into emptiness

Lake floating in cloud

An old tree leans ever further

Into emptiness

This is what awaits us – emptiness. A still lake shrouded in cloud, mist. This is the emptiness of death. Not just physical death, it's also the emptiness that lies at the heart of our mind. Emptiness. There's a stillness in it, a peace, peacefulness, floating, floating in space itself, spacious, empty stillness.

Perhaps if you have meditated, you are familiar with this place, deep within oneself, within one's mind, beneath the mind, encompassing the mind – pure empty consciousness. This place, which is not a place, offers no handhold. It is formless. It has no character, no attributes to distinguish it. It is the realm of non-duality, where the self no longer exists as a separate entity. And this is our true nature, only we don't want to see it. We don't want to admit it.

For to admit this is to abandon everything we have ever invested in: our identity, the personal feeling of our relationships. These things rely on that false sense of a separate self, that dualistic world that our own thinking mind has created. Only whilst we are believing that this duality is real, only whilst we live with this illusion, believing in it, only when we delude ourselves in this way, can we feel ourselves to be separate, and from a place of separateness have an identity, an ego, personal relationships.

This whole dualistic world is an artificial creation. It has come from us believing that our symbolic thinking mind is reality. It is not. And as we mature, spiritually, we, like this old tree in the poem, lean further and further into the truth of emptiness.