reflecting around in an old ceramic glaze.
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possibilities.
Nothingness; the source, pure potential of all that has been, all that could become. Nothingness is available to every sentient mind; mindfulness and presence pull back the veil of our conceptual mind, revealing that thought, time, the separation of I and other, and myriad assumptions and opinions, are nothing but fallacies.
That nothingness, the great time—the infinite moment in time before the machination of neurons concoct another thought—is the abode of awareness, beyond the prisons of past and future, as these can only live in memory and imagination; tools of the conceptual mind. Nothingness, or awareness, or mushin, is a state of possibilities, a state still yet to settle on a decision, to forge information; every thought, every categorisation, every memory, every imagined point in the future, still in limbo. Not until the wavefunction of thought collapses do we see a decision—something discernible, information—the emergence of ephemeral entities like ideas, memories, and time.
To be mindful, present, in sadhana, is to sit in an experience of the superposition—all possibilities—of thoughts, an experience of the primordial nothingness before the dawn of time, a precursor to a Big Bang of thoughts. And like the cosmological Big Bang, which pried open existence, so, too, this wavefunction collapse to a single thought, a single decision, creates existence—the moment-to-moment existence of concepts and ideas. And yet, these concepts and ideas are annihilated at the next moment of mindfulness. Information is created, destined to be lost to the Universe.
The dichotomy of thought is that at once it is the wellspring of all concepts, all ideas, and yet also the death knell of the thing we humans prize above all else, peace. What is and what is not; what could be and what is not; division of self and other; categorisation of good, bad, and otherwise; so desperate to be true and correct, until shown to be temporary, annihilated at the next point of mindfulness.
And for peace to once again return, in the ceasing of information and concepts; the great time.
