Is Nothing Sacred?

I believe the short answer to the “question is nothing sacred?,” is yes.

Here’s a slightly longer response. If you feel you’ve come in to this movie before, you’re right. This is one of my favorite drums to beat…

The kick off is how I’ve been taken to task by a commenter on my happy use of the word God to stand for sunyata.

In the past this position has tended to annoy theists, who see that while I’m happy to put a face on the great empty, clearly it is just pasted on, and at some point the glue gives and it will slip away revealing, well, the great empty.

No big human. No personality. No plan.

Just nothing.

That sacred nothing.

The term for this use of God is upaya. It’s a Buddhist thing. But this isn’t as shamelessly instrumental as it might seem at first blush. I’m utterly fascinated in how when one engages in this practice everyone and everything is changed. Most people using sunyata in my experience get on the arid side. They miss how powerful, dynamic and in human experience, organic it all is. We say God and all of a sudden the richness is obvious.

I suggest…

Well now I appear to have annoyed a nontheist. Precisely why, I don’t know. I will refrain from speculating…

Of course, my thinking of late has been that all the hullabaloo around god-talk isn’t the real problem in human affairs. I’ve mentioned this a few times of late. Yes, the litany of crimes committed in the name of the divine is long. And, while I’ve met some objection to this from other nontheists, it strikes me that once atheists got in charge, in the name of atheist rationality, some very nasty crimes also followed. My take away is that for the most part once one gets at the level of a state, gods or no gods, its mostly about power…

However, this is a bit of a digression.

Back to the relentless nothing.

What I think is a real problem is the idea that an individual has some eternal substance.

Call it soul. Call it atman.

I call it a problem.

It is when we separate ourselves from the great mess that bad things happen.

Our hearts cut off from the world, its joys and its hurts. And when our hearts are not engaged, that’s when we tend to do the worst things…

When we say, and worse when we believe we’re just passing through, then we have a lot less of a sense of responsibility.

Friends, I suggest, this is it.

No use looking somewhere else.

It doesn’t exist.

There is no other place.

Nothing is our heritage. We come from nothing. Nothing surrounds us all the days of our lives. And we will return to nothing.

We and all things exist in a great mix of mutual causality, rising and falling together.

We all share a common family name.

That name is nothing.

I also like empty.

These days I usually use boundless.

But, you know, God works just fine.

And, yes, soul is okay, as well; so long as it is pointing us to the family thing.

To the great no-thing.

To our common boundless heritage.

And all the things that follow such a knowing, or to be slightly more technically accurate, all that follows such a not-knowing…

Two cents on a Tuesday morning…