I've been reading this week about the Buddhist principle of 'emptiness of phenomena,' or śūnyatā. I've had some difficulty getting my mind around this concept, mostly because it has nothing to do with anything I would personally call 'emptiness.'
I tend to equate emptiness with 'pointlessness,' which is not what śūnyatā is about.
But in addition to thinking about the emptiness of phenomena, I find myself thinking about the pointlessness of, well, almost everything. At this very moment, for example, I'm thinking in the back of my mind about the pointlessness of posting this. Will it change anything? Will it inform or enlighten someone? Will it help inform or enlighten me? Probably not. It just gives me something to do at 4 in the morning.
People talk about what's happening in their lives, and I think, 'what's the point?' I look at what's happening in my own life, and think, 'what's the point?'
I guess I've become an existential nihilist.
1 comment:
For what it's worth, even glimpsing sunyata is a horrifying experience that precipitated in me a lengthy bout with what Thomas Aquinas termed acedia. It truly is the Void. Fair warning: I spent many years practicing Vipassana meditation, and I wouldn't wish seeing the dark abyss of "sunyata" on anyone. The flowery rhetoric of the masters hides an all-too-real nihilism they can deny all they want. We are creatures of real flesh and blood, not disembodied minds. We are inert matter made alive and sentient, and we are meant to relate to ultimate reality in this way in this physical here and now. My acedia only began to end with what felt like an electric shock of Life and Joy when I read the opening lines of "The Imitation of Christ" by Thomas a Kempis. I am not a religious nut, but I have experienced revealed truth, and thank God for it. Of course your natural human curiosity will compel you to continue to seek sunyata. But some things are better left alone. There is only one thing that can fill what Pascal called "this infinite abyss." Gloria in Excelsis Deo.
Post a Comment