New Self Image
7-12-00
As you've probably noticed if you've read much of anything I've written, I tend to ramble on a bit. Much of what I write about God and Reality revolves around how incomprehensible these things are. Yet, as I wrote several pages on how one cannot explain such big ideas, I was of course attempting to do just that. What's worse is that much of this attempted explanation was simply regurgitated from other sources.
Until more recently, I honestly didn't understand much of what I said, because I wasn't really the one saying it. But lately, along with beginning to understand more about interbeing and so on, I've also found that when thinking or talking about God and Reality, I reach a point where no more words or even thoughts are useful. I'm sure this point was always there, but I couldn't see it because I was blinded by my need to be saying something, even if it was about something that can't be explained
This brings me to another version of my self-image, though it doesn't deal so much with self as the earlier one. Before, I referred to the outer shell of consciousness concealing the darker, more emotional core to all but a few people. This version was like saying language is the only thing protecting us from the raw emotions of everybody else, because without the outer shell (of language in words as well as thoughts and images), we would all be open and exposed.
Later on I mentioned the idea that there is no core, only the shell, but this was (at the time) just another idea I'd picked up from some book somewhere. Now I've begun to understand what this means. Instead of a separate core for the "darker" part of me, emotions and feelings go along more with thought and words to form the outer shell, because most feelings are caused in some way by thoughts in the first place, so aren't entirely separate. This shell is part of the conceptual framework we've created around everything which connects us to every other person and idea through the use of language, both verbal and nonverbal, to share our thoughts and emotions.
My "self" is the empty space within my own personal shell. This space is the same that permeates the entire framework, including every other person on earth. It is a far better connection between us than the frail strands of the framework itself. The fact that our centers are empty is a result of the fact that none of us has a separate, persisting self to begin with.
When I reach these points without thoughts and words, it's like my own personal shell has opened up for only a second, allowing me to see how much more real the space between concepts is than the concepts themselves. In "Many Lives Many Masters," Weiss describes the perfect diamond at the center of each of our beings that only needs to be cleaned by a cycle of rebirth in order for the innate perfectibility to show through. This is kind of like my viewpoint, with one important exception: The "diamond" is itself nonexistent, and is instead as empty as the space around whatever needs to be "cleaned."
It is only the dirt covering this space, dirt made up of thousands of lives' worth of accumulated karma, as well as this life's collection of concepts, that needs to be cleaned away. Nothing is perfect. That is, nothingness is perfect. It isn't a separate diamond at the center of every being that makes us perfect, or at least perfectible, by nature, but the fact that there is nothing there at all. No persisting self nature.
The universe is empty of anything which can be used to separate and divide it into parts. We as thinking beings have artificially created these separations. They don't really exist at the most fundamental level. My inability to find any more words useful to describe "God" or "Reality" doesn't mean I don't understand these things well enough to describe them. On the contrary, it means that I have finally reached the point at which I am comfortable leaving the unexplainable unexplained.