4 Menard Kristen
This poem was inspired by mourning the loss of a loved one…
Experiencing a moment of sorrow,
Heart aches, tears glisten…
Loneliness knows no bounds.
Somehow that emotional vulnerability that was implicated in my poem above is a reflection of
the suffering that we all encounter in various times of our life. As we discussed last week both in
lecture and with further elaboration on my assignment that I submitted last week, we cannot fully
understand success in life without failure and we cannot recognize euphoria without suffering.
“The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering, there will
be no power of attaining spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field of non-distinction”
(Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 94) and this brings us to this week’s discussion on the concept of
nothingness. The idea of embracing nothingness and to strive towards achieving a state of
nothingness. What does this mean? According to the lecture, we understood the definition of
nothing to be equal to all space, all wisdom, free, having no own-nature, unproduced,
unconditioned, boundless, incomparable, unequalled, ungraspable, signless, wishless,
unthinkable (Lecture, 02/12/14). Why should the emphasis be placed by the Eastern cultures
(Japan, for example) on achieving emptiness and nothinginess and why would they be eager to
embrace an idea that we are in essence, nothing? Most of us strive to prove that we are someone
or something. Many of us think of our own self-worth in terms of being someone and having
made a difference in this world because we are something special, even unique. I believe that
these cultures that adopt the idea of “nothinginess” have a point. Why you may ask? Well
according to the following quote from lecture last week “If your mind is full of something,
something else cannot enter it”, we cannot learn anything new if we believe that we know
everything there is to know. So if we assume that we are the all-knowing and that we have
nothing more to learn, then how can we expect to grow and learn? The idea of achieving
nothingness, is like emptying ourselves of knowledge by putting the knowledge we have attained
into action, we are simultaneously becoming an empty vessel, eager to learn, opening our minds
to more knowledge and giving ourselves room to grow in the process. “The world is neither
condemned in its totality….but a bridge is shown which leads from the ordinary temporal world
of sense perception to the realm of timeless knowledge...” (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 95), in
other words, only through achieving nothingness, can we be truly be capable of personal growth.