Emptiness

A New Beginning, Part II

Photo: Egrets, Piermont Pier, August 2022

I come back to this idea of emptiness from September 1.

It would be worthwhile to re-read that piece in order to keep it in mind, because this follows directly on its heels and in fact within the time scale of the written pieces, they are contiguous, not separated as they have been by publication dates.

Last night, August 31, was my wife's 70th birthday, and we sat on the deck with one of my few (counted on the fingers of one hand, here) male essence-friends and another woman who lives in the neighborhood, is in the Gurdjieff work, and has also acquired a depth appropriate to our age. The environment on our deck is exotic and tropical, and she has contributed powerfully to it with her sewing skills, by making flags from found fabric that mimic (visually, at least) Tibetan prayer flags. But they might as well be any flags: they’re simply there to celebrate the fact that life is.

That we live.

While we were sitting there on the deck, I spoke about this question of not knowing anything, of having a part – let us refer back to the astral body — that’s empty, that has nothing in it, and receives everything in suspension: apart from that hairball of personality and assumptions which I spoke of earlier. If one is persistent and surrounded by the right people and influences, and one spends enough decades in inner work (some few may understand what I mean, and others will need to age and grope in darkness to reach this) one will form a part that has this ability to contrast itself against the disability of one’s ordinary personality.