Posted inDharma, Henry's Messages

Message from Henry: Sunyata

April 21, 2022

In his massive, strange book Nostos, the Irish philosopher-poet-sage John Moriarty bemoans the loss of a human and mythic cosmos, in the face of the vast, bleak Newtonian and geological universe. He sees the scientific view of the last three hundred years as having stripped away the richness of a mythic view of things.

But how about this: Consider the internet for someone using it – its richness, its multiplicity of experiences. Yet it’s all coming from cold cement sheds in remote places such as the Scottish Hebridean islands, where storage facilities house great banks of data, powered by cheap electricity from wind turbines in those windy reaches.

From a look at the banks of data storage in those concrete bunkers, how could we ever guess the richness of experience available on the internet?

Likewise, look at the bare mineral universe, and you could never guess the experience of life. Look at the bare geological world, and you’d never imagine the experience of color, shape and a billion species.

Look through sense-experience, to the bareness of sunyata – and you’d never guess sunyata could make and be all this. We see:

Sunyata is an utter marvel of loss.

Sunyata is an utter marvel of love.

Our fulfillment and our reality is in knowing both.

Likewise the brain, the grey and white sludge so drab in color – but from within its circuitry, it creates a world of color, sound, taste, touch, smell and thought and feeling. How can this be? Aren’t these examples analogous somehow? Could it be that if we solve one we solve them all?

Message from Henry is from our April 18, 2022 Newsletter.

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