Photo: Daffodils, Bryant Park, April 6
“Ah, yes, Lee” you say to me. “But how does one empty the mind?"
It is not so difficult to empty the mind. For example, even though all of these well-connected thoughts are coming out of my mind right now, my mind is empty. It is the emptiness itself that produces well-connected thoughts; all thought that comes out of anything that is less than empty is from the beginning not well-connected, because it is already inflected by assumptions, ego, and false will. Well connected thought begins in emptiness and generates itself as a whole thing. This means that proper thinking already contains everything one needs to know within the first word that is spoken; all the words that come after it are mere consequences that iterate a whole thing which has already in merged into Being from within its own wholeness, and merely appears to us sequentially within ordinary time because that is the only way it can be iterated externally. Internally, it begins from its own beginning within wholeness.
This is much like the nature of the self and the soul, which begin from within their own beginning within wholeness. They are already whole and perfect, and already arrive here in this instant with great value and purpose. Yet our propensity for formulation instantly forgets this, because it believes it is superior to the other functions. And in the supreme irony, the first thing it does is believe that value and purpose are not properly understood, and strikes a note on the bell insisting that we must seek value and purpose — primarily, of course, outside our selves. It never begins with a legitimate and non-egoistic love of self and life and, inclusively, a fundamental love of God from which Self and life proceed.
This fundamental love I speak of is a lost property of humanity; the treasure in the tomb, the gold in the cave which was lost but may be found again. There is gold, there are gems, at the beginning; where God touches earth, there the perfection and beauty is already present. It is irresistible to remind readers yet again of Hieronymous Bosch’s famous painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” where in the left-hand panel the fountain of divine wisdom and creation touches the blue pond of the earth and deposits priceless gemstones.
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