An answer to the previous post came to me today during a pleasing zazen.  I believe the answer to “fullness or emptiness?” is fullness because emptiness.  After entering early in my sitting a state that felt truly empty, and then returning from it somewhat regretfully to a condition of consciousness, I asked of that state, “of what was it empty?”  And the answer came to me at once: “it was empty of me.”  It is the self, the ego, the consciousness (but not the awareness) that is emptied out at such a moment.  This is the fullness of ourselves that obscures the world as it truly is, and with disciplined meditation I believe it can be set aside, and for longer periods than I experienced today.

At any rate, I began to understand that it is only in such moments of emptying out of the self that we can experience the real fullness of the world and of the moment in which we are sitting.  In effect, we are in the way of the world; we see it only through our own distorting lens.  The full complexity, layering, vastness, intensity, of any given moment can only be experienced when by some means or other—meditation being only one of them, I suspect—the self and ego are at least briefly knocked aside. 

I understood something like this years ago enough to put it into a poem, “Human Light”:

we must all learn

to get out of the way of our own light:

a simple step to one side

and a lifetime casting shadows

to take it

If some of this insight is true, if it persists, then it may help me to recover meditation as a practice that does not divorce me from the world, as a poet must not be divorced.  I grant that even at such a lucky moment of emptiness there is still something (someone?) perceiving the fullness of which I’ve spoken, some residual or variant “I” not wholly emptied out.  I suspect the Zen Master I have never encountered would chide me for such a partial understanding; but if I hope to continue to write poems, rather than rest easy in silence, this idea of fullness because emptiness is my way forward.

21 November, 2024.