This is it, plain, raw and unseeable: the emptiness of all things, as all things, thoughts, sensations, appearances – seamlessly emerging and dissolving.
Nothing and no one is separate from itself, never has it been: always a seamless stream of what is happening, phantoms and shadows arising and disappearing.
Can you remember the beginning of the story that made you? The very first moment of awareness that you exist? As a separated, independent self? Do you remember when you first reacted to the name given to you? What is your very first memory after oblivion, after you were born?
This emptiness out of which you emerged has no properties and no boundaries, it makes you itself, as itself. It’s a wild and raw world, that is not a world anymore. No map that can picture it, no guidance or coordinates to give you halt. No time frame of before and after, now and then.
The brain seems to connect randomly out of the life stream arising fragments and bits of information and sensations to repetitive patterns, experiences, and storylines. They have become so familiar and vivid, that they equal truth and reality to you.
You have filled the emptiness with belief and meaning to survive and overcome what might seem like bare insignificance or chaos. After all, there has to be meaning and purpose? Some divine order? How can this just be an illusion or random? How can there be no end, no final achievement, no freedom, no choice? What were you fighting for, trying to attain? You have changed, evolved, and overcome! Can memory be a lie? Experience an illusion? How can all your beliefs of hope and liberation be just a bursting bubble in the void?
The stories – mundane and otherworldly- of an imaginary past and a future that fill the void, give you identity, meaning, and purpose. A goal, something to share and to do, something to live for.
They give you hope to survive the emptiness, as emptiness itself, as consciousness, as awareness.
You need a name, context and affiliation. Without any of this, you’re lost, you’re nothing. But nothing is also not what you are, nor no one. This existence is a mystery in which you cannot find an island or refuge from seamlessness and interconnectedness. What you are is inseparable from what is, division and isolation are ideas that arose from conditioning, objectified perception, and interpretation.
Eventually, liberation does not always come as relief. Grief can rise as beliefs crumble, attachments dissolve, the mirage of belonging fades, and the realization that there is no escape from the innate emptiness of a world so familiar to you. Yet even grief is empty, appearing and vanishing like all else.
You lose it, and this is it.
A strange lostness might absorb you, which becomes indescribably delicious, being the freedom, the aliveness that already is.
