7. THE PROBLEM OF NOTHINGNESS

We have given here the basic model of the Kabbalah, but we must remember that the Kabbalah employs highly intricate and difficult concepts the more it advances into its metaphysics and it is perhaps here that we might part company. Nevertheless, since eventually we must move into the area of meditation and contemplation, it is important to grasp the Kabbalah understanding of Nothingness and see if that helps in any way our own understanding of our Chan Dao teachings, practice and contemplation.

The Kabbalah speaks of the unfolding, emanation and evolution of "Something from Nothing".

Kabbalists refer to this as the beginning (Bereshit), the hidden point or the Primordial Point. It is the point for us where life begins and later evolves into the human creature.

Ari declared, "know that before the emanations emanated and the creations were created that the supernal simple Light filled the entire existence (within the world) and there was no empty space or vacuum whtsoever. For everything was filled with the light of the En Sof, the endless world. However, when the simple desire arose to permit the creation of the worlds and to emanate emanations and thus bring forth the perfection of its deeds, names and appellations, this was the cause of the creation of the worlds."

We see this "simple desire" as the generation through natural evolution of the first element life itself with the corresponding "force of survival which is the force of natural auto- perpetuation".

In the Kabbalah this "force of survival which is the force of natural auto-perpetuation" is termed the "Thought of Creation".

This moment in the Kabbalah is termed the middle point, primordial point, and it is said that at that point the Primordial Light withdrew and there remained empty space or a vacuum surrounding the exact middle point.

We remember that this is a model to assist understanding and when one speaks of the withdrawal of light that does not imply the state of visible darkness, only the withdrawal of a spiritual light.

So then how can we evaluate that?

Certainly the generation of life with its Life Force was a unigue event within our now conceptually limited world. We know that although "life" thus separated is not really separated from the whole, yet it is to life itself with a primitive consciousness separated from all else.

We can say then that a primitive consciousness, not of itself, but of unconscious other-relatedness may be considered as a removal from the Light of the Totality, the unified oneness. This then is not a real removal but a separation which still contains the oneness in the Avatamsaka sutra sense.

Eventually we see with the evolution of a "self/no-self" consciousness a sense of something lacking might well have come into consciousness with a desire to return to that oneness.

Let us examine that homeostatic impulse to retain a oneness with the Light (Devekuth) which arrives clearly within consciousness only when there evolved concepts of time, space and motion.

Any possible return must be considered as a release from consciousness but that does not entail a return to a place of Darkness, but rather the Light of Oneness without consciousness. A state indeed of conceptual nothingness.

Do we not indeed in Chan Dao consider the Awakening a return to a state of conceptual nothingness to the Light of Oneness? Yet paradoxically that Contemplational return to the conceptual nothingness is accompanied by the physiological experience like that of birth when the senses are fully receptive without any possible differentiation and "perceive" nothing but undifferentiated light.

Paradoxically then the return to the Light of oneness which is not a physiological state is accompanied by a physiological unrelated phenomenological experience of undifferentiated light.

Or perhaps it is no coincidence. Perhaps indeed the sages simply chose the expression "Light" to match the physiological experience of the Awakening. Probably this is pure romantic speculation.