Posted inHenry's Messages

Message from Henry: The Fertile Void

July 29, 2020

One touch and it sucked away the universe. Another, and all things were born.

Today’s message is an excerpt from Henry’s memoir, One Blade of Grass, describing an aspect of his path of training. Read Marvelous and Ordinary to put this week’s piece in context. 

There’s an enlightenment poem by Yamada Koun with the line: All my karmic sins were extinguished as if in a bolt of lightening.

An ancient ax strikes the cranium. Suddenly it appears: the bare fact of nothing at all. All this living, all this Zen: all along it was nothing.

Nothing to see, no one to see, no seeing. Next thing you’re on the floor, face wet with fears and laughter, every last nook and cranny of your self gone, therefore fully absolved.

The strange thing was that anytime I chose to look, it was still going on. A black hole in reverse, a sun, a nuclear fusion seething away–but where? I didn’t see how anyone could say. What it was, everything was. One touch and it sucked away the universe. Another, and all things were born.

The mother and father of everything, the fertile void: so loving, so powerful, so all aware–what a thing it was. Yet is was no thing.

Message from Henry is from our July 27, 2020 Newsletter
Image: Science Channel by eli007, from Pixabay.com
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