Time is infinite
The sweet pain of living is floating between our present and our future. When this moment is awakened, please cherish it. She will show you the way. Its sweet for you to snuggle, its pain to push you forward. People are born with their own unique gifts and a certain sense of nothingness, and the years stretch between the gifts and nothingness, and the two always fill each other and influence each other. Whenever the sense of nothingness arises, and whatever the unique gift, we need to spend our lives exploring how the two interact and complete each other. We used to be so ashamed of our sense of nothingness, we used to waste so much time trying to hide and fill it, even thinking we had a right not to be troubled by it, that it meant our soul was off track.
In the midst of this self-reproach swing, we cannot rest safely in the depths of the soul that only our genius can ignite and that only a sense of nothingness can activate. In December 2010, I was having dinner with two friends at a small restaurant in New York City, and we all had the feeling that we would touch some kind of solid earth, feel the support of the earth, and at the same time be surrounded by a great sense of nothingness. As I begin my narrative, I find myself actually talking about the relationship between talent and a sense of nothingness. It's often the case that insight comes when something said or said in a conversation with someone triggers something I wasn't aware of myself. It was our conversation that night that inspired me to write these words. We tend to be so focused on digging, so obsessed with what we can dig up, that we sweat and swing a pick to dig the earth away, in a hurry to find out. But the empty pit lay there, waiting for us to hold up our lights. This is the relationship between our gifts and our sense of nothingness. A few months later, I shared these thoughts with a study group that had been exploring with me for more than a year. When I threw these insights out, the men oohed and awed as if they were watching something brought up by a diver from the depths of the sea, and began to disagree with each other: Several found the concept itself confusing, while others found the idea that nothing in itself is an important part of our journey uncomfortable. Then, like a guide leading us down to the lake, I spotted a gentle slope next to it and guided us around to the lake. My approach is to make everyone realize that everyone has experienced the sweet pain of living. It's a concept I explored in my last book, "Seven Thousand Ways to Listen," and I call this sweet pain "the tuning stick of my soul." It lets us know when we're getting closer to the c
ore. In real life, in the face of those beautiful or painful life experience, the kind of profound pain we feel, has been our loyal and steadfast friends, this is a point that everyone can deeply understand and more easily agree with. Although we approached this concept through another avenue, I always wondered, what is it that makes people so fearful and resistant to feelings of nothingness? When people are in the empty or silent, a kind of fear arises because the experience makes us unable to face the emptiness. But nothingness belongs only to a larger, larger space, like the ubiquitous air before it is sucked into our lungs. The following spring, I led a wakeup camp at the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Canada, where I had the opportunity to discuss the topic of talent and nothingness again. This time, I'm going to cut straight to the chase and ask you what your sweet, painful experience of being alive is. I introduce the concept of nothingness when people are immersed in their own experiences. Still, some people shudder when they are led into that empty space I call nothingness. Here I would like to quote three quotes to pave the way for the following discussion on nothingness. One time I was teaching a class at Royal Roads University, an amazing place on Vancouver Island. It was a beautiful and quiet campus, and there were peacocks roaming the campus. Cadet Kathy shared a handwritten quote from her grandmother's chest of drawers: "My cowshed, burned down, I can look at the moon now." Later, I learned that the poem was written by the Japanese samurai poet Arashilan Matsukura. "My cowshed has been burned, and now I can enjoy the moonlight." Matsukura Lanlan's insight in this poem is very enlightening for spiritual practice. He did not hide from the fact that the cowshed had burned down, but pointed out that a large area had been freed up by its disappearance. I want to use this metaphor to introduce us to the topic of the virtual self today. Because whenever we experience nothingness, it seems that nothingness is an empty space created by the destruction or loss, the destruction that has swept away something we once cherished, and the destruction also leaves us with a sense of downright painful loss. But often after a house burns down, more space reveals itself. By experiencing nothingness, we can also experience more of the omnipresent existence and reality. As overwhelming as this process may be, we can see the moon in the night sky more clearly, no matter what life destroys. We, too, needed each other's support in the burned clearing to survive and make sense of the nothingness that had been waiting for us. The second quote comes from Martin Buber, a famous 20th-century Jewish philosopher whose main contribution is in his book I and Thou. Bube points out that when we are able to make everything we encounter the center of our lives, then God comes down to us and has the most authentic conversations we can have without rehearsal. But if we make ourselves the center of the world, the sun that rules everything, then God will disappear from our lives. Obviously, many people are self-centered. In fact, I often do. We are human, after all, and pain, worry, doubt and low self-esteem can make us more self-centered, just as fatigue can make us clumsy. As a state of mind, egocentricity is an integral part of human experience. This becomes a problem when we get caught up in a pain or an