Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything

by J C Amberchele

  That keep us from knowing the intelligence

  That begets love

  And a more lively and satisfying conversation

  With the Friend.

  ―Hafiz

  PERFECTLY RIDICULOUSLY EASY

  For years I had the strongest urge to discover something I couldn’t define. It was as if I were being led into a maze by an unnamable source. It was, as the saying goes, like searching in a dark room for a black cat that wasn’t there. Except I didn’t know what I was searching for!

  I was restless and confused, and although after college I tried to settle into the two-car suburban life, the urge persisted, and soon after, without trying, I found LSD (or it found me!). Of all the turning points in my life, in retrospect I have to say that this was the most significant. During that first trip, an opening appeared―of what I couldn’t say―but an opening that thoroughly wiped the slate clean of everything I thought was real. There were more trips after that, but none had the power of the first, and then, strange as it seemed at the time, the opening I’d seen soon dwindled into questions of my sanity: Had I briefly gone mad? Was there something wrong with me? Had I given up on making something of my life?—for by then I had quit my brief foray into the corporate world and succumbed to the trap of drinking and carousing, no doubt to block the fear of having glimpsed something life-threatening, truly world-ending.

  But the urge did not disappear. A decade and a half later, footloose and well into a life of criminal activity, and then finally with a major arrest and facing the prospect of a life in prison―or perhaps because of it―I found myself propelled headlong into the search, book after book on Taoism, Buddhism, Vedanta, the Sufis, Christian mystics and the Kabbala.

  And eventually, with one simple look suggested by an English philosopher, I discovered why I previously didn’t get it, and why others I encountered didn’t get it. It was too simple, too easy, too close. All the searching and frustration and seemingly wasted energy, the thousand wells I had dug and the one deep one into Eastern religion, all a joke at which I could only laugh; there wasn’t even an “I” that I could blame, nor even one to laugh with! And I had seen this, albeit momentarily, all those years ago in the days before the counterculture of the 1960s when I first dropped acid.

  The story goes that the 13th Century trickster Mullah Nazrudin approached the border on a donkey one day. The border guard checked his papers and let him pass, but was suspicious of this strange man on his donkey. The next day when Nazrudin approached the border, the guard questioned him and searched his meager belongings, but found nothing, and soon let him pass. On the third and fourth days when Nazrudin approached, the guard meticulously examined him, but each time found nothing and had to let him go. By now, the guard was convinced that Nazrudin was smuggling something into the country, and every day thereafter when Nazrudin arrived at the border, he grew more and more frustrated when he found nothing. Finally, on the weekend when he was off duty and already a bit drunk, he ran into Nazrudin in a bar across the border. “Sir,” he said. You are driving me crazy. Every day I search you coming across the border, and every day I find nothing. I don’t know how you do it, but I know you are smuggling something. Please, I beg of you. I promise not to arrest you and I promise not to repeat this conversation to anyone, but tell me, what is it you are smuggling?”

  “Donkeys,” replied Nazrudin.

  The obvious point of the tale is that awakening is so close we miss it, so obvious we fail to see it. I can’t count the times in my life I have searched for my glasses only to find I was looking through them.

  So it is with awakening. Where is the black cat in the dark room? It isn’t there. It’s here. It was never there because awakening is the recognition that what is looked for is what is looking! Which of course is always Here. “God” isn’t out there somewhere, separate from you. Your eyes are His eyes, your awareness is His awareness, your sense of being, of presence, is His presence. In fact, Awareness/Presence is what God IS: pure, empty, silent awareness, capacious of all that appears, and all that appears does so in the only place it could appear, which is right Here where you are, where He is. There is no without. Never ever is anything “other,” or “out there.” As the 12th Century mystic Meister Eckhart put it, “God boils within Himself.”

  So boil. Get on with Who you really are, I say. What do you have to lose, except the lie of who you are not? What do you have to gain except everything? Come to Nothing, and find Everything.

  WORDS GALORE

  So many books, so much talk, so many words.

  Read a novel, a magazine, a textbook, a newspaper, a how-to manual. Read for enjoyment, for distraction, to learn, to laugh, to titillate, to ponder.

  Want to improve your mind, your attitude, your body? Read your choice of thousands of self-help books. How about a book on Mindfulness? Be in the moment, attend to the task at hand and relax your “monkey mind” and its bag of regrets about the past and worries for the future. You could have a happier, more fulfilling life, you could be “here and now.”

  The only problem is—and it happens to be a huge one—is that you still think there’s a “you” that you can improve!

  Ram Dass and several other awakened masters mean something entirely different when they point to Here and Now. What they are referring to has little or nothing to do with being in a “moment,” since they are quite aware that, even if there were such a thing as a moment, you wouldn’t be in it, it would be in You. To the awakened, Here/Now refers to that which is prior to space, prior to time, and prior to thought, totally inconceivable as a concept but exactly What You Really Are! Perhaps I could say that Here/Now refers to that no-moment of no space and no time, but what could that possibly mean? How to explain what can’t be

  explained, yet is so obviously Who You Are? As Wei Wu Wei so often reminded us, it is like trying to conceptualize that which is conceptualizing!

