Boundarylessness
I’d like to explore the implications of boundarylessness. The erosion of limits and borders that only too easily happens when you are intimate with your own presence. Of course this doesn’t even require stillness to happen. It’s a very common experience in yoga posture practice that you no longer feel limited, constrained by the three dimensions within which your body is normally recognised or perceived.
I suppose we have two fundamental options with which we can respond to this experience. We can either say, well that’s a nice hallucinatory effect of endorphin production or sweating or doing something different or whatever. That’s one option. It’s not so hard to imagine who would choose that option, but there is another option. Maybe it is not a hallucination, maybe in fact boundaries are hallucinations, boundaries are illusions.
Of course it’s pretty obvious that boundaries are necessary, not just legal boundaries between my property and your property otherwise you would just take my potatoes. But even more basically or you could say even more intimately than that, boundaries are necessary even to be able to think. It’s when we become intimate with our thinking, when we become intimate with our mind, when we start to experience directly how the mind works that we begin to at least suspect that boundarylessness is not a hallucination.
As we see the mind creating boundaries on the basis of its ability and its need to distinguish. Why does the mind need to distinguish to keep the body alive. An amoeba doesn’t need a mind to distinguish for it because its needs are so simple it just reacts from a more fundamental intelligence. An amoeba can also distinguish. An amoeba is also an expression of a boundary. You could say that is the fundamental expression of boundary that life generated, that life generates.
The inside/outside boundaries began with amoebas and is expressed in every one of your cells, but you have a lot more boundaries in your body that an amoeba does. An amoeba doesn’t just have that one boundary. Inside the amoeba it has all sorts of organelles and mitochondria with all their boundaries. Without those boundaries life would not have evolved in the way that it has. So boundaries are necessary even if they may be slightly hallucinatory, or even if they may be conventions of perception.
The amoeba has absolutely no sense of a boundary. It just reacts to different stimuli. But when everything is cool it doesn’t say to itself, God it’s nice in here, I’m glad there is none of that shitty stuff around. So an amoeba maybe has a boundary, as far as our mind is concerned, but it doesn’t need one as far as its intelligence is concerned, it just needs to respond. Nevertheless our minds can see boundaries everywhere, and that’s not an error, but it can be a problem if the nature of boundaries is not clearly understood.
That can be looked at in a number of ways. I’m going to look at it now from the point of view of how the mind works. In order to really understand how the mind works we really need to understand what the mind is, which is not very difficult even though it has flummoxed very intelligent people for thousands of years, it’s very easy to see what the mind is.
Mind is a capacity, it’s a functioning, it’s an expression of cerebral sophistication, of neurological sophistication. In other words it’s an expression of the body. It’s a capacity of the physical. It’s a capacity of matter. You know we are still a little baffled. How did carbon get together with other elements and create life. We are still a little baffled by that, but we are prepared to accept that bafflement. Perhaps we should also accept bafflement of being unable to quite get how that can lead to mind, but it does. Here we are, I’m talking, you’re hearing, you’re understanding what I’m saying in your own way as my mind communicates with your mind. But actually my body is communication with your body through these words isn’t it? Vibrations are being created by my vocal cords and they are landing on your tympanic membrane. You think of it as words, you think of it as abstractions, you think of it as concepts, you think of it as mind and that’s true but it’s also body.
Where is the boundary between mind and body? Of course nobody has ever found such a thing because nobody has ever found such a thing as a mind. A mind is a functioning. There isn’t a beat of your heart that’s an object that you can find. It’s a functioning of your heart, it beats. You can’t grab a beat and say hey this is a nice beat, I’ll keep this one in a jar on the shelf. It’s just a functioning of the heart and the mind is a functioning of the brain the nervous system and the body. Its not just a cerebral cortex in my opinion. I would say, yes the amoeba does have a basic mind and a lizard has more of a mind, and a dog has more of a mind, and a woman more of a mind, and a man even more (laughter). You know I’m joking, am I? You don’t know if I’m joking (laughter) unless you know me pretty well and then you might know.
We need those boundaries in order to survive. But we need to understand the nature of those boundaries in order to really thrive. We need to understand their their functional nature, their conventional nature, so that we can perhaps begin to feel the extent of our own presence as going beyond that incredibly insistent and necessary boundary of our skin.
