Tag: nothingness.

• 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.

  2026.07.05

• 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.

  2026.06.28