Zen Fullness

And the Gift to the World of Your Own Weirdness

Much of Zen focuses on what we habitually call “emptiness.” And this is both an important concept, but, more importantly, an important experience. What is meant by emptiness in here is that no-thing carries within it an essential “self” that is separate from its ever-changing context. Any particular “thing” is actually a process of relationships, an entangled, temporary assemblage. Nouns serve as a conventional placeholder, but in real life, everything is a verb. Experiencing this emptiness is exactly what we learn to relax into in our sitting practice. In this practice we see that our thoughts are historically contextual and impermanent. They come out of the nowhere of our past, our memories, our projections, our day and night dreams, our delusions. They are a endless, bottomless parade- like blown soap bubbles at a birthday party. Insubstantial. Dreamy.

Empty.

Just like any particular thing.

Just like us.

And yet, this word, “emptiness,” connotes lack. When may gas tank is empty, it lacks gasonline. When my stomach is empty, it lacks food. When I am tired, I am empty of energy- food, glucose, sleep.

When my life is empty, it lacks life.

So conceptualizing this lack of “self” can make it seem like the task is to rid ourselves of this “self.” To recede into Oneness. To even out our uniquness into a bland, wonderbread sameness. To nihilisitically rid our life of the energy of its life. Language doesn’t just prescriptively describe; it proscriptively creates a frame of interpretation. And the language of emptiness can consciously, or, especially, unconsciously, connote a bland dullness. A recession from life rather than an entering into it.

The point of understanding emptiness is to know that if everything is “empty” everything is also One.

True.

But it can therefore seem that because all is One, everything- all moments, all things, all people- are all the same.

It can imply that our task is to become boring.

This is so not true.

I am currently reading the Flower Ornament Sutra. (Also known as the Avatamsaka Sutra.) It is a beautiful, impossible sutra, and, at over 1400 small print pages, also the longest sutra. So I am not necessarily recommending it. (Though please dip your proverbial toes into it. Or, better yet, read Ben Connelly’s very accessable and inspiring commentary on it.)

It is also a wonderful antidote to a bland conception of emptiness.

The sutra is full.

Full of buddhas, jewels, sunlight. It is full of life. It is absolutely anti-empty. Its fullness is way over the top. It is superabundant. And again and again and again it points out that fact that each moment, each dharma, each “thing,” is not merely empty, but actually full of everything. Each particluar “thing” that arises within a moment of time is actually an expression of everything. Each thing expresses the whole. Each moment of “now” also necessarily contains everything that occurrend before now, and everything that will occur after.

Which means it is impossible for life to be nihilistically empty. Because if everything that arises contains all else, then every moment matters. And you, as an interdependently conditioned expression of the whole, are necessarily incredibly unique. The bottomless set of conditions that you arose from are unique to you. All other people have a different set of bottomless conditions that they arose from. And thus your very particular uniqueness is incredibly important to the whole.

Our practice is not to empty our lives, but to embrace the fullness of every moment as it presents itself, uniquely.

It took the whole history of the world to create the conditons that allowed you to appear. And your appearance will create a whole future. Connelly writes, “We are creating the world we live in, and the world to come. We are the fruit of seeds, and we are planting seeds.”

The choices you make, the life you bring, matters.

Immensely.

So our Zen practice is to sit while continually letting go of our resistence to life. This resistance comes in the form of our conceptions, our ideas of who we should or shouldn’t be, what life should or shouldn’t be, of what we should or shouldn’t do. All of this we let come, and we let go. Instead of habitually grasping on to these ideas as a way of protecting them, of protecting our idea of our “self,” we allow life to present it self as it is, unfiltered. Which is always somewhat different from we think it should be, or shouldn’t be. This is what allows us to live from the force of life that is always expressing itself, uniquely, through us.

Which means that we must have the courage to be weird.

Because what arises as we experience each moment is also an overwhelming compassion and sense of love that binds the world together. We don’t have to create compassion. It is not something that we have to generate. It is something that arises all on its own. It is inherent to what I am calling the force of life. It doesn’t belong to us. We don’t own it. It’s not a property with its own essentialized self. Compassion is an interative pattern of response that arises from experiencing, moment to moment, each unique expression of the force of life. In each connected experience of the uniqueness of each moment, we recognize our wholeness as an expression of what Thomas Merton called the “hidden wholeness” underlying everything.

And to be straightforward, such compassion makes us weird, “strikenly odd, especially in an unsettling way.” Compassion calls for a response. A response that will be unique to us. Unique to the moment.

The people we admire the most have the courage to be weird, to defy convention, to be unsettling in their compassion. To break with the karmic conditioning of our society. Because, as Bruce Cockburn put it, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”

Martin Luther King, that master of unsettling defiance of social conventionality, called this “maladjustment.” He said, “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; danger, passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives and men [and women] do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”

The strength to be weirdly maladjusted to unjust conditioning/conventions arises from our connection to the force of life that generates compassion. (Note, [again]- life itself generates compassion so that we don’t have to. Its a gift.)

Our work is to stay connected and to have the courage to be oddly unsettling as we courageously live from this connection.

Our work is to live the fullness of life through our weirdness. Our refusal to adjust.

Bodhisattva work is the work of creative maladjustment.

May you be weird.