Now obviously having skin is not a problem. You wouldn’t be here without it. Not only would you not be here without it, you would have a lot less pleasure without it. You can take your mouth as your skin folded inwards or your skin as you mouth folded outwards. Doesn’t really matter how you look at these boundaries so long as you see that they are not really boundaries. But when you close your mouth, when you open your mouth the inside outside interpretations that you can make about that are taking place in your mind. But then you say, but my eyes are seeing them my fingers can feel them but what you see is taking place in your mind. The seeing is taking place in your mind. The feeling is taking place in your mind. Anyway that’s all very clear. I don’t need to labour the point.
Boundaries are perceptible impressions, are functions of the mind, and when you become very intimate within your own presence that becomes relatively obvious. You don’t hear the birds singing out there, you feel the birds singing inside you. Ok, maybe I should say that differently, you don’t only hear the birds singing outside, but at the same time you feel it vibrating inside you. If that happens enough, if what you normally perceive as being outside is experienced as being inside, this can make a radical difference in your approach to and your attitude towards life even towards survival.
Most people have a circle of care that extends beyond themselves, and those that don’t have a circle of care that extends beyond themselves, are normally not only pretty miserable but wanting to have one. They do want somebody to love and somebody to love them, into whose circle of care they can migrate and who can migrate into their circle of care. When you have a child then that child is in your circle of care and you see the boundaries but you don’t live as if you were totally separate from that being, from that expression of your own presence. Your a child is an expression of your own presence, and of course of your own activity.
So yes we can see certain boundaries between ourselves and our loved ones, but there is also boundarylessness inside our circle of care. Those you love are inside the most important boundary, the most difficult to cross boundary of all. They are inside the boundary implied by your skin. Clearly then boundary is a matter of perception.
Now, this boundary between you and me, us and them is not wrong. It does not have to be dismantled nor transcended. It does need to be contextualised. If not you are going to feel not only isolated, but even also, often threatened, when there is no actual threat. That is a survival boundary, and as such must be accepted and honoured in your behaviour. If not, you die. You will not survive.
You want to do more than merely survive though. You want to thrive. You want to flourish. You want to express yourself. You want to be yourself. You don’t just want to be alive, that’s not enough. Survival is a very very small part of your agenda. It may be the first and the basic, but once it’s taken care of, you’re not satisfied. You want to flourish and in order to really flourish you need to see the implications of boundaries into boundarylessness.
In other words not just feel boundaries dissolving when you’re making love or hugging your children but understand what that means that those boundaries are dissolving because you are relaxing out of your projections. You’re relaxing into what actually is more deeply than your projection.
Sometimes when you lie down or sit down, and your arms and feet and legs dissolve into softness, and softness dissolves into delight, you become aware only of delight or softness fluctuating, and only occasionally hands and arms and your social identity. Is this a hallucination or is this settling into the ground of what actually is, because you are unthreatened, because you are safe. You don’t need to defend yourself you don’t need to erect a boundary.
The purpose of boundaries is to feel safe, and yet, it just so happens that they only dissolve when you feel safe. It’s not that the boundary dissolving creates safety it’s the other way round. When you feel totally safe, if you feel totally safe, all of those perceived boundaries between your skin and mind, between this part of your body and another part of your body, between you and the earth, between your skin and the air, between your blood and the sun: they dissolve. All of the parts of your experience all of the elements of your experience all of the separate aspects of your experience dissolve into what the Buddha would call emptiness.
If you haven’t really experienced that dissolving of separate entities, dissolving of parts into emptiness, dissolving of the particular into emptiness you can imagine it might be like an empty glass, or empty pocket. It isn’t. Not at all. This kind of emptiness means no boundaries, no separation, no distinction, no identities. Emptiness means no way to make distinctions, no boundaries is what emptiness means. It doesn’t mean nothing. There is no such thing as nothing. Nothing is a concept. It’s only in the mind. It’s a very powerful concept, but a concept nonetheless. There would be no banking system without the concept of a zero and don’t underestimate the power of the banking system but it’s just a concept, nothing.
There is no such thing as nothing, but you think there is because sometimes you say I’m doing nothing or it means nothing to me or, there is nothing happening. But there always is something happening. Sunyata, or emptiness was a favourite concept of the Buddha and the Buddha was a man who definitely had a very deep lucid insight into the nature of mind.
