For many years in the 90’s and 2000’s I offered community ed courses at a community college where I taught philosophy classes. One day the director of community education stopped me and asked me to participate in a series of speakers talking about their form of spirituality. It was going to include several representatives of major religions I knew well and used as guest speakers in my regular courses.
She asked me, what my tradition was, and I replied, nothing. thinking that was a satisfactory response, but when then the course schedule was published, my name did not appear. While I never asked, clearly nothing , though so central to my thinking and spiritual practice, was to this person not something. Perhaps I should have sent her a copy of Wallace Stevens, The Snowman.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
( a good visual is here : https://youtu.be/lFX7STnf44w}
My experience of emptiness began as that- an experience I could not name but clearly recognized as a unique experience occurring many times when teaching a class on a particular religion, religious thinker or many philosophers. In these posts I want to explore emptiness by examples and anecdotes because I don’t believe it can be reduced to a concept. I begin with one of my favorite poems that spoke to me in ways I could not understand for many years before hearing the sound and space of emptiness.
To keep this a post and not an essay, I am avoiding any of the rich readings of the poem or background of how Stevens might have come to compose it.
A mind of winter, cold a long time
Many poets, philosophers, thinkers have regarded the decline of the influence of Christianity and the Western God as trauma and tragedy. This has not been just an academic reaction. Many people, many clients and students I have had over the years have moved quickly to another religion or form of spirituality, avoiding consciously or unconsciously the experience of absence. For Wallace, the absence of God was simply assumed. The result is an environment of absence that is not tragic but is home. Experiencing the cold as a place to stay not to run away from. This mind “regards “ the trees, the ice , and the wind, and thinks of no misery. A world without God and without a replacement for God. A world experienced without the hope of return or relief.
Listening to the wind
The wind that blows is no breath of God blowing across the face of the earth. It is rather, wind that belongs to the land. The wind, the sound, the land are the same. No greater purpose being served, no plan using these elements. There is manifestation of nothing, which is not no-thing. A real experience, but it takes a particular perspective to be able to listen to this sound.
The empty mind
The listener does not look beyond the land, snow and wind, but stands in the snow aware he is part of the nothing. This nothing not there and also the nothing that is. This might make you think of the Zen concept of no mind, or the Heart Sutra that I’ll talk about in another post. Here I want to relate this idea of nothing that is not nothing to the experience I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
I think of this empty space as a perspective that as nothing, has nothing to add. Teaching about Hinduism, Christianity Jainism, etc, I would feel emptiness as an openness. Emersed in the stories and doctrines of a particular spirituality, my only agenda was openness. I had no larger framework to fit it into, no other place to stand in order to critique it.
Over the years this unchosen sense of openness evolved into an awareness of emptiness. It is now the center of my spiritual practice. I wish all those years ago I could have been clearer in my answer to that director. I think it would have been an interesting course.
For many years in the 90’s and 2000’s I offered community ed courses at a community college where I taught philosophy classes. One day the director of community education stopped me and asked me to participate in a series of speakers talking about their form of spirituality. It was going to include several representatives of major religions I knew well and used as guest speakers in my regular courses.
She asked me, what my tradition was, and I replied, nothing. thinking that was a satisfactory response, but when then the course schedule was published, my name did not appear. While I never asked, clearly nothing , though so central to my thinking and spiritual practice, was to this person not something. Perhaps I should have sent her a copy of Wallace Stevens, The Snowman.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
( a good visual is here : https://youtu.be/lFX7STnf44w}
My experience of emptiness began as that- an experience I could not name but clearly recognized as a unique experience occurring many times when teaching a class on a particular religion, religious thinker or many philosophers. In these posts I want to explore emptiness by examples and anecdotes because I don’t believe it can be reduced to a concept. I begin with one of my favorite poems that spoke to me in ways I could not understand for many years before hearing the sound and space of emptiness.
To keep this a post and not an essay, I am avoiding any of the rich readings of the poem or background of how Stevens might have come to compose it.
A mind of winter, cold a long time
Many poets, philosophers, thinkers have regarded the decline of the influence of Christianity and the Western God as trauma and tragedy. This has not been just an academic reaction. Many people, many clients and students I have had over the years have moved quickly to another religion or form of spirituality, avoiding consciously or unconsciously the experience of absence. For Wallace, the absence of God was simply assumed. The result is an environment of absence that is not tragic but is home. Experiencing the cold as a place to stay not to run away from. This mind “regards “ the trees, the ice , and the wind, and thinks of no misery. A world without God and without a replacement for God. A world experienced without the hope of return or relief.
Listening to the wind
The wind that blows is no breath of God blowing across the face of the earth. It is rather, wind that belongs to the land. The wind, the sound, the land are the same. No greater purpose being served, no plan using these elements. There is manifestation of nothing, which is not no-thing. A real experience, but it takes a particular perspective to be able to listen to this sound.
The empty mind
The listener does not look beyond the land, snow and wind, but stands in the snow aware he is part of the nothing. This nothing not there and also the nothing that is. This might make you think of the Zen concept of no mind, or the Heart Sutra that I’ll talk about in another post. Here I want to relate this idea of nothing that is not nothing to the experience I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
I think of this empty space as a perspective that as nothing, has nothing to add. Teaching about Hinduism, Christianity Jainism, etc, I would feel emptiness as an openness. Emersed in the stories and doctrines of a particular spirituality, my only agenda was openness. I had no larger framework to fit it into, no other place to stand in order to critique it.
Over the years this unchosen sense of openness evolved into an awareness of emptiness. It is now the center of my spiritual practice. I wish all those years ago I could have been clearer in my answer to that director. I think it would have been an interesting course.