Fragmenting…

…the Unfragmentable

Before emptiness sundered into lo these many selves all was peace

It turns out that Emptiness and Ego-Less-Ness are pretty much the same. Strip away all the barriers between you and me, between the ant and the buffalo, between the moon and the sun, between one water molecule and the next, between one galaxy and the next, between…

There is no darkness. There is but will. No earth, no star, no sky and all is still. The Upanishads named it Brahman, this pre-dawn nothingness, the many, many post-dawn shards of which they called individual Atmans.

The Buddha called it Sunyata (Emptiness).

Emptiness is one of (especially Mahayana) Buddhism’s major doctrines, much bandied about. Though it is safe to say, as Guy Armstrong so cleverly points out in his wonderful Emptiness, A Practical Guide for Meditators, it is a word not designed to attract newcomers. But then he goes on to say, “Many of those who have practiced the Buddha’s teaching on emptiness regard it as the greatest gift he offered the world.”

As I have come to understand emptiness (admittedly a work in progress), the beautiful thing about it is that it is not empty. Yes, empty of all things material, even of all things mental, and perhaps even of all things spiritual (at least as to individual spirits); but it is not empty of potential, or of will (pretty much the same thing). It has always existed — since it exists beyond time — and always will exist.

What I have pondered a lot of late and still find myself no nearer to really grasping, is, as I put it in a recent Wolfku (a Wolfku, by the way, is a Haiku written by a Wolf; it is always seventeen syllables long though not in the traditional 7–5–7 format):

I am an impossible — a fragment of the unfragmentable

(See, seventeen syllables)

For, really, how do you fragment an emptiness, a pure will, a sheer potential? There is nothing there to fragment.

How do you create separateness when there is no space to separate, when there are no barriers at hand to interpose? How do we wind up me seeing you and you seeing me and not all seeing itself?

Surely, this must be the cleverest trick ever played by anyone, anywhere, and the trickster still keeps very much mum about it.

The Buddha said that the very wellspring of our long journey in Samsara (aka suffering) is Ignorance. I believe that this is the very ignorance he’s talking about: Our not knowing how “we” in fact did (and successfully at that) manage to fragment the unfragmentable.

But surely we have all tasted (if even in a diluted version) this emptiness, this evaporating of barriers interposed between. I think of love, of true love where one soul melts into the other and vice versa. Where there is no telling where you end and he or she begins. No borders. It is possible. It is experienceable.

It is true.

And it is lovely. I know it is lovely. You know it is lovely — and I use that word advisedly, love as adverb, love as the ultimate feeling.

Imagine all barriers evaporated, leaving only undelimited (aka limitless) love. The ant loving the buffalo. The moon loving the sun. Water loving itself.

I think another word for that would be Nirvana.

© Wolfstuff

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