IS NOTHING SACRED?
Nothingness bursts with Love, bursts forth into expression and outpictures as the entire universe, in accordance with the way of its own nature, simply.
The universe is the effulgence, the corona of the divine No Thingness.
The Womb
“Poets searching the wisdom of their own hearts have found the pledge of existence within non-existence”---The Rig Veda (X, 129). We Hindus call this eternal womb The Milk Ocean.
Principle: Holy Nothingness births this world from Itself in infinite Love, unfolding as a playing field in which to love and be loved. So that’s why we have a world. In our multitude of forms, we’re confined yet defined, able to play, to share in every way.
We’re always in the original Place and Time, which is our divine Consciousness, the only activity and substance. So our “journey” is a transformation of awareness.
888
On Buddha’s Middle Path, Existence joins up with non-existence.
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A new invention creates quiet by intermeshing its sound with a disturbing noise. Just so, the primal “silence” is a unity, and also an amalgam where both halves of fundamental paradoxes are running. You/Me, Body/Mind, Empty/Full, Nothing/Everything, Huge/Tiny, Here/Everywhere, Now/Forever, Life/Death, Objective/Subjective---We meet both halves of them at once in meditation, complementary, fusing, making the ineffable W/hole. |  |
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Meditative stillness moves. Being, Nothingness, circles in the Tao. Earth is immovable and flying through space. Some physicists say that near the axis a wheel spins so rapidly, it’s still. At the quick, we’re so tranquil we’re always progressing. |  |
I Am filled full, a plenum. Nothingness is totally filled. With what? With indivisible Beingness. This Beingness likewise is unity, unassailable peace, living substance, abidingness, reality, unlimited infinity and awesome simplicity. Dimensionlessness contains many-dimensional, perfectly harmonious symmetry. It’s the constant humble Consciousness everywhere. Above all, Beingness loves totally, totally incorporating every being As Its very self, holding us each very close, safe and secure as It Is.
I will never leave you nor forsake you. I have loved you with an everlasting love. You are home in Me.
I am burgeoning activity showing forth our primary being, absolute simplicity of Nothingness sufficing to compose the universe, our substance and songs.
Seeing through: Nothingness, the secret Identity of Beingness.
Being outpictures while remaining beyond form. It was never started, but It always Is, and always Is no thing. Being is Nothingness. Within the Is Not, Being Is. If nothing exists, then Nothing Exists. “It Is.”
All Is One, One Is None, None Is All
God is the stuff, the reality reflected palely in our idea of nothingness: always here, inherently here, not having to be created; symmetrical; outside of the limits of form, unified, inviolable, the one without a second---all of this the opposite of appearance, and fearsome to our ego. Whole, hole. Excess of yang turns to yin: Supra-form is perceived also as non-form; being all-embracing and paradoxical, nothing is excluded from It.
In our darkest hours, we never again need fear that this God is non-existent, or unavailable, or destructive, when we become acquainted with our Beloved in receptive prayer.
G_d. Some write this way to show the ineffable nature of our source. The missing letter is “O”, zero, beyond limits, holy No Thingness, the secret truth. We could write Pe_ple, the unsounded hidden “O” our inner unknown Self.
Nothingness is limitless.
The Limitless is no thing and the Limitless points in Allways.
The Boundless forever flows out abundantly. The Boundless can never be bound, pinned down, importuned, threatened, compromised or obligated. We all try these familiar standbys, while the Self lovingly waits for us to just let Its freely given grace drench us.
888
While the Beyond Form balances, It’s progressing too, Being Is Becoming. Two sides of one process: We’ll first symbolize our evenness by a globe or wave, then we’ll later picture our ever-expanding evolution as a circle swinging wide into a spiral, a sine wave growing into the caduceus.
How to Make a Big Deal Out of Nothing: A Training Manual
Two fundamental shapes, that can conveniently illustrate things for us, are among the myriad metaphorical building blocks of the appearance world. Arising inherently out of the nature of No Thingness, the surround: Circle and sine wave.
The circle or ball is the essence of symmetrical balancing-out, of the Beyond-form seen as first a dimensionless dot, then a zero, then boundlessness. Subatomic particles, elliptical orbits, stars and planets. Then sine waves slink around a necklace of the globes.
A serpent of sine waves, the balancing up-and-down shape of every type of energy wave, the first suggestion of a play of complementary opposites.
An endless concatenation of worlds within worlds, or worlds following in sequence, is nothing more or less than our present realization of this reverberating sine wave that emanates from No Thingness.
So we Hindus tell a myth of universes that expand and contract, growing and dying one after another. This is also the tale of succeeding human generations writ large. This passage from parent to child among all living things is indeed a device to create something out of “nothing,” out of the eternal existence beyond metaphor, definition or shape.
The rise and decline of lives, and of everything in nature, benefits from the mechanism of the sine wave, a balance of plus and minus that permits zero, “nothing,” to be “something.” Looking at the broad picture, Beloved, you too may enjoy this metaphor.
This waving also serves as camouflage making it easier to believe the world can exist, while still ultimately begging the question, how could the universe begin?
How Indeed?
How could the Universe begin? Did it ever begin? Science sees arguments for either a big bang or an eternally steady state, because the mind can have it either way.
