I remember in the January snow of 2010 spending five minutes filming the back garden. The snow fell silently. The sound of traffic was more intermittent than usual. In the snow the world is quieter. With leafless branches pointing into white skies there’s a great simplicity in a snowscape, as there is in any winter landscape. Everything is stripped back. Like the unbleached woollen garments worn by Cistercian monks.
As snowflakes lose their identity in the snow-bed’s totality of white, so I am reminded that I am nothing and at the same time a part of, and at fundamental level connected to, everything. At the heart of simplicity is the clarity, unity and in the end bare reality so beloved of the mystics. I am increasingly inclined to the view that the ultimate reality, which might be called God, Nirvana whatever, is this clear, silent, still and unfumished heart of an ‘onion-like’ reality.
Any sense we might have of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘self’ or ‘soul’, is an illusion, a trick of the mind, generated to prevent it from seeing the ultimate reality, indeed realising the emptiness. These illusions protect the mind from seeing what it fears to see, that it itself is an illusion. The mind fears emptiness, it fears silence, and thus seeks to realise its self, creating the illusions of ‘self’, ‘soul’, I’ and ‘me’.
At one level we need this sense of self in order to survive. This body of mine needs to be able to say ‘that’s my food’ ‘I will guard it.’ But there’s a down-side as well.
The sense of self can lead to a ‘me versus you’ an ‘us and them’ way of thinking. This in turn pushes us away from realising the ultimate simplicity of reality. There is but one thing. It is mostly nothing and we are all a part of it. As Einstein put it “human beings are a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe”, a part limited in time and space. We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest.., a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The temple in Jerusalem, like other temples had a space at its heart in which to place an idol of the God. The space was called the holy of holies. In the Jerusalem temple the holy of holies was empty. God was represented by nothing but an empty space. God was not to be represented by an image created by human minds and hands. Maybe that is true of you and me. Perhaps in order to ‘see’ ourselves as we really are we must learn to discard the images and concepts we have created to represent our selves.
If this sounds depressing, bleak, nihilistic, and even hopeless, on a cold January morning, it is perhaps that we mistake the unfurnished heart of things for the absence of anything real. That is perhaps an error, for the emptiness points us to the ultimate reality that which I call God. And what is love other than the expression of a need to reconnect beings made separate by the illusion of self. Love is a emptying of self to connect more fully with the other. God, they say, is Love.
A New Year like a new day is like a clean slate, a time for a greater simplicity, a time remember the self emptying nature of love. In the clarity of leafless branches pointing into white skies we can learn again to see our true humanity emptied of all idols and illusions.
As snowflakes lose their identity in the snow-bed’s totality of white, so I am reminded that I am nothing and at the same time a part of, and at fundamental level connected to, everything. At the heart of simplicity is the clarity, unity and in the end bare reality so beloved of the mystics. I am increasingly inclined to the view that the ultimate reality, which might be called God, Nirvana whatever, is this clear, silent, still and unfumished heart of an ‘onion-like’ reality.
Any sense we might have of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘self’ or ‘soul’, is an illusion, a trick of the mind, generated to prevent it from seeing the ultimate reality, indeed realising the emptiness. These illusions protect the mind from seeing what it fears to see, that it itself is an illusion. The mind fears emptiness, it fears silence, and thus seeks to realise its self, creating the illusions of ‘self’, ‘soul’, I’ and ‘me’.
At one level we need this sense of self in order to survive. This body of mine needs to be able to say ‘that’s my food’ ‘I will guard it.’ But there’s a down-side as well.
The sense of self can lead to a ‘me versus you’ an ‘us and them’ way of thinking. This in turn pushes us away from realising the ultimate simplicity of reality. There is but one thing. It is mostly nothing and we are all a part of it. As Einstein put it “human beings are a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe”, a part limited in time and space. We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest.., a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The temple in Jerusalem, like other temples had a space at its heart in which to place an idol of the God. The space was called the holy of holies. In the Jerusalem temple the holy of holies was empty. God was represented by nothing but an empty space. God was not to be represented by an image created by human minds and hands. Maybe that is true of you and me. Perhaps in order to ‘see’ ourselves as we really are we must learn to discard the images and concepts we have created to represent our selves.
If this sounds depressing, bleak, nihilistic, and even hopeless, on a cold January morning, it is perhaps that we mistake the unfurnished heart of things for the absence of anything real. That is perhaps an error, for the emptiness points us to the ultimate reality that which I call God. And what is love other than the expression of a need to reconnect beings made separate by the illusion of self. Love is a emptying of self to connect more fully with the other. God, they say, is Love.
A New Year like a new day is like a clean slate, a time for a greater simplicity, a time remember the self emptying nature of love. In the clarity of leafless branches pointing into white skies we can learn again to see our true humanity emptied of all idols and illusions.
