Emptiness and the Shore Beyond – Part I
“Emptiness is bound to bloom, like hundreds of grasses blossoming.” ~Eihei Dogen, Sky Flowers
The Sunyata, the Emptiness, which is at the center of the Buddhist doctrine, is often not adequately understood. It is not a pessimistic or fatalistic doctrine, invented by an unhappy mind. It is the total and deep experience of a very healthy state of consciousness. We are all this primordial purity or emptiness, but our everyday consciousness is so clouded by emotions and thoughts that we are not aware of it, and thus we don't recognize it.
Sunyata is one of the deepest realization states of meditative consciousness. It is what we all experience when we close our eyes and study the interiority of life.
By closing our eyes, we begin to see that life and consciousness consist of different layers. The first layer is already visible when our eyes are open. It consists of solid matter. This is the grossest form life exhibits. We can touch, smell, hear and see it. It is shallow, because it is what it is. It needs no interpretation, but only confirmation. We all agree about a rock. A rock is a rock.
Sunyata, on the other hand, emulates the attempts to perceive reality beyond the form, the integral essence of the beings and how the vibrational fields and different levels of consciousness play diverse roles in our understanding of ourselves and the universe.
“...It is only thus that the disciple can reach what the Lord Buddha called the 'other shore' -- the spiritual realms which have to be reached by crossing the stormy ocean of human existence, and doing so under one's own spiritual and intellectual and psychical power, with only such help as can be given him in view of his own past karma.