outward-taking mentality, which makes it easy for us to adopt selfishness as our world view and life creed. Because so much self-serving thinking is like building a cowshed in our minds that blocks our view of the moon, then we lose our connection to the emptiness in which the spirit inhabits. More than anyone else, we are the center of our own universe, and by honoring that interrelationship, we can move past the lonely moments of our personal sense of nothingness to the ubiquitous truth that sustains us all. That's what Einstein discovered when he came up with his theory of relativity: there's more than one center. Einstein's first insight into the theory of relativity came in his childhood, as he recounted in his autobiography: At the age of 12, he understood Euclidean geometry in a moment of inspiration. He understood it perfectly and knew that one more day would be a dull one. Einstein was very profound about the rhythm of life -- the peak experience cannot go on forever, the light must be followed by gray, the flat by deep, the full by nothingness. This is life itself and the experience of being human. When Einstein began to understand the theory of relativity he immediately realized that it was the most fundamental principle of human existence. In a moment of wonder, he was actually saying (as I interpreted it) : "Euclidean geometry is a fine system, but because its basic premises are based on a central point, the principle is flawed, because there is never a central point." Einstein also asserted that "Euclidean geometry is valid only within certain limits." We can also use this assertion to assess our self-centered attitude toward life -- when we place ourselves at the center of the world, it is as if we build a cowshed that blocks our view of the sky. The cowshed is useful for a while, but like Euclidean geometry, it can only be useful within a fixed range, because there is never a single central point. Buber affirms this and concludes that eternity can only be experienced between a few central points connected to each other. When we come out of our cowshed and into the clearing, we also have a chance to see each other as part of something bigger than all of us. I'm going to introduce Buber's quote: "The world is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be embraced." This view is like a hibiscus, but it is not easy to lose sight of the source. So what purpose does he have in saying this? What's behind this idea that we don't see? First of all, Buber is metaphorical that the mind's thinking can only be effective within a certain range, and the essence of embracing -- that is, being touched and supported -- is far more profound and realistic than the language of the brain. His words also tell us that our innermost dependence on the vast and the infinite is far greater than the visible. Even when we think we know nothing, we can reach out and touch what is in front of us, to fully embrace what can make us realize all about the life within us and the omnipresent nothingness outside us.
The sweet pain of living is floating between our present and our future. When this moment is awakened, please cherish it. She will show you the way. Its sweet for you to snuggle, its pain to push you forward. People are born with their own unique gifts and a certain sense of nothingness, and the years stretch between the gifts and nothingness, and the two always fill each other and influence each other. Whenever the sense of nothingness arises, and whatever the unique gift, we need to spend our lives exploring how the two interact and complete each other. We used to be so ashamed of our sense of nothingness, we used to waste so much time trying to hide and fill it, even thinking we had a right not to be troubled by it, that it meant our soul was off track.
In the midst of this self-reproach swing, we cannot rest safely in the depths of the soul that only our genius can ignite and that only a sense of nothingness can activate. In December 2010, I was having dinner with two friends at a small restaurant in New York City, and we all had the feeling that we would touch some kind of solid earth, feel the support of the earth, and at the same time be surrounded by a great sense of nothingness. As I begin my narrative, I find myself actually talking about the relationship between talent and a sense of nothingness. It's often the case that insight comes when something said or said in a conversation with someone triggers something I wasn't aware of myself. It was our conversation that night that inspired me to write these words. We tend to be so focused on digging, so obsessed with what we can dig up, that we sweat and swing a pick to dig the earth away, in a hurry to find out. But the empty pit lay there, waiting for us to hold up our lights. This is the relationship between our gifts and our sense of nothingness. A few months later, I shared these thoughts with a study group that had been exploring with me for more than a year. When I threw these insights out, the men oohed and awed as if they were watching something brought up by a diver from the depths of the sea, and began to disagree with each other: Several found the concept itself confusing, while others found the idea that nothing in itself is an important part of our journey uncomfortable. Then, like a guide leading us down to the lake, I spotted a gentle slope next to it and guided us around to the lake. My approach is to make everyone realize that everyone has experienced the sweet pain of living. It's a concept I explored in my last book, "Seven Thousand Ways to Listen," and I call this sweet pain "the tuning stick of my soul." It lets us know when we're getting closer to the c
