Friday, January 19, 2007

Lending a helping hand, a realization of sunyata

I've been helping D with the computer for her friend. D finds the help I've been providing rather too selfless. I wonder if she is struggling with the idea that I'm being this helpful without asking for much, if not anything, in return. It even worries her, I feel. It would perhaps do the same to me. She is trying hard to see what the "real hidden agenda" behind all this is. At this point, I don't have any at all! The way I see it, I have the opportunity, time and "skill" to do what needs to be done. I can be thankful for that. Sure, there is that satisfaction I gain from helping someone. That satisfies my ego. I makes me feel important. I hear nice words from a good looking woman. It makes me feel fulfilled in some ways. So, I guess there is an agenda.

That said, I think there is one agenda that is beyond me. As I was eating at the Heartland Cafe, and reading Dune Messiah in parallel, I realized this: I'm nothing more than an agent through which the universe acts. I'm playing my part exactly as it was meant to be. It is almost as if this body of mine belongs to something else, and it simply acts through me to get to its means or whatever it does or needs to do. I know it sounds very New Age-y, but I'm afraid I'm not able to express this any better than that. I think Frank Herbert's Paul from Dune Messiah expresses this better:
...It occurred to Paul then that all creatures must carry some kind of destiny stamped out by purposes of varying strengths, by the fixation of training and disposition. From the moment the Jihad had chosen him, he'd felt himself hemmed in by the forces of a multitude. Their fixed purposes demanded and controlled his course. Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it!
...
The only difference is that I don't see it as a cage. I rather see is as a much more opening experience. There is no me, only a flux going through what is recognized, rather associated as "me". Only the flux of change and flow, coursing in me and through me. So, where is "me" and "I" in all of this? I find no such thing, yet there is such a thing. What a strange thing this is! This is what has been labeled in Buddhism (& Hinduism) as sunyata, I guess.

What a strange feeling it is... it is all-encompassing because of the lack of everything, it form arising out of formlessness, formlessness arising out of form. This has been a very very interesting day with some wonderful realizations. Fascinating!

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