Confront the lion in his den.
Accept the empty circle.
Accept the empty circle.
The Target: Great Capacity
Early one morning, I began the transition back to earthly life from a lucid dream. Breathing wakefulness into my body, I stretched and flexed. A sentence spoken in the dream resonated in my consciousness with clarity and life-changing power: Confront the lion in his den, accept the empty circle. I knew these were life-shaping words. They are written in my heart. They guide my daily life.
I discovered later that the diploma of a graduate of a martial arts school in medieval Japan was a blank sheet with an empty circle. The circle was complete. The martial artist had come full circle. He began knowing nothing. Then he began to know something. Now he truly knows nothing (the place of continuous beginning) as if for the first time.
The graduate of the martial school has followed the path to emptiness. All the techniques, methods and ways are learned, then “forgotten.” The graduate warrior becomes a white belt once again. He has beginner’s mind – empty of preconceived notions leaving room for the fullness of universal energy. He is the empty circle.
What appears to be a circle from one view point is actually, from another point of viewing, one portion of a continuous spiral. The completed circle is actually one turn of the spiral. The return to the beginning is both a returning and a fresh newness.
As the warrior progresses, emptying may be allowed to occur. Emptying has advantages: one is the ability to take in new information. When I believe or feel I have a firm grasp of reality, I have already lost it. Reality cannot be grasped. Instead of reality, I have grasped a headful of concepts and notions and a bellyful of feelings and desires.
Emptying need not be feared. “Empt” comes from an Anglo-Saxon verb (amtian) which means to be at leisure. “Leisure” has its roots in an Old French word which originally meant “permission.” To be empty is to be permitted, to have license. One who is truly emptying is relaxing (at leisure) and is allowing (permitting); relaxing with the openness of no restriction. One is on vacate-ion.
“Amtian” is composed of two parts: “ae” (without) and “metta” (having to): without having to, not having to. When emptying, we are not filled with “have to,” not driven, not loaded, and not burdened. When emptying, we are unoccupied by ego demands. When emptying, we are “poor in spirit,” counting “self” as nothing and thereby gaining “the kingdom of heaven.”
Emptying is lightening up, dropping the heavy load of conceptual and emotional baggage, releasing the weight of anxiety, worry and fear, realizing the openness of interrelation, letting go of the illusion of separate self with all its problems and demands.
Emptying allows poise, serenity, and complete assurance. And why not? One is given a continuous “allowance” by the source of being, by the larger context.
We come from and are continuously being born out of the Great Emptying, the at-leisure, allowing Openness which manifests itself as far and as deep as we can intuit (and further). Nowhere does it abide (stand still). The Great Emptying dances and sings. Out of the Great Emptying, all creation continuously arises.
Circum Stance
“Circumstance” refers to all that goes on around (circum) the stance or stand we take. The circle with the ego at its center seeks to attract energy for the ego’s purpose, seeks to pull energy inward toward the center. Universal energy is blocked. When the empty circle is accepted and ego dissolves, the winds of life blow clean through. An empty circle flows with universal energy, with the breath of heaven and earth. The circle is limitless and has no bull’s “I.”
When I do not accept the empty circle and instead take an ego-stance, I am an excellent target. The ego is a natural attractant for psychic lightning. The ego is like a chip on the shoulder just begging to be knocked off. The ego is a forced separation in the flow of What Is. And life naturally opens to striking the visibly exposed (it cannot be hidden) ego.
When ego dissolves and I take the stand of life itself, the stand of the source of being, I have confronted the lion within its den. I am accepting the empty circle.
Knotting
Some time ago, I was minding my own business (as usual) when I saw a perfect circle revolving in front of me. I had grown accustomed to this seeing of visions. I knew if someone else were present, they would not see it. As it revolved, it made a sound: tsst! tsst!, much like the sound the old vinyl records made when the needle hit a scratch.
“What is that sound?” I silently asked.
“Look more closely,” was the instant reply.
I peered more closely. The circle was an unbroken string with a knot in one place. As the string revolved, the knot caused the tsst! sound. “What is that knot?” I asked. “You humans,” came the reply. And then a laugh: “You humans are a bunch of knot heads!”
“You mean if it were not for us humans, the universe would be running silently and smoothly?”
“Yes.”
This cognitive knotting arises from attachment. We become attached to certain movies of the mind. Just as we might enjoy I Love Lucy re-runs on television, we have our favorite mental movies. They are not always pleasant. We re-run our internal movies of guilt, of shame, of injustices, of vengeance. We re-run our movies of What I Should Have Said, of If I Could Do It Over Again. We re-run our fantasies of Success, of Failure.
We also become attached to Thinking. Rather than simply allowing thought to flow through, as a river flows through a landscape, we may become captured by the river of thought, helplessly swirling in its eddies.
We often make ourselves separated knots in the flow of What Is, knots in the fabric of the web of existence – convoluted, turned in upon ourselves in a tangled way – a Gordian knot awaiting the single clean sword strike releasing us from illusion.
Re-Form-ing, Re-Bell-ing, and Re-Volt-Ing
Another way we knot is through rebellion and reform. At such times we act as if we are prisoners. We prisoners are always trying to make the prison a better place. We want re-form when what we need is re-volt. We think there is a warden other than ourselves. We guard ourselves better than any hired mercenary.
We want re-form. We want better prison conditions. We wish to remain in prison. We want a better prison – less brutal guards, better food, good medical care, time off for good behavior. Don’t take away my prison. Just give me better prison conditions. I want re-form. I do not dare re-volt.