The first answer: The universe hasn’t yet begun. We move unborn in a dream world which all ways cancels out. The wheel of karma, good and bad occurrences, equal and opposite reactions, birth and death. A zero sum game.
All the world’s a staging area. We are incipient, as yet unborn. We first find the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh in a packed sheepfold, and later meet David with the sheep too. The sheepcote represents the womb. Egypt was anciently named “The Narrows,” and the “firstborn” Israelites seek delivery from Egypt.
After death, when some people report going through a narrow black tunnel, we’re shown the as yet unborn state of this world.
The second answer, equally true and the complement of the first response: The universe is always “beginning,” always existent, newly in this only moment now. Just as Nothingness always exists, Nothingness is always coming into expression. This is its nature, for Nothingness is unimpeded and we live out each possibility of omnifertile Nothing.
When we say God exists “before” the universe, it’s just like saying we put the horse “before” the cart, or have no god “before” Me. We give the first order of importance and primacy to the Divine, but it’s not really a case of God’s prior arrival. This underlying spiritual level of Consciousness exists only right here and now.
By the same token, the great completion of this questioning, gestating, suffering human interim always exists, already exists.
While we need to organize our experience into the sequence of birth, history and redemption, God always emanates and God always Really Is.
888
The Basketball Game
Once in college, I went to a basketball game. High above us a huge banner proclaimed “Coach Brown’s 500th Victory.” As the pack of players ran up and down from one end of the court to the other, vitally and three dimensionally, the pun became clear: The opposing teams were actually working together to create the rhythm of life, and victory lay in the .500 percentage of back-and-forth between the opposites. Stripping back their team spirit, I saw the surrounding audience become flattened and jellied, the divine Nothingness, witnessing the playing of the universe of relations, observing with an irreversible choiceless choice, a volitionless will to roll forward.
The Bell Curve
Everything tends to the neutral. This is seen in every sort of human characteristic. Whether it’s height, IQ, or opinions, almost everyone gathers around the middle, like bees in winter huddled together in the hive to keep warm. Human reality is a consensus reality. Objects retain their forms because we all agree they do. So a person is near the center in most regards; each of us shoots to an extreme in some ways, since everyone equally undertakes a special mission.
Army ants surge round in a vortex like a washing machine until some few are thrown out from the perimeter. Then everybody follows them. So those few of us who gain spiritual vision are no better or worse, just put out here as a function of the whole.
Pulling the Rabbit Out of the Hat
The long round black hole is at the head, the origin of things. By a magic trick, a mystery, the Easter bunny is birthed, the sign of multiplying life.
Seeing a blue sky so brilliant it pierces through sleepy closed eyelids, and therefore slowly opening the eyes---is this world such a dream preparing us for birth?
888
A good verse to contemplate: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” The earth says: Heaven shows what was, is, and will be. The heaven says: In our rising awareness on earth, we actualize and embody the design of life. Forgiving our suffering, we open the gate and find we are already heaven on earth.
B’rasheit, “In the beginning,” can also be translated as “In a beginning.” The organizing of the universe is a dramatic step in a process, like freezing and boiling points, like changing levels of awareness. God is ever-active, was and shall be ever-active---beyond the limits of human metaphors, was, is, and shall be, all meeting together.
When we read afresh the first verse of the Genesis poem, we see that “the Earth was without form and void” from everlasting, with the flood of deep waters which (as in many myths) is already here, before the act of “creation”. “The earth without form and void” eternally Is, since Nothing Exists, always. The birth of form expressing It is always happening, one process. Evening, then morning, make the first day.
The beginning is painted in Genesis as the differentiating into the waters below and the waters above, into dark and light. “Division” means double vision.
Ocean and sky, we are told, are but two poles of the waters.
The sea is sky blue
The sky is sea blue
I’m standing on my head
And never knew
Sometimes we see that a line forms between areas in the water---Nothingness differentiating itself.
Forms merge and emerge from clear formless stream
in the unbeheld light all sights are seen
Light is clear and contains all colors. The wind (spiritus, ruach), invisible and tasteless, provides the voice of profound stillness, and lifts us up when we fly, life-supporting, communicating and enveloping. Water too is clear, shapeless, tasteless, scentless, and is the building material of all bodies. Since everything outpictures the Beyond-form, metaphors are paradoxical, we can call either Sky or Sea the primal source of the changing world. Air can be seen as the transmuted yang counterpart of the uncreated water, No Thingness dividing and then relating, like the twisty lazy eight of infinity.
How God works: Looking at the globe, it expands evenly from the ineffable Allness within, the center spot inside dimension, and the circular shape is intuitively worshiped in varied trappings. God is the Nothingness we mistakenly feared, and God Is Allways Being, totally constant and caring.
The shining floors of Solomon’s palace fool the Queen of Sheba into thinking they’re water (The Qur’an). We crystallize the mutable waters into the sense of stable concreteness in this universe, and then release back again to flow. Om mani padme hum: Om is the jewel at the center of the lotus which is my heart. Ultimately we return, enriched and renewed, amidst hosts of Sacred Relationships within Oneness, to know our origin in pure Consciousness, saying “Thank you,” and receiving the reply, “Oh, it was Nuthin’.”
