a positive path for spiritual living

Emptiness & Possibility

field-tree

Last Sunday morning we sang a lovely new chant by our friend Mark Shepard called I Am Walking in a Field. It begins,

I am walking in a field
I am walking in a field
I am walking in a field of Possibility

And then myriad verses are possible: I am healing in the light of Possibility; I am dancing in the rain, etc. But my favorite is, “When I’m empty I am full… of Possibility.”

To begin with, I love the use of the word Possibility, especially when it’s capitalized. Most of our ways of naming the Divine also limit it in some way. But “Possibility” is wide open, and I don’t mean wide open for interpretation, either. Interpretation equals limitation. To say that I am “walking a field of Possibility” is to proclaim oneself open to wonder. It is to admit that I have no idea what anything really is but I am ready to receive. And that admission is the beginning of wisdom.

In about the 6th century BCE, Lao Tzu began his Tao Te Ching with these words (translation by Stephen Mitchell):

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

It’s the same idea. He counsels us to remain in that field of possibility and not to get caught up in the particular, in the naming of things, in thinking we’ve caught the fish. One commentator on this passage, Jim Clatfelter, says,

“Lao Tzu begins the Book of Tao by telling us that the Tao, the absolute, cannot be defined with words. He says we must look for it. This looking or seeing is total seeing – looking out at the world of appearance and looking in at its origin in the spacious emptiness at the very center of our being. This emptiness is truly empty and truly great because it contains all possibility, all potential, and all that appears. It’s the source of all that exists – and aware of itself as such.”

When we empty ourselves of all our preconceptions and release our attempts to define and separate everything into categories, we can become open to the Truth that is really present. Mystics tell us that in the deepest part of our being we are fundamentally and eternally at one with God, with the All, and that we can experience that Oneness if we drop our pretenses and become totally receptive.

When we insist on making up our own definitions of what everything is, we become the “Owner of Two Shops” as the poet Rumi puts it:

You own two shops,
and you run back and forth.

Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap,
getting always smaller.
Checkmate, this way. Checkmate that.

Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore.
You are the free-swimming fish.

Earlier in that same poem he delivers this two-line punch:

Live in the nowhere that you came from,
even though you have an address here.

I have no more to say after a line like that!

Join us if you are able for this Sunday’s multi-faith music and meditation service at 6:00 pm. I will be away this week, but Mark, Pete and Sarah will be there to help you find the fullness in the emptiness.

Peace,
Roger