ore. In real life, in the face of those beautiful or painful life experience, the kind of profound pain we feel, has been our loyal and steadfast friends, this is a point that everyone can deeply understand and more easily agree with. Although we approached this concept through another avenue, I always wondered, what is it that makes people so fearful and resistant to feelings of nothingness? When people are in the empty or silent, a kind of fear arises because the experience makes us unable to face the emptiness. But nothingness belongs only to a larger, larger space, like the ubiquitous air before it is sucked into our lungs. The following spring, I led a wakeup camp at the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Canada, where I had the opportunity to discuss the topic of talent and nothingness again. This time, I'm going to cut straight to the chase and ask you what your sweet, painful experience of being alive is. I introduce the concept of nothingness when people are immersed in their own experiences. Still, some people shudder when they are led into that empty space I call nothingness. Here I would like to quote three quotes to pave the way for the following discussion on nothingness. One time I was teaching a class at Royal Roads University, an amazing place on Vancouver Island. It was a beautiful and quiet campus, and there were peacocks roaming the campus. Cadet Kathy shared a handwritten quote from her grandmother's chest of drawers: "My cowshed, burned down, I can look at the moon now." Later, I learned that the poem was written by the Japanese samurai poet Arashilan Matsukura. "My cowshed has been burned, and now I can enjoy the moonlight." Matsukura Lanlan's insight in this poem is very enlightening for spiritual practice. He did not hide from the fact that the cowshed had burned down, but pointed out that a large area had been freed up by its disappearance. I want to use this metaphor to introduce us to the topic of the virtual self today. Because whenever we experience nothingness, it seems that nothingness is an empty space created by the destruction or loss, the destruction that has swept away something we once cherished, and the destruction also leaves us with a sense of downright painful loss. But often after a house burns down, more space reveals itself. By experiencing nothingness, we can also experience more of the omnipresent existence and reality. As overwhelming as this process may be, we can see the moon in the night sky more clearly, no matter what life destroys. We, too, needed each other's support in the burned clearing to survive and make sense of the nothingness that had been waiting for us. The second quote comes from Martin Buber, a famous 20th-century Jewish philosopher whose main contribution is in his book I and Thou. Bube points out that when we are able to make everything we encounter the center of our lives, then God comes down to us and has the most authentic conversations we can have without rehearsal. But if we make ourselves the center of the world, the sun that rules everything, then God will disappear from our lives. Obviously, many people are self-centered. In fact, I often do. We are human, after all, and pain, worry, doubt and low self-esteem can make us more self-centered, just as fatigue can make us clumsy. As a state of mind, egocentricity is an integral part of human experience. This becomes a problem when we get caught up in a pain or an outward-taking mentality, which makes it easy for us to adopt selfishness as our world view and life creed. Because so much self-serving thinking is like building a cowshed in our minds that blocks our view of the moon, then we lose our connection to the emptiness in which the spirit inhabits. More than anyone else, we are the center of our own universe, and by honoring that interrelationship, we can move past the lonely moments of our personal sense of nothingness to the ubiquitous truth that sustains us all. That's what Einstein discovered when he came up with his theory of relativity: there's more than one center. Einstein's first insight into the theory of relativity came in his childhood, as he recounted in his autobiography: At the age of 12, he understood Euclidean geometry in a moment of inspiration. He understood it perfectly and knew that one more day would be a dull one. Einstein was very profound about the rhythm of life -- the peak experience cannot go on forever, the light must be followed by gray, the flat by deep, the full by nothingness. This is life itself and the experience of being human. When Einstein began to understand the theory of relativity he immediately realized that it was the most fundamental principle of human existence. In a moment of wonder, he was actually saying (as I interpreted it) : "Euclidean geometry is a fine system, but because its basic premises are based on a central point, the principle is flawed, because there is never a central point." Einstein also asserted that "Euclidean geometry is valid only within certain limits." We can also use this assertion to assess our self-centered attitude toward life -- when we place ourselves at the center of the world, it is as if we build a cowshed that blocks our view of the sky. The cowshed is useful for a while, but like Euclidean geometry, it can only be useful within a fixed range, because there is never a single central point. Buber affirms this and concludes that eternity can only be experienced between a few central points connected to each other. When we come out of our cowshed and into the clearing, we also have a chance to see each other as part of something bigger than all of us. I'm going to introduce Buber's quote: "The world is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be embraced." This view is like a hibiscus, but it is not easy to lose sight of the source. So what purpose does he have in saying this? What's behind this idea that we don't see? First of all, Buber is metaphorical that the mind's thinking can only be effective within a certain range, and the essence of embracing -- that is, being touched and supported -- is far more profound and realistic than the language of the brain. His words also tell us that our innermost dependence on the vast and the infinite is far greater than the visible. Even when we think we know nothing, we can reach out and touch what is in front of us, to fully embrace what can make us realize all about the life within us and the omnipresent nothingness outside us.
Time is infinite
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