Of Smiles, Secrets, Strawberries, Sunyata

[Revised 10/17/2010.]

As he passed me in the hall this afternoon, a colleague said, “You’re always smiling. You must know something I don’t know.” Of course, I’m not always smiling, but I do smile whenever I encounter someone, whether student, staff member, or visitor: in such a place (a school for emotionally disturbed children), they deserve it. And I am genuinely pleased to see them. But I find it ironic that this person who writes knowingly about darkness, depression, and anxiety is perceived as “always smiling,” as if in possession of a happy secret.

What secret might I know? I don’t even know who I am. When I go deeply into myself, I don’t find anyone or anything – which is why I sometimes resist going deep. But the depths are always there, always in the heart of my heart. I may try to repress it, but I can never completely cover the trace of untouchable nothing at the center.

Nothing, void, emptiness, sunyata:¹ is this, then, the reality of who and what I am, the truth that the consolations of religion and mysticism tried and failed to cover?² At the heart of me, at the heart of all things, I am confronted by emptiness: not soul, not Being, not God or godhead, not a “That” or Absolute, not “Reality,” “Truth,” or “Essence,” but the brutal simplicity of sunyata, the radical darkness of void, the pure and pregnant emptiness, perhaps, of the null set.³

Sunyata is unseen, but its trace can be traced, the presence of its absence noted. And then the secret is out: the secret that, as Caputo reminds me, there is no Secret,⁴ and that, as Zen reminds me, those who sell Secrets are selling water by the river. Once, long before I discovered Derrida, I ran to the river and dipped my cup to steal and still the living water, hoping to learn its secret. But the rushing river took me up and carried me through a floodgate, and there is no going back. That gate is no gate,⁵ opening to nowhere, and what flows through it is simply water, an inessential essential of an inessential life. Water fills my cup, yes, but the cup is still empty.

A cup of water in the hand; a strawberry on the tongue:

A man pursued by a tiger caught hold of a strong vine and swung himself over a precipice. Above him, the tiger sniffed at him from the edge. Hanging there, clinging to the vine, he looked down and saw another hungry tiger pacing as it looked up at him. Two mice, one black and one white, began gnawing through the vine. Then the man noticed a strawberry growing from the cliff face before him. Reaching out with one hand, he plucked the strawberry and ate it. How sweet it tasted!⁶

Trembling in terror, he tasted the strawberry, the accidental gift, and then he, the accidental being, continued falling, as he must have, as we all do. Nothing that we are, we yet taste the terrible sweetness of falling. (And are our screams not blessings upon Brother Tiger?)

Does that Zen parable have a moral? Does it recommend, for example, that we doomed beings grab such lifelines and pleasures as we can? Does it offer the strawberry as a symbol of the Secret? Zen should know better than that (but of course there are many Zens). As I read it, the story is tersely descriptive of human experience, akin to haiku. It paints an accurate picture of our lives: the falling through emptiness; the grasping for survival; the horror of certain, painful, and imminent annihilation; the beauty of the transient even in our extremity; even the beauty of our transient extremity. Life as helpless falling, futile grasping, sweet horror.

Christianity would reverse my fall, return me to a fabled prelapsarian happiness, redeem me from fallenness and fallingness. Zen quietly points out that I have never been free of falling and never will be; that falling, the passing of nothing from nothing to nothing, is, in fact, my very life. From this fall there is no redemption, for there is nothing to be found that could be redeemed.

But surely there can be no falling? Nothing is, after all, nothing, not something named “nothing.” And yet I fall. Now, in this moment, I exist, and to exist is to fall. And to grasp. But later my existence itself will not exist, and I know that later arrives in a moment and, in a true existential prolepsis, is now⁷ – and always has been. This moment (isn’t the phrase itself a futile attempt to grasp the ungraspable?) is past, present, and future, all empty, as I am, void even of voidness, unknown and unknowable. I in/and the moment: sunyata. Even falling is empty.

And yet I cling, trembling, to my vine; the yin-and-yang mice gnaw; the tigers pace; the strawberry is eaten. Although I see that nothing is happening to no one, I wish it would happen less painfully, less horribly, for everyone. Everyone I meet is a falling through void, and the tigers are never sated. So I smile for them all as, sadly, I sow strawberries.

