I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices.
So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands of individual understanding. Words can be bridges, as well as barriers. The notion that emptiness is the primordial substance is, of course, ageless. It’s at the core of every deep mystical spirituality.
Recently I came across this piece about Faqir Chand, an Indian mystic, written by David Lane. It’s an interesting discussion of the idea that every sort of form, whether physical or spiritual, ultimately stands between us and the highest reality, which I like to think of as pure and simple existence. “Sat,” in an Indian language. Truth. Existence. Real reality. What remains when everything that isn’t truly Sat is removed.
Sat often is combined with chit and ananda, Sat-Chit-Ananda. Existence, consciousness, bliss. Probably the best three-word description of God, or ultimate reality, that anyone could ever come up with, the real Trinity. We need it all. Truth. But also consciousness of truth. And who would want a nasty, painful, horrible consciousness of truth. So bliss too. Satchitananda. Blissful awareness of fundamental existence. Sounds good to me.
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