face this emptiness

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Can the mind face and live with this emptiness and not escape in any direction?

(Krishnamurti - The Urgency of Change)

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To escape from the emptiness is fear. I fear the emptiness. As soon as I begin some 'doing' I have begun to fill the emptiness. What is the emptiness? Is it the sense of everything going on and on forever into all eternity? I see that everything has been going on for billions and billions of years, billions of cycles of the earth around the sun and, of course, even before and beyond that.  


How can achievements and goals hold any validity in that immensity of space without measure? The sages speak of being in the space free of concepts like space and time and free of the sense of being a center as 'me'. Here where I am, however, there is still the compulsion to move and create those fascinating (and sometimes horrific) patterns in the mind-stuff. Those I can hold on to, those I know and those give me a sense of the familiar. 

It is said that the way out of the compulsion of the 'love to be' is to relax into the 'mere being'. He said: "Although this body is lying lifeless like a corpse, I know that I am. Unaffected in the least by this death my being is shining clearly." (Ramana) This is the fact: My being is NOT one with the body, but is of its own, eternal, changeless, self-shining. The words come out onto the page easily now, but the realization of this "fact" is still not steady and continuous. It comes in flashes and then it is gone. 

Yes, I had my own extended episode of realization that time in the hotel in Colombo - when was it? Sometime around 1982... I was on my way back from my tour of Tamil Nadu and my sojourn at Ramana's Ashram in Tiruvannamalai. The entire hotel, all physical surroundings were palpably 'the Heart" that was 'taking care of me'. Now Mooji says: "The Heart is what we are." This 'something' that has no form but pervades all forms - how it escapes my awareness!

My awareness is hard-wired to rely on the data-input from my physical sense organs. Is there a marriage of the two? or as the Yoga Sutras say: The energy of Pure Seeing is distinct from the energy of the Seen, the Observed. When they mix, there is avidya, confusion.

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