Emptiness
Wrapped in silence, the world takes shape out of its own stillness. The manifestation is a product of the stillness, the form impossible without the formlessness that is under it. Wrapped in this substance of absolute silence, all that we are becomes possible; the potential is inseparable from the emptiness underneath. We are people designed out of absence; we are made of lack; we are, at all, because nothing at all is under us. The emergence becomes possible only out of the emptiness. And this is not only the holy blessing of all things, it is the physical, scientific fact of them. We are constituted this way, and this way is as much a law as it is a grace. This fact of birth out of silence, form out of nothingness, is the immutable axis that the universe turns on, the unshakable principle, and so this grace is not some kind of surprise blessing, not some accident or exception, it is all that is and it is that which all that is rests upon. And so, when we seek to be or to become, to transform or to transcend in any way at all, we must seek that out of the emptiness, because it is that emptiness—and only that emptiness—which holds such potential. Manifestation does not beget itself; form does not make new form. The stuff of one shape may reconstitute into the shape of another but the guiding principle of that reorganization, the plan, the blueprint itself, does not reside in a form, it resides in the nothingness, and so the principle of that reorganization, the fuel for that, that which makes that transformation possible, comes up continuously from the great substratum that is silence itself. This principle has a more profound effect on your own personal becoming than any other single principle, and it is regularly your task and your quest to dip into, to open into, that limitless substratum of silence so that what may be born will be. Any other means of self-growth or self-investigation, any other method for actualization that does not root into this emptiness is necessarily limited in what it can produce. If you want to be new, if you want to be really changed, if the threshold you seek is one you have not even yet imagined then place yourself in the emptiness first, commit yourself into the silence. This will be only episodic, of course, but it will be, every time you do it, the basis for any real and lasting transformation. Form begets nothing at all; emptiness begets form. Settle into this. Know this to be so. Live with a constancy to that practice you have found which allows you access to the silence, which lets you touch the pool of all potential and opens you to the great intelligence always at work in that formlessness. We are well made, and we are not the designers. Let your own potential emerge from those depths just as all manifestation will and must. Give rise to yourself through your surrender into that. Be at peace and at home within that emptiness and you become all that you can be, all the great transcended potential that is waiting within that emptiness just for you. Again, form begets nothing at all; emptiness begets form. Nothing could be more holy, and nothing is more relevant to your personal search.
02.13.14