Making a measuring stick out of formlessness, part two

First, I would like to clarify. Neither of these posts are attempts to intellectualize formlessness, though it probably can be seen this way. I should probably learn to channel my energy into poems to avoid this confusion. What I am really trying to do with a lot of my writing, is turn awareness toward recognition of the limitations of conceptual mind, and in so doing, provoke a glimpse into Tao. Arguably a pretentious undertaking, I admit. Some immortals are probably just laughing and pointing at me.

When I was very very young, I was obsessed with two questions. One of them was, what is nothing? I became so frustrated with the fact that anything I came up with was just a mental representation of nothing. The deepest black abyss, is … an attempt to visualize nothing as a deep black abyss. I would lie in bed at night trying to find something, anything to be nothing for me.

This is what I was trying to get at here in my first post. The density and subtlety of forms we witness is only relative. On the surface we can say something like, “Zen Buddhism is more formless than Tibetan Buddhism”. And it makes a certain sense in communication. Everyone knows what you mean. Tibetan Buddhism is filled with elaborate rituals and visualizations and meticulously defined stages of progress. Zen attempts to cut away the extraneous and approach awakening directly. But here is the whole point - attempting to cut away the extraneous and approach awakening directly is, itself, a form. It has a very specific structure that excludes other structures. In a way Zen is even a very culturally Japanese form.

Imagine manifest reality is a canvas. Anything whatsoever that you paint on this canvas is … paint on a canvas. No matter how you limit your palette, no matter how abstractly you paint, your painting is not ever closer or more accurate a representation of no-canvas than anything else. Actually, even this is not a reliable statement. We are back to the deep problem of visualizing nothing. Anything our mind conjures to represent nothing is something. The concept “nothing can be said about nothing” is something. It’s another mental form. It’s apparently a very seductive form too, at the root of modern philosophical disasters such as postmodernism. This is why I don’t entirely disagree with someone reading part one of this article, and answering “yes” to the first set of questions I proposed. “As above, so below”. I am just approaching this from a different side, most likely for my own benefit.

In the relative there does appear to be an unfolding to Enlightenment that seems to take a predictable sequence. Prior to awakening contemplatives tend to seek solitude and a simpler, meditative lifestyle. Many contemplatives don’t find a state of emptiness when say, dancing, so they seeks silence and zazen which it’s more easily sensed. This is great. It’s very natural and I am not suggesting this be changed. I am asking: is this feeling state of emptiness or awareness found in meditation really literally closer to Truth than the feeling of boredom we have at work, or hunger before dinner, or fear before a presentation? It’s a real question. I certainly don’t know the answer. But think about it. Is Enlightenment just a feeling we get in deep meditation? Is Truth just a temporary state we can drop into sometimes? Is Awakening separate from our moments of sleepiness, anger and sadness? Is our hope, perhaps secretly, that one day we will have practiced enough so that we get Enlightened and finally find ourselves always on the free-of-suffering side of the fence? What are the assumption here? That Truth is dualistic. That Tao is temporary and mysterious and difficult to access. That what you truly are is a separate little human and if you just say the right prayers and sit the right way and breathe properly and pay careful attention you will get enlightened? That there is a bigger better you that is awake but right now you are asleep in a dream and if you do these funny little dances within the dream you will eventually wake up?

I yearn to ask, what has no preference for the pleasures and sense of progress meditation gives over any other activity and its associated feelings? What has no preference even for whether you have a preference or no preference? What is Always Already Awake?

What if what you truly are, right now in this very second, is Awake Awareness itself. And it just so happens that Awareness is playfully, like an innocent child, watching a dream called “you as a separate self”. And there is nothing “you” can do about it. Awakeness is already 100% present in every moment whether “you” notice or not, and what “you” think “you” are doesn’t even get a choice nor have any power to control whether this dream called “you” notices the “big picture”, ever. Because really there is no you and there is no big picture. Big picture, little picture - black paint, white paint, red paint. It’s all just more pictures on the canvas. What gives birth to the canvas and to the paint itself remains unborn. Unfathomable. Nothingness. We watch what is born but cannot turn to see, in the way a human eye cannot turn and see the source of it’s own perceptions.

What I am pointing to here, in a way, is humility. I’m turning the arrogance of my own intellect on itself. I really don’t know anything. I don’t even know if I don’t know anything. In fact, often I think I know a lot of things. But my intelligence is really just a measure of how long I can go on about something before I hit I don’t know, which is the ground. I don’t know why I am a spiritual seeker. I have no clue what really compels me to seek this ineffable Tao that often seems to be the next step from my grasp, and in other moments is the very eyes I am looking with.