We can look at the legacy of the Buddha we can say yes, that’s pretty profound, that’s pretty subtle even if we can find fault with some of it now that we have thousands of years of human development and hundreds of years of the scientific mind under us. Why was he so enamoured of emptiness, of Sunyata. When the Europeans first went to India and they discovered this notion of Sunyata, they were shocked: “oh these barbarians and their nihilism, their worshiping of nothing. It’s a complete misunderstanding. There is nothing nihilistic about Buddhism. There is nothing nihilistic about emptiness or Sunyata. Actually Sunyata is everything. It’s the richest possible abundance that you can conceive of. That’s what Sunyata means. That from which no thing is absent. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense is abundance, is abundant.
Sunyata means no distinction, no boundary, no separation, no self, no other. An emptiness of distinctions, of identity: no identities, no separateness because everything is one indivisible wholeness. Now that’s just a concept. One is just a concept, indivisible is just a concept, wholeness is just a concept. Still, that is what emptiness means: that all of these boundaries are biologically generated out of the necessity for survival, through the ability to perceive. An amoeba can perceive. If it couldn’t perceive it couldn’t respond. If it didn’t respond it wouldn’t survive. If it didn’t survive it couldn’t replicate. If amoebas hadn’t been replicating you wouldn’t be here and you are here. You are here because of this abundance of life, which in itself has no boundaries.
It’s very difficult for the mind to really get hold of that because as soon as you open your eyes you see nothing but boundaries between this post and that post, that board and the other board, this person and the other person. So close your eyes, where are the boundaries now? Immediately almost all of them completely disappear. Yes that’s because you had your eyes closed. If you had your eyes open you could see boundaries.
So what happened to the Buddha when he opened his eyes and didn’t see boundaries? He supposedly became enlightened when he didn’t see boundaries or when he didn’t see boundaries in the same way. .When the little boy went by he saw the boy, he could see the difference between the boy and the dirt and when the little girl came by with the bowl of rice gruel he put it to his lips, not his ears. He could still see boundaries but he was no longer their captive. He was no longer their slave. He was no longer bound by boundaries even though he was still living within them.
Even the Buddha didn’t create a language of emptiness. We have to talk about emptiness with the language of boundaries, a word is a boundary, a concept is a boundary. So we have to use boundaries to understand boundarylessness. Better, we have to experience boundarylessness. Then the words express themselves much more easily with our willingness and ability to recognise that every word has more than one meaning and some of those meanings appear to be contradictory but it doesn’t matter.
I love….you can finish that sentence. I’m sure you can finish that sentence, that phrase I love in more ways than one so that the word love means something completely different. I love my son, I love my daughter, I love my mother, I love my father Its different isn’t it. I love chocolate, I love pleasure. It’s different. So why not emptiness different, why not boundary different?
In other words you have to become more fluid in your mind in your interpretations if you want to thrive. You can’t deny boundaries and their significance, but if you deny boundarylessness and its significance you’re not going to flourish, you are not going to thrive. So anyway this implication of boundarylessness as the significance of emptiness being wholeness is what somatic intimacy means and it means this because normally, taken in by the convincing presence of boundaries you feel separate. You feel separate from… you can finish that sentence in a million ways. You feel separate from Mars, you feel separate from Paris, you feel separate from Safak, you feel separate from the floor, you feel separate from the earth, you feel separate from the insects, you feel separate from your lover, you feel separate from your children, you feel separate from the corridors of powers, you feel separate from the universe.
You’ve felt all of these things haven’t you. You’ve felt separate plenty and you’ve felt that separateness dissolving also. You’ve felt that separateness dissolving when you’ve taken up alcohol and you’ve felt that separateness dissolving twenty, thirty minutes after taking some LSD. You feel that separateness dissolving when the person that you want to kiss starts to kiss you etcetera, etcetera. Yes, you’ve experienced separateness dissolving on your mat and you’ve experienced separateness dissolving on your cushion.
One of the implications of your own presence is boundarylessness, and one of the implications of boundarylessness is wholeness. There is a wholeness, here, now. Not one that’s been put together like a Ferrari or Space Rocket. This wholeness that we are each a part of, that we are each an expression of has not been constructed. It simply is. It is simply an indivisible singularity that in itself has no boundaries at all. No beginnings. No endings. Only instantaneous simultaneous continuity.
What are you? Are you imaginary or are you real? Do you actually exist or are you a phantasm? You know the answer to that question, you are not a phantasm. You’re not quite so sure whether I am a phantasm or not. But you are absolutely sure that you are not. You know that you exist. You know that you are not imaginary. Now you can imagine yourself to be sexier than you are but you will never be as sexy as me (laugh) I didn’t mean to say that. You can imagine yourself being sexier than you are but you are not, that’s why you would imagine it, simply because you’re not. You can imagine yourself being cleverer than you are, but you are not. You are as clever as you are. You can imagine yourself being stronger than you are, but you are not stronger. You might be tomorrow but you are not stronger now because you are not imaginary.
