Emptiness, Form and Conscious Matter
“The only way to clear up the problem of samsaric existence is to dissolve ignorance into the primordial ground. This is done through simply recognizing the natural state of mind and not perpetuating the habit of dualistic fixation; by simply letting be in naturalness, without accepting or rejecting. That is what overcomes all obstacles. Recognizing this precious self-existing wakefulness is like the sun that vanquishes all darkness.” Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
All composite phenomenon is impermanent
When something arises, whatever it is, it inherently contains its own cessation. When a thought or even state arises, it also contains its own cessation. Nothing else comes along to clear it away, it clears itself away inherently because it is not permanent. Like bubbles on water or waves in the ocean. There’s no separation and no permanence.
Emptiness means that things exist insomuch as they are the result of prior conditions. They are real, but lack intrinsic meaning. They arose from other things that also lack intrinsic meaning.
Composite form is made of stuff. That stuff changes. It is empty of its own “selfness”. Form is completely empty. It cannot be isolated from other phenomena. Emptiness is the basis for form. In some sense, we can say that emptiness creates form. Form comes out of emptiness.
Form is form. Form isn’t being rejected. It’s the independent origination of form that is being rejected. This is not a contradiction. Emptiness makes cause and effect possible.
You can put water into a device to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. We can then have a device create water from these atoms. If consciousness is fundamental to everything, hence it exists in a universe with other conscious entities that can interact (water binds to water in a conscious way), then even if a specific person ends, its atoms or suchness goes on into others. It’s just a temporary state of ‘being’. In a way, all atoms pass and move on, putting that conscious matter into other conscious matter. As nothing is ever a permanent anything, just an empty form, we have to argue that reincarnation is constant and all the time. The universe beats as one conscious thing. Therefore, nothing leaves.
You might argue that “Well, consciousness isn’t fundamental. The wood in my desk doesn’t appear very conscious.” When you plant a mango seed, you get a mango tree that produces mangos; you don’t get apples, barley or rice. If we rigidly define consciousness to mean intelligent life, as most scientists do, then we are no more advocating for a turtles all the way down philosophy than most theology. How can it be that the random generation of elements brings rise to conscious life if it is nothing itself? Like a mango seed producing mangos inevitably. Moreover, what is stopping the matter in your table from just shredding apart and disappearing before your eyes? Is that not a conscious system and, even by our definitions, an intelligence?
When we examine what it means to be a “person with a brain that produces consciousness and a body that the person owns”, there’s nothing concrete at all. We contain billions and billions of carbon-based lifeforms and innumerable systems of interconnection. What is our own? At what point, as we are adding all these things together, do we get to say “Ah, yes, there is the self. I see it now.” Neuroscience has rightfully failed to find any loci of self in the brain, a fact Buddhists have known for centuries.
We like to say that a system is either autonomic (heart rate, digestion, etc.) or not. If we go with this bifurcation, then do we also not see that we are made of conscious systems of life in those regards, which are completely outside of our immediate control?
The passing of knowledge from one to another is barely concrete. A self and an organism is a process with no beginning or end. Knowledge, genetics, etc. are empty and just viewed in their temporary forms or known in their temporary transmissions. They’re inherently void of independence. We are all inherently free of independence. The inter-being, as Thich Nhat Hanh rightfully coins it, of suchness is in everything and inescapable.
Inter-being is observed because everything is one. Nothing is truly inseparable, as everything is void of substance and dependent on other things. It’s therefore best to rest in this Zen koan: “The whole universe throughout all its ten directions is the One Bright Pearl.”