Re-volt does not mean violence. Re-volt means to charge from inside, to open to the voltage of the life force. Without re-volt, I am a sleep walking zombie. Without re-volt, I am the living dead.
To re-volt will cost me every thing. To re-volt I must give it all up.
I am the universe universing. I am earth walking. I am sky singing. I do not want re-form. I want re-volt.
Re-volting (opening to energizing spirit) is different from re-belling. Re-belling is to ring those same old bells – over and over. Re-belling is banging one’s head against the same old gongs, using one’s head as the clapper (what is the sound of one head clapping?)
Only prisoners and slaves re-bell. Free beings re-volt.
“I find you re-volting!”
“Thank you very much!”
Afraid of Nothing
He sat in the chair across from me. Searching for words to describe at least a portion of his deeply felt apprehension (after all, if we can name a beast, it becomes more family-er, less terror-able), he said, “I am afraid of the nothingness that will come if I stop focusing on my thinking.”
He habitually identified with his thinking, falling prey to a wild roller - coastering of judgmental emotions and imagery. He knew enough to know that something, sometimes called emptiness or nothingness, emerged as the dominant field when one allowed thinking to flow as a subset of consciousness. He was afraid of the idea of nothingness, of the thought of his self as nothing.
“You mean you are afraid of nothing?” I asked.
His mind vibrated rapidly between the dual meanings, then caught hold. He laughed.
We know how to live in splitness. The realm of the nondual, the not-two, and not-even-one may be less familiar. In fact, most of us go to great lengths to stay out of this realm. We fear it will mean our demise. We may not know or we may not have not experienced, that the non dual is the wellspring out of which all arises.
The beginning warrior may start the journey into the maze of existence with full complexity: full of self, full of ego, full of pride (all three are compensations for fear); full of techniques and methods; full of principles and rules. When full of self, one is receptive to nothing else. Awareness is restricted to buzzing thoughts, self-concerns, emotional states, and one’s mortal situation. The whole world consists of nothing but me, me, me.
The Fullness of Emptiness
In late 16th and early 17th century Japan lived an unusual man named Ryokan. To some eyes he seemed a lunatic, a fool, a man of no common sense. He continuously gave away all he had. He voluntarily gave a startled and confused burglar his clothes when the burglar found nothing to steal in his hut, then lamented because he could not “give” the burglar the moon (the burglar had no eyes to see it).
Nothing could be taken from Ryokan. Owning all, he possessed nothing. So it was also true that nothing could be taken from him. He loved all and was loved in return. When he came around, people lightened up.
Ryokan was a man of cosmic energy. He was re-volting. He swung the sacred sword of Vajraraja, the sword “which cuts and puts to death anything dualistic appearing before it.”
All of Ryokan’s questions about life and being and the ego with its dualistic and separatist thinking dissolved into Emptiness. As can be seen in his daily living, Emptiness is not a dead emptiness. Emptiness allows Spirit flow, life, laughter, love, contentment, energy.
Emptying
One way to empty is through the use of attention. As you sit quietly, pay attention to your thoughts going by. You may see your thoughts as boats on a river or a train with rail cars or as planes taking off and landing. Begin to pay attention to the spaces between the thoughts. At first it may seem as if the spaces are razor thin. However, continue to pay attention to the spaces, the intervals, and they will become larger.
Direct energy to the spaces between thoughts, rather than to the thoughts themselves and the mind will become positively empty. As the mind empties of preconception and thought, room is allowed for what is. The mind expands outward to include a subtle sensing of everything. No separation exists.
Great Capacity
The inner work of the warrior of spirit is active daily use of the eight keen weapons which allows the clearing away of obstructions and obscurations, allows room for and opening to the lifeforce of the Source, allows Spirit to flow unimpeded.
As with the development of any new skill, at first we may feel clumsy and uncertain in practicing keen weapon use. We may also find that we favor the use of one or two of the keen weapons to the exclusion of others. We may feel greater ease in the practicing of compassion than embodying relentlessness. Or vice versa. This means an imbalance in our warrior skills.
In physical training of warrior ways, we may need to practice movements with our less favored side of the body, be it left or right, twice as much. Internal, or spirit, training is no different. The complete, well-rounded warrior is skilled in embodying all eight keen weapons.
And what is the target, the aim of this weaponry? The target is depicted by the open spaciousness at the core of the Wheel of Keen Weapons. The target is one’s own inner core. The weapons are deployed to open space for the expression of the lifeforce through (and as) one’s moment to moment existence.
Embodying the wheel of keen weapons allows the opening of great capacity. All obscuration dissolves. When one sits in the seat at the center of the soul, the seat disappears and the sitter vanishes. The wellspring of life itself is one’s source of energy and action. One is an embodying of the qualities of the Source: mindfully compassionate; opening and surrendering relentlessly with strong intent; calm, present and active in the continuous emerging of life.
This is the work of the wheel of keen weapons, allowing an opening to the heart of the soul.
Your Practice for Allowing Capacity
There are three practices I have for allowing capacity. One is just sitting, sitting calmly with no agenda other than sitting. A second is walking, especially walking the mountains and canyons of nature. A third is conversing and being with friends (including book friends) of a capacious nature. Capaciousness is catching.
What are your ways? How do you allow capacity in your life? You might sit quietly and reflect upon this for a moment. What are your practices providing you with capaciousness?
