Emptying Into White
Meditation. Contemplation. Mysticism. Nondual. Some further thoughts.
I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice
Tables of paper wood, windows of light
And everything emptying into white
I’ve always loved the song Into White but only in recent years come to understand how beautifully it speaks to contemplation and the non dual. I have also been in relationship with and friends with more than one person who finds lyrics like those in Into White and descriptions of the non dual baffling and somewhat infuriating.
I sympathize. Truly. The more one tries to talk about things that cannot be talked about, what has been comically described as trying to eff the ineffable, the more confusing it can sound. Rupert Spira and SAND (Science and Non Duality) can come across as simply too much.
Rupert Spira also has created a delightful exploration through all this in four parts called Love is a Place.
Are you familiar with the E.E. Cummings poem?
Again, I can hear my ex-boyfriend or my friend A. grinding their teeth in frustration and see them rolling their eyes.
But if you love prose exclusively, you miss out the joys of poetry, right? I adore Mary Oliver and love what she says about poems from this foreword to a book:
In this book you will find, set among the prose pieces, a few poems. Think of them that way, as little alleluias. They’re not trying to explain anything, as the prose does. They just sit there on the page, and breathe. A few lilies, or wrens, or trout among the mysterious shadows, the cold water, and the somber oaks.
Image by Robert Pental
I don’t think it’s an accident that trying to come to terms with the non dual so often seems to circle away from the prosaic to the poetic, to songs, to images, even to total silence.
From the time each of us arrives in the world, we are indoctrinated with the binary. Right/Wrong. Up/Down. Happy/Sad. Conservative/Liberal. Further, we have it drilled into us which we need to embrace and protect, and which one we should reject and oppose.
Sadly, many of us come to the conclusion at an early age that we are the ones who are essentially bad or wrong, and simply don’t fit into this world.
Or maybe like Issa, who grew up in a society dominated by the Zen perspective, but whose small daughter suddenly dies, the worldview falls alarmingly short of the agony of experience.
What is most important cannot possibly be reduced to mere words, can it?
All art, however sublime, cannot encompass it, only in some measure point away from itself to a Reality that is beyond anything we humans create.
This is why I practice. Day after day, sitting with whatever arises, being held in a Love that understands everything I cannot, communicating without words with the Ground of Being.
In the silence, in the persevering and patiently observing the chatter of the mind and grumbling of various bodily sensations and letting them go over and over again, there is a slowly growing clarity of purpose and being.