There is no ‘er’ or ‘ers’ even, after the adjective that describe you as you are now. You are just as you are. You are not stronger, you will never be stronger than you are when you will be stronger than you are now, and you will still and always be what you are. You will never be imaginary but you can imagine being lots of things. Maybe you can’t imagine being as sexy as me but you can maybe imagine being a little stronger and you can imagine being a little longer and you can imagine….. you know, and that can go on and you can imagine but you are not any of those things. You are what you actually are.
You are imagining that you are separate and you are imagining that you’re threatened and you are imagining that things could be different but they are not and that they could be is purely imaginary but you are not imaginary. This is not imaginary. None of it that is actually here that is actually happening is imaginary. You can imagine all kinds of things. You can imagine what you would prefer to be happening.
You know maybe I would prefer there to be 50 people in here so I could deal with my debts or something or maybe I would prefer that Monica Belucci was here but she isn’t and I have to deal with that. I have to deal with what is actually here and I have to deal with what I actually am, not with what I imagine myself to be and I imagine myself perhaps to be threatened by Vincent Casell, that’s her ex husband. But that’s just imaginary. All of that is imaginary. That it could be different is imaginary. It is the way that it is and there are no boundaries intrinsically. There is no enemy. It seems like there is. I mean it seems like the bankers are part of the enemy army doesn’t it. The bankers and the petroleum developers and Shell, it seems like they are the enemy, but it seems like you are separate from me. It even seems like your children are separate from you. Appearances can be very deceptive and appearances can be very dangerous if they are not recognised as being deceptive.
Becoming intimate with your own presence so easily clarifies the presence and significance of boundarylessness, and its relationship to emptiness and wholeness. Experiencing this clearly enough and often enough can allow you to relax and stop fighting. Fighting is not expressed in any particular action it is an attitude that there is something wrong with A, B C D E or F. Well all that really means is that you don’t like something, and it’s really easy to turn what you don’t like into what is wrong. That’s what the mind does so really really well and then you get your mates together and I don’t know what the flag looks like but its black and white and you go marauding across the desert of Iraq and Syria killing Christians and Kurds and whatever.
Because you’ve worked it out. It’s very clear. It’s wrong. They are wrong. They should be killed and you have the means, so you do it. Don’t think you’re that different. You are not that different. Fundamentally you are not different at all. You just don’t have the same opportunities to express that side of yourself. But when you become intimate enough with your own presence consistently enough its implications become more obvious. Then for sure you will feel less alone, less separate, more supported, more safe even in the face of danger. Danger is potentially everywhere all the time. What the most dangerous thing in your environment right now? The sun. What’s the most generous thing in your environment right now? The Sun.
To become intimate with your own presence is eventually to become intimate with wholeness, and to understand that your experience of separateness is a necessary functional experience but it doesn’t describe the nature of reality. It’s not what actually is so maybe you can relax a little bit about all of the things you insist are the way they are that you don’t like.
When you become a Zen monk you shave your head and when you shave your head it symbolises something. It symbolises homelessness becoming, homeless; that you no longer have a home, you no longer own a home and in fact you no longer own anything. The Zen master I was with said Godfrey I know you’ve got long hair and so some people say you have to shave your head, don’t shave your head you’ve been homeless all your life, what you do need is a home and what you need from Zen is to learn to do nothing. This was the most powerful gift anybody ever gave to me, learn to do nothing; not learn to never do anything. That’s not what it means, but learn to be able to do nothing, to stop interfering on the basis of your preferences, your judgements. The biggest interference that we make is this erection of a boundary between me, myself and you lot out there. I don’t give a shit about you lot so long as it’s ok in here behind this boundary. Ok so you’re having a hard time, never mind, Yes I’d like to help you, but never mind. You don’t get very far like that because you are the wholeness. You do not exist, you cannot exist, alone, but by becoming intimate with your own presence you are invited into the wholeness. You are invited to acknowledge and to understand and to support the wholeness that is supporting you, and yes very often that means not doing a lot of the things that you would normally do, that you normally only do just because you are feeling separate or feeling bored so just become intimate with your own presence instead of, I don’t know what it is.
