In a number of posts here, I use the term Fullness. I say things like “Everything is either fullness or resistance to fullness.” But what of emptiness? Teachers like Adyashanti describe reality as an emptiness, the process as an emptying out.
We’re describing the same thing. This is one of the many apparent paradoxes of fundamental reality. It is an unbounded silence, without qualities. Thus words fail. It has the ‘characteristic’ of emptiness. Yet at the same time, it infuses all things and all experience arises in and of That. So it has a ‘quality’ or potentiality of Fullness.
When we first come to silence, it tends to be experienced more as a sense of emptiness. The gap or blank spot. Or the unbounded space. Later, as the silence moves more into our world, it has a richness so more seems a fullness.
If we look more deeply at it’s nature, we can see why this is so. Silence is empty of all qualities, without form and void as the Bible puts it. But within it are 2 principles. Not expressed, just principles.
One is a principle of alertness. The silence is alert. The other is the principle of liveliness. When alertness becomes lively, it becomes aware. Thus is born pure awareness. It is, and you are, the lively alertness of silence. That’s all there is.
With liveliness, awareness moves within Itself. We might call this flow pure love. Or pure intelligence.
“the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep” as the Bible puts it.
From the movement of love, existence arises, pure Being, memory.
Awareness becomes aware of Itself and the impulse to express arises, the observer is born.
“Let there be light…And God saw the light, and it was good” as it has been said.
This is the fullness of emptiness. What is, is fullness.
As the Upanishads put it “I am That, Thou art That, All This is That.”
Note that in this process, there is no first and second. It is a simultaneous self-awareness. It is also the height of abstraction. As such, it could be described several different ways. Just a process happening in the moment, the only moment of now.
Davidya
Last Updated on April 10, 2014 by
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