Black Hole
Sun
Readings: Dhammapada
1
Vajrachedika XIV, XXIII, XXXII (pp.
128,138-139, 144)
Text: Gospel of Thomas saying 27: "Jesus
said, If you fast not
from the world, you will not find the
Kingdom; if you keep
not the sabbath
as sabbath, you will not see the Father."
Here is a peculiar text from
Thomas. It seems to contradict a
number of other sayings in
the collection, which take a dim view
of traditional Jewish piety,
especially including the practices
of
sabbath-observance and fasting. Saying 14, for instance: "If
you
fast, you will beget sin for yourselves." In this, Thomas
seems to
take the same stance as Mark: that of Hellenistic
Christianity, that of Paul.
But I am little inclined to
harmonize this text with those. It is
dangerous to use some
wholistic picture of the text to polish
away
the rough edges of the text. We have to let the rough edges
chafe
us, or we are silencing the text. It is not as if we have
understood
a text only when we have managed to oversimplify it. We should not
imagine that any single text is a unity, any more
than we
have a right to assume that the Truth itself is a symmetrical
system of evenly balanced, harmonious truths. When we do
think
that, as we are tempted to, we are just trying to make it
easy for
ourselves.
And in any case, there are still
other Thomas sayings which do
seem to echo this one, like saying 56:
"Whoever has known the world
has found a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse, of him
the
world is not worthy." The wise one refrains from partaking of
the
world: though others may relish it, the wise one abstains
when
this gourmet dish is passed around, for he can detect the
smell
that says the meat has gone bad. He fasts from the world as
from
over-ripe carrion.
I have been
reaclamating myself to the practice of fasting in
recent
months. But I have to confess the reason is simple vanity,
not
religiosity, in which case the Sermon on the Mount would of
course
prevent me from revealing the fact to you! I am just
fasting
once a week to speed up my diet. But it did get me thinking
about
this verse, and about what "fasting from the world" might
mean.
I try to be introspective
sometimes, to catch myself unguarded
and to understand my various
neuroses. And it has seemed to me
for some time that my
tendency to over-eat and my tendency to
collect things and never to
part with anything, are somehow
related. I am a pack-rat.
Freud would call me anal-retentive. I
guess he would be right, but
that just names the problem. I don't
think it really even
describes it, much less solves it.
Anyway, once I got help in my
over-eating from the divine grace
of appetite-suppression
pills, I began to wonder if I might
somehow apply the same new
disdain for excess to my habits of
collecting and amassing. I
intuitively felt that if I could, I
would feel as free of
psychic baggage as I was beginning to feel
from physical weight. And I
couldn't help but feel the Thomas
text, saying 27, had
something to do with it. But this remained a
nagging suspicion until late
May. Then things began to fall into
place for me.
I was driving down to see my
mother in North Carolina. I was
alone, and I chose that day
for my weekly fast. When I drive by
myself I enter into a state
of "Driver's Zen" where the time
seems to go by faster. But I
got more than I bargained for, more
than a griping stomach that
day.
You know that mystics cultivate
fasting and isolation for the
purposes of inducing visionary or at least
meditative states of
consciousness. I won't say that happened to
me, but I did drift into
a refreshing sense of clarity and self-reflection. My
brothers
and sisters, let me embarrass you by sharing these personal
revelations with you.
Whether they will apply to you I
do not know, but I guess there
is a better chance of it
happening this way than if I try to present
it in some sort of denatured, abstract form. If you see
truth
embodied in another, however different from yourself, you
may see
the possibility of it being embodied in you as well,
in your
own way.
Certain subjects appeared to me,
matters which have haunted me
for some months, matters which cause pain,
and which, like an aching
tooth or a festering scab, one cannot seem to leave alone. One such was
the matter of my bitter schism from the leaders of
my
former congregation. Only this time I found the thoughts not
so
bitter. I felt that perhaps I had rounded a corner, gained
some
distance from it, and that the pressure was off. I could be
less
preoccupied, less bitter.
And then I began to reflect how
this bitterness, and others,
were linked to my general negativity, my
cynicism, my tendency to focus
on the bad side, even to rejoice in it by way of sarcasm. And then
the spotlight caught my familiar acquisitiveness, then
my
tendency to over-commitment. To make my life
a whirlwind of activities
without a moment to breathe, never a moment free from
anxiety
over whether I am supposed to be doing something I have
forgotten.
And then certain images began to
occur to me, Buddhist images as I later realized. Or at least images
which fit Buddhist conceptuality
better than any others I know of. The first of the three
was
this. I knew that negative preoccupation had shaped me and
would
continue to shape me. It would warp me. It would be not
just
what I did, but what I was. Because there is no real
difference.
You are what you do. You do what you are.
The second thing was this: I
could suddenly see that all these
preoccupations, all these
tendencies, compulsions, I guess you'd
call them, were frantic
attempts to fill some void in me. It was
as if the hole could never
be filled, no matter how much
activity,
no matter how many possessions, no matter how many grudges I
tried to
fill it with. And this was simply because the hole
inside
me was a rushing vacuum that sucked everything within it
and was
immediately as empty and voracious as before. It was like
a Black
Hole, that speculative cause celebre
of modern astronomy.