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NOTES

1. “Sunyata” is a Buddhist term that can be difficult to define in a few words. The Wikipedia article on it, for whatever it’s worth (I’m not qualified to critique it), can be found here.
2. It seems that there’s always (an) essential “Being” (thus, some thinkers speak of onto-theology), even if, as in Neoplatonic mysticism, it’s “Being beyond being” (hyperessentiality). For a discussion of that issue in this context, see David Loy, “The Deconstruction of Buddhism” and Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” both in Coward and Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology.
3. The image of pregnant emptiness is from David Loy, op. cit. On the null set as void, see Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology.
4. In More Radical Hermeneutics, John D. Caputo (echoing Derrida) says more than once that “The secret is, there is no Secret….” On page 1, he writes, “The secret is that there is no Secret, no … access to The Secret, which is what Jacques Derrida means by the absolute secret….” See also the aforementioned essays by Derrida and Loy in Coward and Foshay.
5. “The great way has no gate. Those who pass through this gate walk freely between heaven and earth.” – Zen saying.
6. A Buddhist story. I first read a version of it in Reps and Sengaki, eds., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, originally published in 1957. In the 1970 printing by Tuttle, the story, called “A Parable,” is found on pp. 38-39.
7. That reminds me of John 4:23, a favorite Quaker verse: “The time is coming and now is….”

The image of the strawberry is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_strawberry

Endarkenment

I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating,
And still I’m suffering, but that’s my problem.
Enlightenment: don’t know what it is.

– Van Morrison¹

Enlightenment. Don’t have it; haven’t seen it; can’t imagine it. Wouldn’t know it if it hit me over the head—or on the shoulder, jikijitsu-like. Don’t know what it is.

Reputedly, enlightenment “fixes” people. That seems appropriate, because I’m certainly broken—all the way down. But the hopelessly broken is not a candidate for repair. And I really don’t want to be put back together. Although it occasionally chokes my heart, brokenness is welcome to me in this world of suffering and failure. The liberation I want is not from the brokenness, but from the constriction. And I know where that liberation lies: it’s when I fear to feel the broken edges that I choke. But that’s my problem.

Enlightenment? Not here; not now; not for this writer. This fellow is a fraud; a shameful absurdity; a corpse preening in a mirror; a mirage obsessing over human error, fuming over intractable facts, shivering over survival. It seems that even we walking dead want to walk a while longer, look as good as possible, be admired for tricks like playing dead. At least, we want such things when we think we’re somebody. What is my original face before my parents conceived me? This I am even now: nihil sub aeternitatis specie.² But I forget. Brokenness can do that.

And this brokenness does, indeed, go all the way down. Unlike the estimable Leonard Cohen, alchemical hero of my cohort, I’m not singing “Hallelujah!” Let the Lord of Song be serenaded as he will; the spirit groans within me as I wait with the creation for the revelation of the children of God,³ weak and broken though they be. Groaning and longing don’t appeal? I understand; “I don’t expect that you should follow me.”⁴ To borrow Eliot’s words, I “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”⁵ Hopelessness has few friends.

Enlightenment eludes me, but endarkenment: that I know. It is my spiritual condition, a kind of seeing in and by the dark. Maybe it’s the other side of enlightenment; maybe it’s a synthesis of enlightenment and ignorance; maybe it’s madness. In any case, one doesn’t get it by taking thought, nor does one get it by not taking thought;⁶ one simply opens one’s eyes in the unity of light and dark, good and evil, life and death, yes and no. So it’s all the same to me? No, it isn’t; perhaps if it were I’d be enlightened. But it’s all “not-two”⁷ to me, and that makes all the difference. I can’t rest in half-measures.

And so I rest in endarkenment, simultaneously seduced and repelled by the dark beauty of our Darwinian world. Or, I should say, I unrest here: I cannot “say ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”⁸ It may be that “all manner of thing shall be well,”⁹ but not yet, not now. Life is suffering,¹⁰ and the end of suffering is the end of life: surely, no satori could switch off all pain sensors, confer immortality, or take the anguish of the world from my heart. Life is suffering, and the less suffering I bear, the less deeply I live—and the more other creatures bear for me. Where is the light in that? What spirit would move me so? Yes, “I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating, and still I’m suffering,” but that’s not my problem.

