Emerging
Emerging from deep dreamless sleep in the middle of the dark, quiet night, the infinity of ‘nothing at all’ pervades everything. This is understood as ‘True Absence’ - empty of emptiness, yet reverberating within the senses as colour and flavour through the encounter with no-thing-ness. A living paradox: the mirror mirroring itself as attention is liberated from continuity, narrative, and the fictions of identity.
There is no necessity for dilemma, nothing to be attracted to or repelled from, and no conflicting forces in motion. Yet this night is neither blank nor dull, indeed I am vivid, wakeful, and charged with immediacy. This is the truth of being without activity, intention, or a seeking self because all definitions and named things have receded beyond the horizon of the mind.
True meditation - the action of doing/nothing - is the direct appreciation of the oldest, most ancestral aspect of who we are. Yet we do not have to retreat back in time, we are awake to an ever-present reality held within the radar of the senses.
Existence is focused within the perception of time’s framing, yet simultaneously free of restriction or boundary. The inquiry “Who am I?” has done its work, yielding no conceptual answer because the question and the questioner have been entirely absorbed, leaving no mental reference point behind.
This must be liberation, but who can know this for certain? Certainty is where identity resides and we are no longer enamoured by this. There is however the recognition that the unfolding of the human self in time, moving through the density and substance of matter, is the natural variance and experimentation of our own unconditioned nature. True Absence is understood, not as a hidden ground behind a display but as the evolutionary movement across matter, time, and form - the very structure of Absence in motion, known directly as our immediate experience of endless creative change. Absence is what makes change possible.
Look at the ephemeral nature of time: the passing chain of events that leave no trace beyond a fading memory, and the material structures that dissolve with the years if abandoned. This passing flux is not an ultimate reality in itself, but the fluid mark of its own impermanence.
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Language falters because every word creates a convincing object and an implied witness. Yet this state, in the darkness, is not an object, nor an invisible host, nor a container standing apart from what it holds. It is the totality of itself as our human selves, devoid of any interjected division.
Lying in the darkness without need, action, or longing, a smile arises on the lips of its own accord. I am reminded of the quiet expression on the statues of the Buddhas, reflecting the human embodiment of reality resting in itself as peace in form.
The ‘normal’ human being is satisfied with an adequate amount of pleasure and reward for striving. This is the honourable activity of effort and reward. The sophisticated human stands on the shoulders of the striving and seeks through searching for perfection. Success, or progress at least, is determined by the sense of getting closer to the imagined goal.
Yet there is no getting closer, because the search is an endlessly circuitous trojan horse of identity. The search is its own activity. Once we face the pain and dilemma of the search, of getting closer, we are finally coming upon significance. The human form is already as close as it gets, once we understand the illusion of the search, which is a product of our evolutionary momentum, we will be able to see the obvious and then we will smile.
Walking in the dark to the meditation cabin and sitting, everything done and not done holds identical weight: empty/full, action/non-action, the arising of life as breath, the remembered mass of the years gone by, and the immediate transition unfolding from night into morning - are all distinct aspects of a glorious totality.
There is no practical need for a false witness gazing out at the apparent display of life (vyavahāra), and no underlying void (śūnyatā) waiting to be repeatedly uncovered and endlessly rediscovered as our comforting story to ourselves. True Absence is the reality of actual reference - and non-reference to anything specific. It is undivided, unpossessed, and self-evident without the need for a single concept, form, comparison or name.
How this can be is no longer a lingering concern. True Absence leaves no masks behind, providing all the understanding required for coherence within the mystery of life’s continuous unfolding.
The day begins, new and mysterious once again, unfolding in an undetermined fashion as the sun’s rays illuminate everything, turning shadows into spaces and into the reassuring familiar variety of coloured forms. Here, True Absence, like the sun, also illuminates perception as Attention, which is embodied through the unfiltered human form as the generous expression of Truth and Love in relationship.