2009
I’d like to explore the implications of boundarylessness. The erosion of limits and borders that only too easily happens when you are intimate with your own presence. Of course this doesn’t even require stillness to happen. It’s a very common experience in yoga posture practice that you no longer feel limited, constrained by the three dimensions within which your body is normally recognised or perceived.
I suppose we have two fundamental options with which we can respond to this experience. We can either say, well that’s a nice hallucinatory effect of endorphin production or sweating or doing something different or whatever. That’s one option. It’s not so hard to imagine who would choose that option, but there is another option. Maybe it is not a hallucination, maybe in fact boundaries are hallucinations, boundaries are illusions.
Of course it’s pretty obvious that boundaries are necessary, not just legal boundaries between my property and your property otherwise you would just take my potatoes. But even more basically or you could say even more intimately than that, boundaries are necessary even to be able to think. It’s when we become intimate with our thinking, when we become intimate with our mind, when we start to experience directly how the mind works that we begin to at least suspect that boundarylessness is not a hallucination.
As we see the mind creating boundaries on the basis of its ability and its need to distinguish. Why does the mind need to distinguish to keep the body alive. An amoeba doesn’t need a mind to distinguish for it because its needs are so simple it just reacts from a more fundamental intelligence. An amoeba can also distinguish. An amoeba is also an expression of a boundary. You could say that is the fundamental expression of boundary that life generated, that life generates.
The inside/outside boundaries began with amoebas and is expressed in every one of your cells, but you have a lot more boundaries in your body that an amoeba does. An amoeba doesn’t just have that one boundary. Inside the amoeba it has all sorts of organelles and mitochondria with all their boundaries. Without those boundaries life would not have evolved in the way that it has. So boundaries are necessary even if they may be slightly hallucinatory, or even if they may be conventions of perception.
The amoeba has absolutely no sense of a boundary. It just reacts to different stimuli. But when everything is cool it doesn’t say to itself, God it’s nice in here, I’m glad there is none of that shitty stuff around. So an amoeba maybe has a boundary, as far as our mind is concerned, but it doesn’t need one as far as its intelligence is concerned, it just needs to respond. Nevertheless our minds can see boundaries everywhere, and that’s not an error, but it can be a problem if the nature of boundaries is not clearly understood.
That can be looked at in a number of ways. I’m going to look at it now from the point of view of how the mind works. In order to really understand how the mind works we really need to understand what the mind is, which is not very difficult even though it has flummoxed very intelligent people for thousands of years, it’s very easy to see what the mind is.
Mind is a capacity, it’s a functioning, it’s an expression of cerebral sophistication, of neurological sophistication. In other words it’s an expression of the body. It’s a capacity of the physical. It’s a capacity of matter. You know we are still a little baffled. How did carbon get together with other elements and create life. We are still a little baffled by that, but we are prepared to accept that bafflement. Perhaps we should also accept bafflement of being unable to quite get how that can lead to mind, but it does. Here we are, I’m talking, you’re hearing, you’re understanding what I’m saying in your own way as my mind communicates with your mind. But actually my body is communication with your body through these words isn’t it? Vibrations are being created by my vocal cords and they are landing on your tympanic membrane. You think of it as words, you think of it as abstractions, you think of it as concepts, you think of it as mind and that’s true but it’s also body.
Where is the boundary between mind and body? Of course nobody has ever found such a thing because nobody has ever found such a thing as a mind. A mind is a functioning. There isn’t a beat of your heart that’s an object that you can find. It’s a functioning of your heart, it beats. You can’t grab a beat and say hey this is a nice beat, I’ll keep this one in a jar on the shelf. It’s just a functioning of the heart and the mind is a functioning of the brain the nervous system and the body. Its not just a cerebral cortex in my opinion. I would say, yes the amoeba does have a basic mind and a lizard has more of a mind, and a dog has more of a mind, and a woman more of a mind, and a man even more (laughter). You know I’m joking, am I? You don’t know if I’m joking (laughter) unless you know me pretty well and then you might know.
We need those boundaries in order to survive. But we need to understand the nature of those boundaries in order to really thrive. We need to understand their their functional nature, their conventional nature, so that we can perhaps begin to feel the extent of our own presence as going beyond that incredibly insistent and necessary boundary of our skin.
