To readers of this series, the post below is the final chapter of the formal ‘book.’ There will be a a few following posts from here. And there will soon be a series of posts on a larger topic beyond the scope of what has already appeared. Beyond those, the future of this effort and the regularity of postings remains uncertain. If you have found benefit here, I am grateful for your presence and persistence. All of it has been a journey of revelation, contemplation, and expression.
From Zero to One:
The unity of emptiness and appearance as a single truth is a cognitive challenge. It defies logic, every rational inclination of anyone deeply conditioned by the world, which is all of us. Yet realizing how close the nondual view always is and opening into a quality of freedom inaccessible by any other means—except perhaps by psychedelics—is worth every gesture of cultivation. These two ways of knowing—the dual and nondual--do not negate each other so much as co-exist. Appearance and emptiness, not two and both true. Emptiness is intrinsic to appearance. Appearance is always an expression of emptiness.
We can bring this awareness into any situation to see and experience the totality and abundance of life’s every circumstance. To dwell in this perception is to wake up from the materialist illusion—even to the illusion of the individual. To comprehend the true meaning of emptiness is a brilliantly disruptive and liberating exercise. Although we can be entirely immersed in the material aspects of existence, the urgency of strong feeling, the minutiae of relationships, our ongoing personal dramas, the immense arc of karmic existence, health challenges, aging, social conditions, ecological collapse or even death, we are not inextricably anchored in that swirling matrix of distractions because it’s only one aspect of the whole story.
We stand perpetually and precariously on the threshold of a single truth, what CW Huntington called the nexus of Presence and Absence. Even using the term threshold is itself a deception. It implies separation where there is none. Presence and absence are always in union, no matter how difficult our material circumstances might appear to be. That union may be represented by the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, chet
which is composed of two other letters standing for the male and female principle. The bridge across the top represents the marriage of these two principles—symbolically depicted throughout Tibetan iconography as realization itself.
The letter even resembles the traditional Jewish marriage canopy, the chuppa. The emotional polarities of life and the commonplace dualistic perspective do not simply declaim all there is. They also imply all that is not. There is always a completely spacious, unadorned, timeless, and compassionate perspective in whatever predicament we might find ourselves, pregnant with wisdom and possibility. Even calling it a predicament is yet another self-deception, as if we are torn between polarities.
But our condition is always precarious, which requires our constant attention and renewing focus. Our material lives appear as placeholders of both presence and absence, vital yet temporary, manifesting as myriad forms forever shifting, holding, and tenuously expressing the perplexing polarities of ego, yet never parted from the essential unity and spontaneity at the heart of all we know, see, or feel, beyond all we may imagine. Huntington elaborates on the unity of presence and absence represented as the symbol zero, a concept simultaneously, again, like the Tao, implying presence while denoting absence, denoting presence while implying absence. Presence and absence do not merely meet at zero. Experience and emptiness do not meet at zero. They co-exist as zero. This is the edge of the blade we live on every day, except that we are not so much living on the edge, we are the edge. Life is the blade in every moment.
That Great Freedom referred to by Wu-Wen, the 12th century Chinese Zen master, is also represented by the image of Samantabhadra, the primordial Buddha in perpetual union with his consort Samantabhadri, representing the union of wisdom and
compassion, Awareness and emptiness, the Great Perfection. In zero resides all the names of God of all traditions. Zero is emptiness made manifest, a careful, deceptively simple, brilliant deconstruction of the assumed uniform material nature of existence. I am zero. I come from zero. Everything appearing as form is zero, a placeholder for emptiness.
Conversely, according to the Heart Sutra, emptiness is a placeholder for form. We are all zeros, paradoxically embodying the polarities of being and non-being, God and not-God, freedom and bondage, energy and matter, life and death, the granularity of delusion and the crystalline clarity of awakened mind. The unity of presence and absence means we in this life are always both in any given moment, regardless of what is catching our immediate attention. We may remind ourselves that material challenges including every form of attachment are nothing more than the unceasing flow of impermanence, rising randomly in the play of mind and having no ultimate reality whatsoever. On the other hand, feelings and sensations are equally real. They require attention, discernment, and a mindful response, constantly returning to the opening heart, to forgiveness and compassion, to the mind of enlightenment, as a guide for action and resolution.
