Crossing Nebraska

I suspect that anyone who’s lived an appreciable number of years will have come to know that darkest of places that we can know – with life as we’ve known it but a fast-fading memory, and life as we think it will be forevermore seeming like the darkest, coldest hell that can ever be imagined. Do you know this place of which I speak – the Void ? I was still a teenager when I first encountered it. Whatever Christian faith I’d known up to that point had crumbled and I’d not yet cultivated much of anything to take its place. In that place of in-betweenness was everything abhorrent to the human mind: meaninglessness, aloneness, joylessness… Some might be quick to refer to such an experience as “ the dark night of the soul ”; but to label it as such is at once to minimize it. For to assume that one’s soul is experiencing some tribulation that will eventually bring it closer to God, or to oneness, or to whatever it is that one might still believe in is to presume that there is ...

Dear friend,   You have come to question what all of this means: your life and love, your toil and entertainment; your tears which give way to laughter which give way to tears all over again; the ceaseless frenzied activity that you’ve been invited to join – activity that you fear will only serve to keep you occupied until such time as you return to dust, as all of life, as mighty civilizations, as entire species inevitably turn to dust, over and over again.   Young friend, you now stand peering into the dark, cold abyss of meaninglessness. Congratulations! Yes, congratulations. For you, young friend, are alive – fully and truly alive. Oh, sure, we’re all alive (until, of course, we’re not), but to live nobly on the brink of this cold and dark abyss is to be fully and truly alive. This and this alone will be your rock.       I know, I know..., these words must hardly sound like the kind of rain that can turn the desert that you are fee...

Introduction: From my first ponderings as a young child intrigued by the deep time of both the fossil record and the cosmos alike, to the graduate level coursework in Einstein’s theory of relativity that I managed to survive on my way to deciding against an advanced degree in physics, I’ve always been interested in the nature of space and time and the answers “out there” waiting to be found. Of course I now know that space and time are not two separate entities at all; rather, they are so inextricably linked as to only meaningfully be referred to as space-time. Ah, but I risk getting ahead of myself. Dogen gazing at the moon I suspect that Dogen Zenji, the 13 th century monk so prominent in Japanese Zen, was likewise interested in what answers might be found “out there.” What else could have motivated him to embark upon a dangerous maritime journey to China in the hopes of assuaging his greatest doubt? In time, however, Dogen came to realize (as did this author) that a...

The Buddhist concept of shunyata , or emptiness, is perhaps one of the most difficult to grasp of all. One reason for this difficulty, of course, relates to the fact that there is simply no really good English equivalent for it. The Western mind is too used to thinking of the world in dualistic terms to have invented vocabulary suitable to the discussion of such a foreign concept. And so we scratch our heads and pick a word that comes close, and then we spend a little time (or a lot of time) expounding upon what we really mean. The problem with a concept like shunyata is that it is so far removed from how we normally think about the world that we have no ready frame of reference for it. It’s a little like trying to imagine a five-dimensional universe when all we’ve ever known are the four dimensions of space and time. How do we even begin to comprehend five dimensions when the very blood and bone and nerves and tissue of our body/mind have evolved over billions of years tightly enmes...

The teaching of no self is one of the most difficult Buddhist teachings to comprehend; not because it is such an intellectually taxing one, but because it cuts right to the core of how we view reality. And even after we do “get it” we’re still subject to the relentless tug of karma pulling us back into our old way of looking at self and other and the world. Unfortunately, as well, is the fact that somewhere along the road to our “getting it” lurks the nihilistic view that everything is merely an illusion, a phantasm – self, other, everything. It is not difficult to understand how Buddhist teachings related to no self , in particular, and emptiness, in general, might be misconstrued as nihilistic. After all, the word emptiness – when used as a description of ultimate reality – almost invites it. And if you think that the word emptiness invites nihilistic ponderings, imagine what the word voidness might inspire. In fact, early scholars of Eastern texts often translated the Sans...