Poetry in Knowing

October 17, 2011

        A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.
        We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.
        The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.
        The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.
        The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.
        Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon-disk rests alone.
            Empty Infinity from Richard Wilhelm's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower

    The material beings that experience our lifetimes have a steady process of change as part of their experience.  Those corpuscles that constitute our materiality are continually encountering fellow corpuscles, frequently being drawn to or repelled by them in a cycle that resembles the phases of the Hegelian Dialectic: the beginning encounter is presented with contradictions that resolve themselves by synthesis in an final situation, and from that final situation new encounters arise.  To paraphrase an image from physics, corpuscular entanglement by interaction produces by synthesis a shared perception of experience.  Free will may be measured by the ability of an individual to preserve those shared situations that they like, or to leave the ones they don’t like.  

    The concept of emptiness in contemplative traditions provides a path of adjustment that may assist our freedom to preserve or leave the situations we have experienced, but the density and duration of experience can diminish that notion of free will to a minuscule opportunity.  Our being is inescapably bound up in our experiences.  The residue from all our entanglements limits our freedom.  We may strive to obtain ends consistent with our judgments, but our success is at best uncertain since not only our own entangled experiences but also all the similar entangled experiences of the universe are potentially at play in every lifetime. To the extent that we can see the manifestations of those entanglements we may have some free play for adjustment, but most often we are not really aware of the depth and density of such influences.  Our fate is a function of the sum of our experience, and the residue of connections affecting our fate is substantial.

    At birth sentience emerges from nothingness and is attracted toward something.  Often it is attracted toward interests relating to past experience and perceptions.  In their best light, those experiences and perceptions are next to nothing insofar as they are empty of entanglements and residue.  If we fill them up with thoughts beyond simple awareness then those thoughts become baggage for our journey.  If we allow them to simply be perceived experience, empty of stuff we may add to flavor them, they are closer to their real essence and that puts us closer to awareness of how they influence life.  Contemplative emptiness is then a vehicle for perception without the corruptions of thought, judgment or desire.  This in not to say we should ignore ethics or natural senses of attraction or repulsion that are inevitably part of life, but it is to say that an uncorrupted perception reveals how those senses play a part in the creation of experience.  

    Returning to the initial imagery, we constantly find potential encounters accompanied by inherent contradictions that by synthesis create new situations.  Involvement in that process of interaction and change leaves can entanglement and residue.  We can only do a bit to alter the course of our fate.  We are obliged to go with the flow of experience and the bit we can do to ease the journey is simplified by being able to see how the interactions influencing life play out in their natural course.  The best light for perception is empty of corrupting residue.  It is free of thoughts that may have consumed past initiatives and responses.   It is the simple awareness of experience in that next to nothing condition that accompanies the emergence of sentience.