Wo. I, me. The symbol for wo is a person holding a spear. The very idea of the self implies conflict and defense. Who holds the spear, and what is the original nature of that person?
As soon as someone comes too close to us, we loudly shout for them to get away. If they don’t, we pick up our spear to drive them off.
After the conflict, what do we do? We tensely mull over our fright and indignation and prepare for greater conflicts. When they come back, we say, “I’ll show them.”
The sages would ask us what we have to be so defensive about. If we were truly to inquire into the nature of things, we would see that there is nothing we can truly lose, so there is nothing we need to defend. What they mean is that the self is only something we to as a convenient and pragmatic way of thinking, but it is not a reality.
What is the reality of the self?
Inquire on one level, and you will see we are all gods.
Inquire more deeply, and you will see that we are all spirit.
Inquire more deeply, and you will see that we are all Tao.
Inquire deepest of all, and you will see that Tao is the void.
And what need is there to pick up a spear and try to defend the void?
________
I’ve pretty much closed myself off from other people lately. It’s mostly because I’m tired of trusting in people and then being hurt when they close me out. I get to know someone so well and put my trust in them, and then they cut me off and refuse to talk to me. With those I am still close to, I just don’t want to extend the relationships further anymore. I am comfortable in myself where I am right now, but connecting with others and trusting them opens me up to being vulnerable to that hurt of being cut off again, and I just don’t want to go through that anymore.
Perhaps what I fear is still really the void. I can accept being a part of Tao, a part of the void, and yet actually experiencing the void itself is still something I don’t want to do. Feeling the void in my own life left by the absence of others from it has been painful, and I can’t yet separate that pain from the void. I know ultimately that I need to detach from the pain but I’m not really ready to do that. I don’t feel it most of the time, but when I think of the people who have gone missing from my life, it is still painful.
Perhaps I need to feel that I haven’t really lost them. I have my memories, I have my experience of them, and I realize there wasn’t really much more I could have gotten from those people. When I think about them, I realize I knew them so well, I had learned all I couild have from them, and knew how they would act and be in most situations. And now I know that in the worst of times, they would not have supported me, because they did not.
And do I really need such people in my life? Probably not.
So what is there really to fear?
No Responses