Now obviously having skin is not a problem. You wouldn’t be here without it. Not only would you not be here without it, you would have a lot less pleasure without it. You can take your mouth as your skin folded inwards or your skin as you mouth folded outwards. Doesn’t really matter how you look at these boundaries so long as you see that they are not really boundaries. But when you close your mouth, when you open your mouth the inside outside interpretations that you can make about that are taking place in your mind. But then you say, but my eyes are seeing them my fingers can feel them but what you see is taking place in your mind. The seeing is taking place in your mind. The feeling is taking place in your mind. Anyway that’s all very clear. I don’t need to labour the point.
Boundaries are perceptible impressions, are functions of the mind, and when you become very intimate within your own presence that becomes relatively obvious. You don’t hear the birds singing out there, you feel the birds singing inside you. Ok, maybe I should say that differently, you don’t only hear the birds singing outside, but at the same time you feel it vibrating inside you. If that happens enough, if what you normally perceive as being outside is experienced as being inside, this can make a radical difference in your approach to and your attitude towards life even towards survival.
Most people have a circle of care that extends beyond themselves, and those that don’t have a circle of care that extends beyond themselves, are normally not only pretty miserable but wanting to have one. They do want somebody to love and somebody to love them, into whose circle of care they can migrate and who can migrate into their circle of care. When you have a child then that child is in your circle of care and you see the boundaries but you don’t live as if you were totally separate from that being, from that expression of your own presence. Your a child is an expression of your own presence, and of course of your own activity.
So yes we can see certain boundaries between ourselves and our loved ones, but there is also boundarylessness inside our circle of care. Those you love are inside the most important boundary, the most difficult to cross boundary of all. They are inside the boundary implied by your skin. Clearly then boundary is a matter of perception.
Now, this boundary between you and me, us and them is not wrong. It does not have to be dismantled nor transcended. It does need to be contextualised. If not you are going to feel not only isolated, but even also, often threatened, when there is no actual threat. That is a survival boundary, and as such must be accepted and honoured in your behaviour. If not, you die. You will not survive.
You want to do more than merely survive though. You want to thrive. You want to flourish. You want to express yourself. You want to be yourself. You don’t just want to be alive, that’s not enough. Survival is a very very small part of your agenda. It may be the first and the basic, but once it’s taken care of, you’re not satisfied. You want to flourish and in order to really flourish you need to see the implications of boundaries into boundarylessness.
In other words not just feel boundaries dissolving when you’re making love or hugging your children but understand what that means that those boundaries are dissolving because you are relaxing out of your projections. You’re relaxing into what actually is more deeply than your projection.
Sometimes when you lie down or sit down, and your arms and feet and legs dissolve into softness, and softness dissolves into delight, you become aware only of delight or softness fluctuating, and only occasionally hands and arms and your social identity. Is this a hallucination or is this settling into the ground of what actually is, because you are unthreatened, because you are safe. You don’t need to defend yourself you don’t need to erect a boundary.
The purpose of boundaries is to feel safe, and yet, it just so happens that they only dissolve when you feel safe. It’s not that the boundary dissolving creates safety it’s the other way round. When you feel totally safe, if you feel totally safe, all of those perceived boundaries between your skin and mind, between this part of your body and another part of your body, between you and the earth, between your skin and the air, between your blood and the sun: they dissolve. All of the parts of your experience all of the elements of your experience all of the separate aspects of your experience dissolve into what the Buddha would call emptiness.
If you haven’t really experienced that dissolving of separate entities, dissolving of parts into emptiness, dissolving of the particular into emptiness you can imagine it might be like an empty glass, or empty pocket. It isn’t. Not at all. This kind of emptiness means no boundaries, no separation, no distinction, no identities. Emptiness means no way to make distinctions, no boundaries is what emptiness means. It doesn’t mean nothing. There is no such thing as nothing. Nothing is a concept. It’s only in the mind. It’s a very powerful concept, but a concept nonetheless. There would be no banking system without the concept of a zero and don’t underestimate the power of the banking system but it’s just a concept, nothing.
There is no such thing as nothing, but you think there is because sometimes you say I’m doing nothing or it means nothing to me or, there is nothing happening. But there always is something happening. Sunyata, or emptiness was a favourite concept of the Buddha and the Buddha was a man who definitely had a very deep lucid insight into the nature of mind.
