I’m not blogging much because I am working a lot. I have a long list of ideas noted down–I am, perhaps, afraid to stop–but it may be a while before I post them.
One positive to this new website is that it is not, yet, on the Google Shit List. I had been unaware of this, but they have a Shit List and if you get on it, your website will not show in searches, and I think most social media incorporates it, so I have not been able to link to my blog on my Facebook profile for at least a couple of years. For now, it is working. It won’t break my heart if it stops, but if I understood the claims of the new host they work to keep you off the shit list. That’s good.
The point I logged on to make today is that I think, I really think, that the essence of the Buddhist Shunyata is the sense of living in an ocean.
I was driving by some old high school today, and looking at the windows, and wondering what it was like for the students to look out those windows. Then I was recollecting my many bored days in school, where I would struggle to stay awake, because I just needed a five minute lecture and I usually had whatever it was. I went to an OK school, but it was not filled with bright students.
Then I had this strong sense of nostalgia, and sense of loss, and longing. I am far, far from that place, and I have moved around so much I have no real home, no place. And the way I have lived my life, I really have no major professional accomplishments. I am a bright fellow. I could have been a doctor or lawyer or academic or anything else.
But, it seems to me, I have tried to stay on the track of life, to pursue doggedly the nature and purpose of life, the nature of emotional health and well being, and have tried over and over and over to confront my pain and heal it, which has been difficult and slow.
Then it hit me: There IS no place. If I were a successful, egotistical doctor or lawyer (trust me: my ego would be huge, uh, -er) all that could be stripped from me in an instant. It has no permanance or reality. No physical dwelling place, no city, no home: all are gone in an instant, cosmically speaking.
And I felt like the universe and me living in it is a huge ocean. There is an up and a down, but there is nothing stable. There is nothing to hang onto, nothing that you can grab for dear life and which will not dissolve in the holding.
We live in an infinite ocean. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is where you are relative to everything and everyone else. You are a part of a dance which renews every moment.
This is the Buddhist ideal: to use change as an advisor. To learn to live and laugh with the continual ups and downs of life. What was is gone, and what is to be is not yet. There is however a deep rhythm, or rhythms, which set a variety of times, which we can interact with and riff on.
To some great extent, no true spiritual progress is possible without becoming lost, after leaving the shore far behind.
Those, in any event, are my thoughts today. I like to think of myself as creative, and what creativity I possess comes from being open, to never knowing what is next, and never forcing anything. I never try to think thoughts: they just flood me when I am doing anything else.
But think of Shunyata not as an emptiness, but as a mass of motion and currents and events without any fixity, without dry land, with nothing to hold on to, where you can never return to the exact place you were before, or the person you were just a moment ago.
It’s tricky. And with the terror comes also freedom. Do you think any sea lion would ever consider living its whole life on dry land? Not a chance.