  Words simply won’t do. And this is the genius of the aptly named “Headless Way.” Words aren’t necessary. In fact, they too often interfere. Occasionally they may skillfully point one toward the “gateless gate” of awakening, but mostly they do just the opposite and mire one all the more deeply in the confusion and confrontation of separation.

  Douglas Harding’s gift to the world is that he tells you to “look,” not to believe him or anyone else, but to look for yourself, that you and only you are the final authority on what you find. And he also tells you where to look, which is 180 degrees the opposite of where you usually look. In other words, look “here” and not “out there.” Attend to what you see when you look at what you’re looking out of. And actually look, rather than think.

  For instance, look here where you think (!) you have a head and notice that you can’t see it. Touch what you think is your head and notice that the sensations you feel don’t add up to one, or for that matter, add up to anything! Take what you see here as real, not what you grew up innocently believing was here because others (your parents, siblings, relatives) told you what was here (from their point of view where they were, which was over there, they saw an object called a head and told you that you had one too. But now, present day, and on present evidence, take what you actually see as true, not what you see in the mirror over there or what others say they see from where they are over there or what cameras record from over there. After all, you’re here, not over there!

  My guess is that you see exactly what I see, which is nothing. The backbone of Buddhist wisdom traditions is “Emptiness,” and whether you’re a Buddhist or not you don’t have to look far to find it. In fact, looking back, you see that you are it. How much more “empty” could you be? There is literally nothing here—no thing (object).

  However, “emptiness” does not mean absolute absence, a total blank. It does not imply a nothing that is the opposite of a something. When I look here, I see boundless space, but a space that is aware, conscious, alive, and with a sense of presence, of I-AM-NESS. And it’s not as if awareness/I
-AM-NESS is inside the space; awareness/I-AM-NESS and this boundless space are the same! Seeing this, I’ve no doubt that this is what I am: Empty Awareness, birth-less and deathless and timeless. And seeing this, anyone can say the same, but it is crucial to SEE who you are first, then allow and affirm what is true for you. Seeing—the act of looking at looking—is pure unmediated experience. It has been called the only true experience because it is the experience of Itself, and it is always available, no matter the mood or circumstance.

  First See that you are Aware Emptiness, right here where you once thought you had a head, and then, affirming that, notice that Aware Emptiness is also filled with the scene that you once thought was in front of you, “out there.” It isn’t, of course, it never was. It is within the Aware Empty Space here! Where is anything experienced, but here where you are. It is not experienced “over there,” it is experienced here. When you see this, when you awaken to this, this too becomes unmediated true experience. This is Who You Really Are. You are both Empty Aware Space and the scene within it. This is the Buddhist formula, seen all at once: First there are mountains and rivers (everyday perception of objects as outside of who you think you are, a separate self-existing individual). Then there are no mountains and rivers (seeing you are Aware Emptiness). Then once again there are mountains and rivers (as inside you, and therefore as what you are).

  Seeing, this may happen immediately and all at once, or it may seem to happen in stages. In fact, there are no stages because Seeing is timeless, and is therefore always immediate. It only appears to happen in stages. You may notice that Seeing Who You Really Are is always the first time, no matter how many times you appear to do it and no matter how many ways you think you experience it. There are no levels to Seeing—you cannot do it better nor worse than anyone else, and therefore there are no beginners nor old experienced hands. The first time is always the same as the last time because there are no times. And finally, if you still think you are located in a separate body and that this is all nonsense, look down at your body, take exactly what you see, and notice that it too happens to be inside this vast, empty and aware Space above your chest.

  Welcome to Who You Really Are!

  THE HOLY CIRCLE OF LIGHT

  Snow today, and our Buddhist teacher didn’t make it to our monthly meeting. He drives to this prison from the city, nearly two hours away, and when the weather is bad, we know we’re on our own.

  We fill the time with chit-chat to start, and then Chris, our inmate set-up man, a long-time member of our sangha who begins and ends our sessions when there is no teacher, raps the gong and we take the meditative position on our plastic chairs. We chant, then fall silent, eyes open, following our breath. The noise of the prison fades, the mind slows, and an opening appears, revealing this boundless emptiness where I once thought I had a head. Thoughts quietly arise and pass away in this awake space.

  And then abruptly—it can’t have been more than ten minutes—Chris raps the gong again, and we lean back in our chairs, stretch our arms and legs, still silent.

  He poses the question: “How do each of you get through your day?”

  The answers come slowly—grudgingly, it seems—like something you’d hear at a prison AA meeting where no one does the steps: Jack works all day, Brian reads a lot, Eddie watches TV and exercises, Al works, then plays cards until lockdown at 9:30 P.M. Of the eight of us, not one mentions meditation, although two claim they study Buddhist dharma. When it’s my turn, I suddenly realize I am not mentally prepared, so I blurt out, “I don’t get through the day, the day gets through Me.”

