"The situation of being left high up in midair is indeed terrifying and maddening existentially, for knowing that things, ideas, and values have no self-nature and that there is nothing whatsoever to cling to is an unbearable threat to our whole way of life. It deconstructs our conventional worldviews so relentlessly that nothing is left to rely on and feel certain of. And yet, this is precisely what practitioners must grapple with—a complete collapse of the reificational way of thinking and its implications. Only then can they realize a truly liberating, responsible religiosity."
—page 44, "Weighing Emptiness," Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen by Hee-Jin Kim
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For the past year or so, the Zen notion of "emptiness" keeps bubbling up in my thoughts. 空 /
kū can mean
sky or
emptiness or
the air or
space. So this notion of suspended in
kū is terrifying. The related concept of 無 /
mu which can mean
nothingness or
to be non-existent or
void is likewise terrifying in its own right. So when I encountered the essay "Weighing Emptiness" by Hee-Jin Kim on a research visit to Pacific Lutheran University's
Mortvedt Library, I knew I needed to spend some time with the book in which it is found and all six essays. (I've made it through the first three.)
•
Hee-Jin Kim is as erudite and dense and chewy and mind-blowing and compelling as I find Dōgen to be. Kim's commentary is an order of magnitude more accessible, however, which is helpful.
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In the quote above, I'm reminded of Christ's kenosis, his self-emptying referred to in Philippians 2:7. "[Christ] made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness." I'm also reminded of Pip floating in the vast expanse of the sea in "The Castaway," chapter 93, of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. "The sea had jeeringly kept [Pip's] finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul...and therefore his shipmates called him mad...So man's insanity is heaven's sense..." To be stretched out between the mortal realm and the heavens, as Christ on the cross or Pip in the indifferent void of unbound ocean, as though hanging over the abyss (as one actually is) and to be aware of such, is likely to unhinge one's mind from the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday. Encountering emptiness, and the very ground of being, as one who is part of that emptiness yet differentiated (or so it would seem) from it, would appear to open up a "wound" in one's being. A separation. A gulf.
Then it gets more personal. (Or less personal, perhaps.)
When I broke my arm, the existential crisis it presented left me two responses. As my arm hung in space, swinging like a pendulum that I could not control, I knew I needed to get to the ground so that I didn't pass out. (While my arm may have been suspended in space, apparently the rest of my body was not.) That was the first response. The second response was to scream—because of the pain, because of the rupture from what I expected versus what was happening, from the break that occurred that was more than just physical damage. I continued to scream and scream and scream. I did so until the EMTs that arrived gave me ketamine to quiet me. That was after the morphine.
Either the combination of morphine and ketamine or, more likely, an accidental overdose of ketamine, provided further rupture. "Troy" continued to do things in "my" absence. I learned of interactions and conversations between medical personnel and "myself" that I do not remember. Some of it is on video or I wouldn't believe it. So who is it that had those conversations? Were they patterned responses? Did "I" reside elsewhere while my physical appearance acted on "my" behalf? Did "I" return to the "Ground of Being," "emptiness," "God" for a few moments before "I" differentiated once again? Were there two representations of "Troy" due to the break; was I fractured as an echo of the structural "collapse" of part of my body?
Since the break, I have relived it every night in my dreams. I break my arm every night. Every damn night. And it is "real." Is it as real as the first time? Maybe. I don't really know. But it is traumatic each time, and I wish it would cease. Yet it continues. Each night, I experience "the situation of being left high up in midair" and it is terrifying. While the physical scars slowly recede, partly due to the invasive (yet elected) insertion of a titanium nail into the center of my arm and healing and rehabilitative exercises and time, I'm not certain that the psychic scars decrease. I continue to hang.
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I continue to read and reflect. As I absorb the words of Kim and Dōgen, I embody them and manifest them. I stitch them into my very being. May I soon know the meaning of "emptiness." I think I'm getting there, but I still have some distance to travel.
