Originally posted by pabrits
are you sure of the vast emptyness? prove it as in sience?
When I
type these wo rds
what you li kely fo
cus
on
is these dark letter marks against a blank (empty) white screen-page. That is the background—or just the ground. You have likely learned to focus, without even noticing it, on where you expect the message to be: on the letter-word-marks. They are the figures which you can only see because they stand out from the ground. If you shift your attention, the white screen may become the figure whose general shape is demarcated by these strange black markings...
The same is true for perception generally: our attention shifts from what we perceive as this figure (or figure-complex) to this one and this one and then that one. But each new figure was a moment ago just part of the whole ground.
This screen-page has a border. What are the borders of your everyday perception? How vast is the ground? What lies beyond the Whole? Can there be another besides the All?
Withoutthegrounditisdamnablydiffculttoidentifyanyofthefigures. Sometimes, it seems that our thinking, concept-making mind works so fast overlaying thoughts onto perceptions that we can become confused between the two. Sometimes, our attention seems to shift fromfiguretofiguresoquicklythatwe forget
there is a ground in which those figures arise to our attention.
The ground is “empty” because it lacks the figure/form definition provided by your attention. It is also “full” because it contains all that you are not attending to.
The Heart Sutra says: “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.” I hope this analog of dark marks against a white screen-page (itself a figure among other pages, etc.) gives some idea of what is meant.
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“Holiness” is a concept, an idea, a word-thought
about—well, either about what is real before all our word-thoughts
about it, or just
about other word-thoughts, other concepts or notions
about . . .
In the context of the story from which black beetle quoted, Bodhidharma (the first patriarch of Zen) was being asked to affirm certain religious notions—holiness among them. Bodhidharma refused, instead pointing with his enigmatic speech to the ground against which we overlay such concepts and notions.
Whatever we focus our attention on (including ourselves) becomes figure lifted out of the vast
emptiness/fullness/wholeness of the ground in our consciousness. Likewise, when we attend to our thoughts-about, our concepts and ideas-about—they become notional figures against the ground on which we overlay them, just as these marks I am typing are overlaid on the screen-page. This includes all our “I-thoughts”.
All our words are words-about; but they can also be used as gestures to point to the reality that precedes them.* All talking is just a way of talking. “Holiness” is just a way of talking; “God” is just a way of talking; “vast emptiness” is just a way of talking—it is a kind of Zen koan intended to point beyond its own conceptual content.
Nevertheless—
“No holiness; vast emptiness.”
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* And also includes them, since it also includes us with our thinking minds—but that is another loop...