Open-Secrets

Tag: the-void

  • Conceptualizing the Non-Conceptual

    Think about it – conceptualizing the non-conceptual. Not only is that wild, but also mysterious and incredibly fantastical!

    If all of reality is based on space, nothingness, emptiness, or the void – it seems unfathomable to be able to wrap the mind around the reality of the material world. And yet, we constantly hear this assertion – being and non-being co-emergent.

    Conceptualizing is nothing but putting a boundary around part of reality and imagining that boundary actually creates something. – A.H. Almaas

    ConceptualizingThe mind loves concepts. Mind feels secure in the world of concepts – conceptualizing makes us feel like we know. Conceptualizing (mental constructs) supports our tenuous grip on feeling secure and in control. Or looking at it from the other side of the coin conceptualizing helps to repress the ego’s underlying anxiety, fear and terror.

    Our normal sense of self that develops is built on concepts and conceptualizing that begin as representations or object images in the mind.

    Take a walk on the wild side – no thought, no thinker. Non-Conceptual perception – the end of conceptualizing, the mind at rest.

  • Heart Space

    Heart absence emptiness space

    I’m attending an intensive 10 day retreat on space/emptiness/absence. It is intense. Yesterday, we were exploring absence – non-being, the aspect of reality that underlies all manifestation of reality.

    There are many levels and gradations of space leading to the void, emptiness, sunyata and ultimately – absence.

    Last night, someone in a more social context said to me – Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. I couldn’t help but reflect on this phrase from the more traditional meaning – The lack of something increases the desire for it.

    Origin: The Roman poet Sextus Propertius gave us the earliest form of this saying in Elegies:

    Always toward absent lovers love’s tide stronger flows.

    The contemporary version appears first as the title of an anonymous English poem in 1602. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the phrase began to be used more widely, with Thomas Haynes Bayly’s (1797-1839) song Isle of Beauty, published posthumously in 1850:

    Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Isle of Beauty, Fare thee well!

    In the context of the work on absence and emptiness my thought is this:

    The experience of absence is beyond any concept of self, there is no self to observe the experience of absence. In fact, there is nothing to observe. Not nothing in the sense that there is empty, vaccuous space. Nothing in the sense that no-thing exists – even emptiness. The effect of this on the heart seems to be more clarity, more pristine capacity for the heart to be it’s very nature.

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