Tonight I am sitting up late. It has been a very busy week and it is over. I feel too tired to go to bed.
I don't have a normal weekly routine. No Monday to Friday - so my 'week' ends when I can and need to stop and recharge. This week end falls on Thursday.
In this tempest of life I have often tried to find a place where I can be peaceful. Obliteration has been one refuge, as has emotional escape. Habits, deeply ingrained. Habits that I have not completely left behind.
They are easy.
Now, as I stare at this screen and type, I contemplate emptiness. Not meaningless. Simply that all the meaning I interpret and attribute is empty of meaning.
I am still not sure that I completely understand it, but the possibility that all of my reality is constructed offers a profound freedom.
When I last went on retreat I found myself in uncontrollable tears, for hours, and then on and off for days. It was the draining of a reservoir of residual contained emotion accumulated over a lifetime of confusion, repression and misdirection. This reservoir was the product of the way I have constructed my own version of reality.
The retreat took me away from my habitual obliterations and emotional escapes. It created a crack in my emotional reservoir. The reservoir drained. It left a perspective on emptiness.
More recently I came to another understanding of emptiness. I have always dreaded death - viewed it as ultimate annihilation. The unanswerable end. My fear of annihilation drove my spiritual journey.
One morning, as I meditated, death presented as an empty 'fact'. I am no more here or not than I ever was. The problem is in the 'I', this temporary assemblage of matter and energy to which the 'I' is attached. My construction of death and my attachment to its opposite (life) are the necessary progenitors for the idea of annihilation.
'I' have never really existed. There is no dread or consolation in this. It is simply an acknowledgement that any view 'I' have of 'me' is not real. It is just shorthand that is sometimes useful for labelling a temporary and constantly changing phenomenon. Again, something different opened up for me.
So as 'I' sit here and type, it is a very different 'I' to the one who went on retreat and the one who sat a few months ago and had an inspiration about annihilation. The draining of emotion tied up in a constructed 'reality' and the pre-death annihilation of 'I' should leave me feeling less substantial. Instead I feel more real.
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