The Absolute does not need to be attained, realised, or even known. Summoned or not, it is. That is why we call it Absolute. It is this frightened flicker of life that is our self, and this bleeding world, that needs our tending. The Absolute will tend to itself.
If my practice is a sideways move, a stepping back, a search of a different angle of perception, then I am practicing escape. The Absolute cannot be known apart from the world and our selves. Can the ocean be known apart from the water and the waves? What is known apart is only thought, the fumes of being, but never being itself.
The ten thousand things blind us to the One until we know them as the One in action. But to know the One that is the ten thousand, we must know our self as one of the ten thousand. For the One, the Absolute, in all its terrifying glory, has seen fit to lay its head within the feeblest of things. Our self. Its call echoes in ten thousand tongues throughout the bleeding world, and it is never “go” or “leave”. It is “Enter and stay.”
May we heed the call,
Simeon
Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
—The Heart Sutra (translated by Thich Nhat Hanh)
Suggested Reading
The World as Lover, the World as Self by Joanna Macy
Macy gives voice to a radical non-duality that refuses transcendental escape. Drawing on Buddhism, systems theory, and ecology, she shows how awakening matures not into withdrawal, but into participation. The One knowing itself as soil, grief, responsibility, and care.
Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.
Thank you, Simeon, for such simple and elegant eloquence -- and for a brilliant choice of image, this particular Van Gogh, to lend its power to your message.