We can look at the legacy of the Buddha we can say yes, that’s pretty profound, that’s pretty subtle even if we can find fault with some of it now that we have thousands of years of human development and hundreds of years of the scientific mind under us. Why was he so enamoured of emptiness, of Sunyata. When the Europeans first went to India and they discovered this notion of Sunyata, they were shocked: “oh these barbarians and their nihilism, their worshiping of nothing. It’s a complete misunderstanding. There is nothing nihilistic about Buddhism. There is nothing nihilistic about emptiness or Sunyata. Actually Sunyata is everything. It’s the richest possible abundance that you can conceive of. That’s what Sunyata means. That from which no thing is absent. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense is abundance, is abundant.
Sunyata means no distinction, no boundary, no separation, no self, no other. An emptiness of distinctions, of identity: no identities, no separateness because everything is one indivisible wholeness. Now that’s just a concept. One is just a concept, indivisible is just a concept, wholeness is just a concept. Still, that is what emptiness means: that all of these boundaries are biologically generated out of the necessity for survival, through the ability to perceive. An amoeba can perceive. If it couldn’t perceive it couldn’t respond. If it didn’t respond it wouldn’t survive. If it didn’t survive it couldn’t replicate. If amoebas hadn’t been replicating you wouldn’t be here and you are here. You are here because of this abundance of life, which in itself has no boundaries.
It’s very difficult for the mind to really get hold of that because as soon as you open your eyes you see nothing but boundaries between this post and that post, that board and the other board, this person and the other person. So close your eyes, where are the boundaries now? Immediately almost all of them completely disappear. Yes that’s because you had your eyes closed. If you had your eyes open you could see boundaries.
So what happened to the Buddha when he opened his eyes and didn’t see boundaries? He supposedly became enlightened when he didn’t see boundaries or when he didn’t see boundaries in the same way. .When the little boy went by he saw the boy, he could see the difference between the boy and the dirt and when the little girl came by with the bowl of rice gruel he put it to his lips, not his ears. He could still see boundaries but he was no longer their captive. He was no longer their slave. He was no longer bound by boundaries even though he was still living within them.
Even the Buddha didn’t create a language of emptiness. We have to talk about emptiness with the language of boundaries, a word is a boundary, a concept is a boundary. So we have to use boundaries to understand boundarylessness. Better, we have to experience boundarylessness. Then the words express themselves much more easily with our willingness and ability to recognise that every word has more than one meaning and some of those meanings appear to be contradictory but it doesn’t matter.
I love….you can finish that sentence. I’m sure you can finish that sentence, that phrase I love in more ways than one so that the word love means something completely different. I love my son, I love my daughter, I love my mother, I love my father Its different isn’t it. I love chocolate, I love pleasure. It’s different. So why not emptiness different, why not boundary different?
In other words you have to become more fluid in your mind in your interpretations if you want to thrive. You can’t deny boundaries and their significance, but if you deny boundarylessness and its significance you’re not going to flourish, you are not going to thrive. So anyway this implication of boundarylessness as the significance of emptiness being wholeness is what somatic intimacy means and it means this because normally, taken in by the convincing presence of boundaries you feel separate. You feel separate from… you can finish that sentence in a million ways. You feel separate from Mars, you feel separate from Paris, you feel separate from Safak, you feel separate from the floor, you feel separate from the earth, you feel separate from the insects, you feel separate from your lover, you feel separate from your children, you feel separate from the corridors of powers, you feel separate from the universe.
You’ve felt all of these things haven’t you. You’ve felt separate plenty and you’ve felt that separateness dissolving also. You’ve felt that separateness dissolving when you’ve taken up alcohol and you’ve felt that separateness dissolving twenty, thirty minutes after taking some LSD. You feel that separateness dissolving when the person that you want to kiss starts to kiss you etcetera, etcetera. Yes, you’ve experienced separateness dissolving on your mat and you’ve experienced separateness dissolving on your cushion.
One of the implications of your own presence is boundarylessness, and one of the implications of boundarylessness is wholeness. There is a wholeness, here, now. Not one that’s been put together like a Ferrari or Space Rocket. This wholeness that we are each a part of, that we are each an expression of has not been constructed. It simply is. It is simply an indivisible singularity that in itself has no boundaries at all. No beginnings. No endings. Only instantaneous simultaneous continuity.
What are you? Are you imaginary or are you real? Do you actually exist or are you a phantasm? You know the answer to that question, you are not a phantasm. You’re not quite so sure whether I am a phantasm or not. But you are absolutely sure that you are not. You know that you exist. You know that you are not imaginary. Now you can imagine yourself to be sexier than you are but you will never be as sexy as me (laugh) I didn’t mean to say that. You can imagine yourself being sexier than you are but you are not, that’s why you would imagine it, simply because you’re not. You can imagine yourself being cleverer than you are, but you are not. You are as clever as you are. You can imagine yourself being stronger than you are, but you are not stronger. You might be tomorrow but you are not stronger now because you are not imaginary.