Scientists speculate that
scattered throughout the universe there
must be entities which
represent the last known stage of stellar
degeneration. After a star
has used up all its hydrogen it begins
to burn its other elements.
In the process it inflates to become
a Red Giant, then a White
Dwarf, and finally a Black Hole. In
this final state, the
remaining mass has collapsed to such an
extent that ordinary laws of
physics are cast aside and the core
of the star continues to
implode infinitely!
The gravity accordingly becomes
unbelievably powerful, sucking in
even photons, so that no
light escapes. It is a black star, a
star in reverse, as if a
great cosmic projector should run the
film backward, so that the
light does not radiate from the star
but streams back into it,
leaving only all-encompassing darkness.
How would you know a Black Hole
was there? Why do scientists
think there are any? Because there are
some places where light
appears unaccountably to bend slightly on
its journey. It might be
because it is pulled off course by a Black Hole in the
vicinity,
an interstellar Scylla and Charybdis.
Inside me was a Black Hole,
sucking everything in, in a mad
attempt to fill what can
never be filled. The Black Hole is like
a parched man slaking his
thirst with salt water.
And then it seemed to me that
what I needed to do instead was to
somehow learn to brace the
circular walls of the Void within me,
to keep it open,
because that cavity was a womb which had to be
open and
empty to make room for something new to be born. A new
and
greater Selfhood would emerge, wanted to emerge, would
have emerged,
except that the space was continually filled and refilled, ever again a
vacuum, but ever again refilled. If that
new Self were ever to come
to birth, I must keep the Void open.
And this, too, was Buddhist in
color: what I was experiencing in
my compulsions to over-eat,
to collect all these books, to knot
my mind into a fist of
resentment and cynicism, all this, I say,
was
tanha, desire or craving, as the Buddha called
it. The desire that
can never be satisfied, because nothing outside us will ever
satisfy
it. Time, some say, is the fire in which we burn. But the Buddha says it
is desire that is the fire in which we burn. We
burn
with the anti-light of the black star.
And the emptiness I tried to
quench, to stuff as if it were a
pillow to be upholstered,
the Wise Lords of the Mahayana called Sunyata,
the Void, the Nirvana, the emptiness that is perfect
fullness,
because it is empty precisely of that which disturbs
and
divides. It is the optical illusion of the pie pan which
seems
empty of pie when in fact it is merely not cut into
divisive
slices. It is the emptiness of white light which seems
bleached
of color but which is actually the perfect harmony of
all
colors which are not seen simply because the light is not
refracted, not distorted, not broken up into
divers colors. It is
that powerful core of emptiness that is
called the eye of the
hurricane, more stable than the howling
winds of change which surround
it.
That is the Void of Pure
Suchness, Tathata,
Thusness, which must
be
known, not understood, experienced, not articulated. The
theoretician
seeks to cram up and close up that Blessed Void by
stuffing
it with vain concepts, just as the gourmand seeks to
stuff it
by absorbing physical satisfactions. But one must leave
it open.
One must fast toward the world if one is to see the
divine
Kingdom of Thusness. For this is the True
Self, the Buddha-nature.
And that is what I had sought to close out.
Perhaps you have seen Holman
Hunt's famous sentimental painting
in which Jesus knocks at the
door of the heart. It is based on a
passage in Revelation:
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If
any one will hear my voice
and open the door, I will come in to
him and sup with him, and he
with me." What I began to realize
that day as I passed through
Virginia on I-95 was that the Buddha-nature
had been knocking on my heart's door, and that I had
been
pumping up the volume on the stereo so as not to hear!
But can something be born within
this Void? Yes, Tantric scripture
speaks of the Void as a Yin-Yang circle divided with curved
line
into Vajra and Gharba,
the inseminating bolt and the
ozone-pregnant womb. As the two interact,
like Siva and Kali, the world
is born. And it seemed to me that day that the Void which I
must
guard, whose walls I must brace open, was a womb of new
birth.
So far, the
Gharba, the Womb, the fertile passivity. But what of
the
Vajra, the lightning shaft like that which
ignited the primeval
amino acids into the pulsing stew of Life? What, in short,
to do?
Did you know that on his death
bed, Paul Tillich lay hearing
his wife
Hannah read the sacred words of the Bardo
Thodol, the
Tibetan
Buddhist Book of the Dead? It was Tillich
whose words supplied
my answer. ["Grace strikes us when..." (p. 161) to "But
everything
is transformed" (p.
162)]
The Patriarch
Shinran would call that being saved by Other
Power, and
I imagine it is why Jesus in Thomas's Gospel warns, "If you
fast,
you will beget evil for yourselves, and if you pray you
will be
damned." More frenetic, self-justifying religious
activity
is only so much spiritual cholesterol clogging the arteries. It is
the last thing you need, the last thing I need.
Let me close with another word
from Thomas, saying 24: "His
disciples
said: Show us the place where Thou art, for it is
necessary
for us to seek it. He said to them: Whoever has ears to
hear,
let him hear. Within a man of light there is light and he
lights
the whole world. When he does not shine, there is darkness."
Let us seek that Place. Let us
seek to shine with that invisible
Light. Amen.
Robert M. Price
June 24, 1995