Living Large

Part of the Eastern spiritual sense of the deeper reality is termed “emptiness.” It is the realization that there are really no singular things. There is only “One without a second” as the Rishis put it. There is the continually changing process of material and nonmaterial existence with all its sub-processes. And there are substantless versions of Mind arbitrarily labeling stages of the process with various nouns as though those stages were actually permanent entities. But as Pablo Picasso once said, "There are no nouns, only verbs." Every thing is merely an asseblage of parts, causes, effects and conditions with no inherent essense of its own. "Essence" is simply projected upon the assemblage by the mind of the beholder. It's all processes melting into other processes.

Still emptiness is not about nothingness. It’s about the sense of spaciousness that comes when you realize that the borders that separates “you” from “everything else” is not the thin envelope of your skin. You are Big Mind peering through a singular perspective called... whatever your name is. But in fact there are no real borders between “your person” and “the other” because 60% of “you” is the rivers that supply the water that make up your bodily fluids. You are the forces that make up the fabric of the material world, the air pressure that keeps your fluids from boiling away, the electromagnetic forces that are sparking the very thoughts that create the sensation of a you in the first place. You are the 15 billion year process from the big bang to the present day that forged the iron in the cauldron of the stars that now courses through your blood.

If your impressed with this universe then give yourself a hand because when you think about it, you and the cosmos are one and the same. Duality is a duel with ones own gigantic shadow. So emptiness isn’t some nihilistic notion that there is just nothingness and that there is certainly no “you”. It’s the transcendent realization that there is nothing but you. "I am you... and we are all together." as the walrus might say. Why do you think they call it the “You”-niverse? Gregory Bateson, the famous systems theorist called this insight “the delimiting of the self”. So… be all you can be, which is everything there is! It’ll make you a much bigger person.