There is no ‘er’ or ‘ers’ even, after the adjective that describe you as you are now. You are just as you are. You are not stronger, you will never be stronger than you are when you will be stronger than you are now, and you will still and always be what you are. You will never be imaginary but you can imagine being lots of things. Maybe you can’t imagine being as sexy as me but you can maybe imagine being a little stronger and you can imagine being a little longer and you can imagine….. you know, and that can go on and you can imagine but you are not any of those things. You are what you actually are.
You are imagining that you are separate and you are imagining that you’re threatened and you are imagining that things could be different but they are not and that they could be is purely imaginary but you are not imaginary. This is not imaginary. None of it that is actually here that is actually happening is imaginary. You can imagine all kinds of things. You can imagine what you would prefer to be happening.
You know maybe I would prefer there to be 50 people in here so I could deal with my debts or something or maybe I would prefer that Monica Belucci was here but she isn’t and I have to deal with that. I have to deal with what is actually here and I have to deal with what I actually am, not with what I imagine myself to be and I imagine myself perhaps to be threatened by Vincent Casell, that’s her ex husband. But that’s just imaginary. All of that is imaginary. That it could be different is imaginary. It is the way that it is and there are no boundaries intrinsically. There is no enemy. It seems like there is. I mean it seems like the bankers are part of the enemy army doesn’t it. The bankers and the petroleum developers and Shell, it seems like they are the enemy, but it seems like you are separate from me. It even seems like your children are separate from you. Appearances can be very deceptive and appearances can be very dangerous if they are not recognised as being deceptive.
Becoming intimate with your own presence so easily clarifies the presence and significance of boundarylessness, and its relationship to emptiness and wholeness. Experiencing this clearly enough and often enough can allow you to relax and stop fighting. Fighting is not expressed in any particular action it is an attitude that there is something wrong with A, B C D E or F. Well all that really means is that you don’t like something, and it’s really easy to turn what you don’t like into what is wrong. That’s what the mind does so really really well and then you get your mates together and I don’t know what the flag looks like but its black and white and you go marauding across the desert of Iraq and Syria killing Christians and Kurds and whatever.
Because you’ve worked it out. It’s very clear. It’s wrong. They are wrong. They should be killed and you have the means, so you do it. Don’t think you’re that different. You are not that different. Fundamentally you are not different at all. You just don’t have the same opportunities to express that side of yourself. But when you become intimate enough with your own presence consistently enough its implications become more obvious. Then for sure you will feel less alone, less separate, more supported, more safe even in the face of danger. Danger is potentially everywhere all the time. What the most dangerous thing in your environment right now? The sun. What’s the most generous thing in your environment right now? The Sun.
To become intimate with your own presence is eventually to become intimate with wholeness, and to understand that your experience of separateness is a necessary functional experience but it doesn’t describe the nature of reality. It’s not what actually is so maybe you can relax a little bit about all of the things you insist are the way they are that you don’t like.
When you become a Zen monk you shave your head and when you shave your head it symbolises something. It symbolises homelessness becoming, homeless; that you no longer have a home, you no longer own a home and in fact you no longer own anything. The Zen master I was with said Godfrey I know you’ve got long hair and so some people say you have to shave your head, don’t shave your head you’ve been homeless all your life, what you do need is a home and what you need from Zen is to learn to do nothing. This was the most powerful gift anybody ever gave to me, learn to do nothing; not learn to never do anything. That’s not what it means, but learn to be able to do nothing, to stop interfering on the basis of your preferences, your judgements. The biggest interference that we make is this erection of a boundary between me, myself and you lot out there. I don’t give a shit about you lot so long as it’s ok in here behind this boundary. Ok so you’re having a hard time, never mind, Yes I’d like to help you, but never mind. You don’t get very far like that because you are the wholeness. You do not exist, you cannot exist, alone, but by becoming intimate with your own presence you are invited into the wholeness. You are invited to acknowledge and to understand and to support the wholeness that is supporting you, and yes very often that means not doing a lot of the things that you would normally do, that you normally only do just because you are feeling separate or feeling bored so just become intimate with your own presence instead of, I don’t know what it is.
2009