Sin

Another letter to no-one:

It's strange: my acknowlegement without reservation of how I craved you led me down a path toward glimpsing the Voidness which animates. It slipped from me because I started theorizing about it. But the feeling remains: a kind of gnosis. The reason I say it's strange is because I still haven't got the courage to talk to you, even though such courage seems trivial compared to what I just had to summon. Voidness is not a place you tour with camera and bermuda shorts to come back and tell all to your friends. No, the void is a living, breathing repudiation of every kind of craving: it trumps our desires--even our most noble ones: to change the world, to live and love, to have security, to at least have luck every once in a while--it doesn't just trump the desire everyone is prepared to get rid of: the desires of the flesh that get swatted away with a few rounds of "OM, OM. shanti, shanti", wth a few rounds of liberal multiculturalism. It' not robes and it's not shaven heads: it's not even mindfulnes. It's void: it's empty, without substance. The world is but a grain of dust held in Sakyamuni's palm--and he holds not! The high point of Beethoven' rapture is voidness. His frustrations were void. What do I say. He is the here and now. And in putting this into words, I've realized that I was confused. It has not come to me in any clear way, but my analytical mind sees an "in". It's what every great artist of any culture was getting at: Dostoyevsky had it in hand, but he let Orthodox Christianity choke it out (coincidentally: the same faith I was "born" into); Ginsberg had it; Mr. Charles Darwin had it. That is to say, they all had parts of it. And monks had it too. And swamis. And Berber poets (their language is, apparently, the most beautifully poetic language of all, unspoiled by academia and literacy). Even the occassional investment banker. Even I might have it--but I don't yet have It. How many mental patients are actually hidden Bodhisattvas, peniless Dharma bums that they are? Most importantly: are you?

Consider: "(S)he who laughs last, thinks slowest."