At any moment I could attempt to escape from the conflicts and constructs impinging on me, retreating from perceived threats into a primitive ego-defined shell for the sake of survival. I could escape into denial of feeling, self-imposed disempowerment and disconnection based on fear known as spiritual bypassing. In reminding myself that the essence of all phenomena, whether we name them as external, natural, internal, or interactive is essentially formless and without any foundation, I also remind myself of the freedom to engage with all of it in a manner that originates from the infinite and absolute compassionate creative potential of that essence. Recalling that emptiness is not nothingness is the seed of heart-opening possibility in every moment. It is ours to respond creatively with the boundless love and devotion arising from this inexhaustible and timeless reservoir.
How does this framework implicate our orientation to death? We are reminded that the universe turns on impermanence and infinite source-less compassion, that life and death reside at the terminus of presence and absence, eternally implying, renewing and becoming each other. If we are all zeros, then death, just as life, is another polarity that only seems to exist, that seems to defy but cannot negate the absolute truth of emptiness. In contemplating death, everything about living becomes even more real in the face of this great mystery, limitless imperturbable uninterrupted unity.
There is no denying the absence of one who has departed life. And there is no denying that we will become one of those departed. But even now, presence always implies absence. There is no chance of escape no matter what we believe. At the same time, while death does put an exclamation mark upon the truth of impermanence, what else is there to do, in the face of the absolute nature of reality, but escape (or even celebrate) the inevitable gravity of change with boundless love, spontaneous joy and wonder. The absolute nature of impermanence from the quantum view suggests a distinction between life and death is not truly as marked as our eyes and hearts tell us it is. We will change form. We will be released from materiality. Perhaps we will enter something vastly larger, something our narrow egos can scarcely grasp.
The Buddhist idea that we can do something about our predicament, that we can train our minds as we are buffeted by material existence carries over into our non-material existence as well. Our suffering does not arise strictly from samsara itself, but from not realizing the unity of samsara and nirvana. That training centers on waking up. To be more precise, the idea is to wake up from the dream. The common metaphor distinguishing wakefulness or being asleep is that conventional reality is a dream, parallel to what we call the mental projections that occur during sleep.
Yet the ambiguity of being asleep or being awake begs the question: who is the dreamer and what is the dream? It seems so easy to distinguish between being asleep and being awake, between dreaming while asleep and waking consciousness. But it’s not so easy to wake up within either. We may experience waking up from a dream every day. But we hardly consider the possibility that we are waking from one illusion into another. What if we were to awaken within the dream, while still asleep? And if we could do that, wouldn’t that imply that we could, as Buddha did, also wake up within the dream of life?
What we regard as waking consciousness is really another form of sleep. The nature of the dream during sleep is the same as the dream we are living while supposedly being awake. Whether asleep or awake, we are still being driven by the unconscious. We may imagine there’s greater order to the waking dream or that we possess greater agency in our waking dream. But to wake up within a sleeping dream is to realize the sharp distinction between imagining we are awake in life and truly awakening within the dream of life.
The quality of experience awakening in a sleeping dream and realizing it is a dream and suddenly awakening to our sleeping state in life is to comprehend in a direct and dramatic way how similar they both are. Practicing one’s way into awakening in the dream state of sleep is not as difficult as it sounds. Yet talking our way into awakening in life is exceedingly difficult because we already seem to be awake. But also, no matter the detail of any conceptual construction of the awakened state, nothing can prepare us for the reality. Likewise, however we prepare for awakening in the dream, the direct experience is beyond anything we may imagine.
So also, I suspect, regardless of how we conceive or prepare for death, there is nothing in life that comes close to the reality of it. We imagine a transition from being what we are to being something we are not. Ironically, as we enter the final sleep, bardo teachings suggest we may either awaken to the dream of life or we may enter the dream of death, remaining equally confused about our condition as we were in life. We may come to know death as the dream it is, though at that point it will be even more difficult to awaken in the dream. That is why we are told to practice now! Either way, science, philosophy, and contemplative tradition all tell us the same thing if we are fortunate enough to recognize it: we will go from zero, as placeholders of presence and absence, to a direct experience of the spacious truth of emptiness, the dissolution of any distinction between the experiencer and the experience, between the creator and the created, Oneness.