  No one looks my way, as though I’m not there. I want to explain that, actually, I’m not, but something tells me it’s not the time, although maybe the place. It occurs to me, however, that deep beneath the façade they erect, they already know that who they pretend to be isn’t Who They Really Are, and Who They Really Are isn’t anywhere. For it is only to others that we appear as an object, and as babies when we innocently accepted what others said they saw from where they were rather than what we saw from where we were, we unwittingly made objects of our One Self and became instead “ourselves,” resulting in the current belief that we are each a tiny inconsequential speck separate from and up against a vast and mostly hostile universe—a belief that may well have been necessary in the development of an ego (for after all, with no ego there would be no story, no “life,” no objective world), but a primal mistake nonetheless.

  And how do I know I am not that now? How do I know I am not an inconsequential speck located somewhere inside an unfathomably vast universe? I See I am not. Looking back at what is looking—that is, reversing my attention 180 degrees and taking exactly what I see and not what I think or have been told by others—I see only empty and boundless space, a space that is not only aware but aware it is aware, a space that is not only empty but is filled with the scene, and filled in such a way that the “void” of this emptiness and the “form” of the scene are the same—I can find no difference between the empty awareness and the scene within it. I am awake to this. I am present as this. I am nothing, a nothing that is completely still as no-thing (for what could there be to move?), and a nothing that is at the same time 100 percent filled with the ever-changing and on-the-move scene that includes all perceptions and sensations and the thoughts attached to them. Looking within, how could this be doubted? What else could I be? I see I am not an object among an infinite number of objects, but that all so-called “objects” appear inside this Empty Awareness that I am, appear in and therefore as what I am. Objects are not objects, they are what I am—Subject! Objects are not separate from Me or from each other, they are my only reality as “I,” the only thing I can be said to be!

  The conversation about “getting through the day” dwindles to a stop, and Chris suggests a bit of yoga instruction from Tony. We move the chairs and stand in a large circle. Tony begins with easy poses he calls “old man’s yoga,” and I am grateful for this warmup to the more difficult poses which I cannot do. Later during the hard part when Eddie falls over on his back and assumes the pose of roadkill, limbs frozen in rigor mortis, we all laugh in un-yoga-like sprawls, then finally stand and retrieve the chairs and sit back down.

  Chris rings the gong, and we settle into more meditation. Another ten minutes pass, and he calls for Tonglen, a practice whereby, breathing in, we take in the suffering of others, and breathing out, we breathe out peace and happiness to them. We do this for loved ones and for enemies, then do the same for those we don’t know in an ever widening circle of imagination, eventually offering compassion with each out-breath to all beings everywhere. We learn empathy, this way, a concept in short supply in prison, and, according to what we see on TV news, in short supply just about everywhere else, as well.

  When we finish, I ask if everyone would like to try something different, and they all nod. I tell them to form a circle and place their arms around each other’s backs. Eddie and Al crack a few “I’m secretly embarrassed but please don’t tell anyone” jokes, and then we fall silent. To begin, I ask that we all continuously intone the deep sound of “om,” breathing in quickly and intoning out, over and over until the impetus to do so fades. We do this for five minutes, and finally the sound and the resonance gently drift into silence, and we stand in the quietude of newness.

  “Look down,” I say. “See where we all have individual bodies: feet, legs, torsos. Keep looking down, and at the same time notice what’s above our bodies, above yours and everyone else’s. Take a look, and take exactly what you see, not what you think you should see.

  “I’ll tell you what I see. I see Space, nothing, no-thing at all. I see no heads, no head here nor anywhere above any of the bodies in this circle. Our separate appearances down there may be connected in this circle, but here where we thought we each had a head, aren’t we all One Space, One Emptiness, totally the same because there is nothing, not one thing, to be different? Thoughts may arise, but what is it they arise in? Perceptions
may be on view, but where are they seen? Where do you actually experience anything? Is it not in this Space that all perceptions and sensations and mentations arise and pass? Aren’t you, as Aware Empty Space, the context, the container of all things, all thoughts, all feelings—and in such a way that the Aware Space and what fills it are wedded as One? Hasn’t it always been this way?”

  At first, no one says a word, and then Eddie lets out a nervous chuckle which signals the break-up of the circle, and everyone finds their chair. I know that we all saw the emptiness above our bodies, but only Eddie looks stunned by it. He stares at me, and I can tell he is looking not only at me but what he is looking out of, what we are all looking out of all the time: not two eyes enclosed in a head but a vast, boundless openness of absolutely No-thing, wide awake.

  Later as we are leaving he says to me, “What is that?” which is the same question I’ve asked myself countless times and the same question I’ve heard from others who suddenly see their own Light, even if they still think it’s their own.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “There are many names for it—Buddha, God, Self, Beloved, Tao, Basic Space of Awareness—but these say nothing. They are labels, mere representations for what you yourself have actually seen, and seeing is wordlessly experiencing, not to mention believing.”