Endarkened here and now, I am a failure as a Buddhist; degodded long ago, I have failed at Christianity as well. I belong nowhere, a solitary broken heart who wanders through life working and writing, poorly but never poorly enough, from a longing to love. Understanding that, I no longer hope for enlightenment; I want only to become ever more faithful to what I am—to be better attuned to not-twoness, more courageous in accepting brokenness, less limited in offering love. Those who feel a similar longing will know what I mean.

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NOTES
1. Van Morrison, the title song from Enlightenment (1990), an excellent collection. (Excerpt punctuation provided by me.)
2. “Nothing from the point of view of eternity.” Quoting the Latin phrase here probably qualifies as Spinoza-abuse; it’s lifted from Prop. XXXI of his Ethics, where he uses it in a very different way.
3. See Romans 8.
4. Justin Hayward, “Shame,” from The View From the Hill (1996), another recommended collection of songs. “Shame” seems to express a sense of the “not-twoness” mentioned later in this essay.
5. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker.” From Four Quartets, first published as a collection in 1944.
6. See Eicho (1429-1504 C.E.), Zenrin Kushu.
7. Chien-chih Seng-ts’an (d. 606 C.E.), “On Believing in Mind.”
8. Jeremiah 6:1: “They have healed also the hurt of my people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.”
9. Julian of Norwich.
10. The Buddha’s “First Noble Truth.”

Sunyata: an Unorthodox Experience

Increasingly, I live in emptiness.

To live in emptiness, I find, is not a deprivation, nor is it an attainment, nor is it salvation. It is simply to be surrendered to reality.

To live in emptiness is not deprivation, although it is disillusionment. As my friend Gary G. has pointed out, to be dis-illusioned should not be a bad thing for a sincere soul. Disabused of beliefs and notions, even against my will, forced into freedom, I am no longer abused by illusions and lies. When I do not confuse dream and reality, I am free to dream.

To live in emptiness is not an attainment, although it is in each moment a kind of kensho. It is an awakening to and in perfect darkness, the inability to deny my nothingness, the discovery of freedom from the desire for light and the need to be. When I do not require light or being, I am open to their transient graces.

To live in emptiness is not to be saved but to be lost, to be so thoroughly, irretrievably lost that all directions are equally perilous and promising. It is to see that the hope of salvation—of any sort—was a denial of life and death, a betrayal of my humanity, a soul-smothering resentment. If I find any salvation at all in emptiness, it is this unsought liberation from hope.

To live in emptiness confers neither uninterrupted happiness nor imperturbable inner peace. To the contrary, it cuts the root of the desire for those goods, of the illusion that happiness and peace are worthy of my seeking and holding. Nor, however, does it bring unrelenting sadness or turmoil. But it opens the heart, deepening the experience of compassion, and to be so opened is to feel the joy and the agony of the world. Happiness is but half of life, if that, but in emptiness is the fullness of feeling. I am joy and sadness, peace and turmoil, acceptance and horror, alternately, simultaneously, intensely. Seeing as I do, feeling as I do, I cannot be otherwise.

To live in emptiness is to live in death—not in the shadow, but in death itself. When I walk in the shadow of death, alone or with God, I am a shade, a half-alive being wandering in the half-light of an unreal world. But to walk in the perfect death-darkness of emptiness is to live fully in perfect light, because, perfection being completeness, darkness and light are an interpenetrative whole.

To find myself living in emptiness was not initially a welcome experience. The condition is not a desirable one, not something that a seeker would want. Nor is it a saleable commodity, perhaps especially in the religion/spirituality market. Who would pay for it? It seems, in fact, to possess no value whatsoever. And yet I would not trade it now for a life of happiness. I would not abandon the insecurity of emptiness even to be cradled in the arms of an omnipotent god. No, not would not but could not, cannot. For as I had no choice but to come into this condition, I have none but to remain. When one’s eyes have been opened, one may close them again, but the light shines in the darkness, and darkness is darkness no matter how bright.

How did I get to this here that feels like nowhere? I can’t say; I don’t even know where I am. This is neither home nor wilderness, here are no landmarks or signs, and roads I walked no longer exist. Nor can I recommend this condition to others: for all I know, being here could appear to turn out badly. In speaking or writing about it, I can only try to describe how it feels to be lost as I am lost, wandering in the noonday dark with a sad heart and a happy smile for little ones, irreversibly awakened to my essential and existential nothingness and learning to live more deeply in the emptiness of that deepening realization.

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary shelter. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

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*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
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[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]

“I know what it’s like to be dead”

My title is from the Beatles’ song called “She Said, She Said”: a couple of the lyric lines are relevant to my topic. When I attempted to describe to my friend Gary G. the change in my experience that I will attempt to describe to you now, he immediately recalled the song.

“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’”

Back in May, I decided to tell my relatively new acquaintance, John C., too, about this significant change in my life. I’ll use some of what I wrote to John to help me introduce it here.

Not long ago, something “clicked,” and suddenly I understood the ineluctable reality of evolution as a soulless and self-contained process. From then on, I have awakened many mornings in a kind of near-death experience, a strong intuition of what it means to really not exist at all. That experience returns to me a few times during each day as well. As a result, my felt sense of the world has changed, and I have more compassion now about people’s desire to remove the fear of the unknown. Another positive result seems to be that I no longer fear the dark so much, metaphorically speaking. But I understand first-hand now how dangerous that experience can be, because time is telescoped and, in a real sense, I already do not exist. I seem to have more respect for and yet less fear of death now. Maybe one function of religion has been to protect us from such knowledge — to serve as a kind of socially-inculcated defense mechanism?

That last sentence raises some interesting issues, but I’ll leave them for future musings. Today I want to focus on the experience.

I remember reading many years ago a Zen dialogue (which, if I haven’t imagined it, I may be able to locate later). In the story, a monk is challenged with something like this: “You can conceive of nonexistence, but can you conceive of the nonexistence of nonexistence?” The question itself is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, one may read it as implying that nonexistence does not exist, that there is no such thing. Well, yes, nonexistence is not a thing: it’s a predicate. One could even go on to say that the Zen master must be teaching that nothing ever ceases to exist. But I don’t think that the master was teaching that: Buddhism attributes only conditional reality, if that, to things. My reading of the question was more like this: do you understand what it means, in terms of your life, that “nonexistence” not only is not a thing, but also is a characteristic that cannot be predicated of any thing? My answer then was, “Yes, but I’ll need to think about that.”

Thinking more about it didn’t give me a useful understanding then, but now the ongoing intuition of nonexistence is helping me to think (and feel) differently. No thing can be said not to exist, I see now. I cannot not exist: not because I am eternal, but because nonexistence is not a characteristic of any real — existing — thing, and I am such a thing. (“Existing” as a thought in someone’s mind is not the existence I require for myself.) There is no time when I will not exist, and yet there will be a time when others can rightly say of me, “He no longer exists.” Contemplating that paradox, I begin to understand “the nonexistence of nonexistence.”

And the reality of death. I might say that death is unconsciousness that never ends, but only with the proviso that no one is unconscious — and that unconsciousness can be predicated only of an existing being. Analogies can’t be of much help here. But this I can say: there are dead bodies, for a time, but no dead persons. I will die, but I will never be dead.

“And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

And yet, in a sense I am dead now, because to intuit nonexistence is to feel past and future in the present. As I told John, time is now telescoped. Seeing beyond existence allows me to feel the timeboundness and momentariness of our existence. Knowing now the eternal reality of nonexistence and the relentless relativity of time, I begin to understand that already I do not exist. And I see, too, that, from the perspective of eternity, I have never been born.

I’m reminded of a kind of prelude experience that I had in 1990, on the day that my adult family’s first pet dog died. Below is a paragraph from the entry I wrote that day in my journal. (Click here for the entire entry. At the time, I was thinking of Zen Master Bankei‘s notion of “the Unborn,” thus my reference to “Mind” in that entry, but my experience now is different, beyond the reach of doctrine — as, for all I know, Bankei’s was, too.)

A line seems to have an origin and an end, but I come from nowhere and go nowhere. I am an imaginary series of points between two deaths. Each point is drawn on the plane of emptiness; each point of life is a point of death. In perfect stillness I pass through them all. If I could enter that stillness, I would know peace. I would know death in life and life in death; I would no longer want to deny what I am. I would live, at last, as a free man.

I now know death in life. And, because of that, I am learning to know life in death. It may be that freedom is at hand.

[Follow-up post: "Wrestling with Nothingness"]