The Null, the Full, the Spilling

Most often experiences begin from the outside- something is experienced in the sensory world, and an internal response emanates. Other experiences begin on the inside- and then there is an urge to bring them outside, in the simplest way by sharing with someone close, or with the world at large. Or by ‘doing’ something externally which would complete this internal experience. The simplest example would be, to eat when hunger arises. Or how a fond memory with a parent arises, encouraging one to give them a call.

There are also internal experiences leading to internal response, which triggers further internal experience and so on. One can recognize one’s downward spirals in this description, and hopefully also upward ones.

And then there is something which I am recognizing afresh. The experience which begins and culminates internally. One end goes around and holds hands neatly with the other end, completing the circle- a zero, existing by itself in fullness and nullity. In fullness of nullity.

This experience has taken me by surprise because all the other ones are so enmeshed with words and actions. Someone like me relies and insists on words to process and explain even an internal experience to myself- through writing, through talking with others… and this sharing is thought to be essential to connections, and even to being internally organized. The completion of actions is similarly considered essential to discipline and contentment.

And yet, gladly, it seems there is something beyond that. It feels like I knew it when I was little, and then somehow got out of touch with it.

In my Tarot Meditations for October, I had written about taking a step/ beginning a practice even if the emotional/ creative/ spiritual outcome may not be immediately clear, but to build towards it rather than expect it a-priori. At the time, I could not have predicted the way it would manifest.

Few days later, I attended a program towards a certain spiritual practice. Unknowingly I was a bit of a skeptic at the beginning, and then knowingly skeptic once fellow participants started showing what seemed to me like exaggerated responses. Somewhere along the way though, my guards were down and at that moment it hit me full force. The room was quiet and everyone sat unmoving, with eyes closed. And yet something spectacular was happening within me, so much so that the teacher saw it clearly.

After the exercise, he called me out to share with fellow participants what I had experienced. This was  atypical and unexpected, but rising heroically to the occasion, I spoke for a full 2 minutes, sharing many aspects of what I had been experiencing and noticing, and eliciting laughs from fellow participants. When I walked back to my place, the teacher nodded to me politely, but he looked puzzled. Two people in the room were acutely aware that while the pieces spoken about were true and hopefully value-adding, the experience which was in fact of greater magnitude and consequence had not been shared at all.

It played on my mind for couple of days. Still does. When people ask me about the practice even now, I find I am uncomfortable to say much. As if the more I say, the further away from truth it will be.

And it’s not just to do with the ease with which the experience lends itself to words- it’s also about the context, the space and the relationship within which it is shared. To take a crude example, to be naked with one person would be intimacy, but to be naked in front of a crowd would be obscenity.

Some things are so ethereal that when presented outside of certain conditions, they can lose meaning or feel caricature-ish.

To those who swim at the deep end of this internal pool- the artist, the seeker, the lover- this understanding is instinctive. They know that what seems like holding back is in fact the capacity for deep oneness.

What is null and full is shared as a gift under proper conditions, not as a necessity or compulsion.

People say that the artist thirsts for recognition and applause. I’m beginning to think that it marks only the beginning stages, perhaps when s/he is establishing credibility with themselves. Once this fledgling self satisfies and matures, it becomes yielding to dissolve itself and get out of the way of the art which needs to happen. The artist still thirsts- not for recognition of his/her greatness, but to have another recognize themselves in him/her, and that s/he recognize oneself in another.

And hence the applause of the world can feel empty unless s/he has first of all offered the very core of oneself. And then if one is extremely lucky, to find recognition of shared experience with a few or even one other.

The drive is to feel oneness. To be in union. The drive of the artist is thus the same as the drive of the lover. And the drive of the lover is the same as the drive of the seeker. To transcend oneself through union. To know life as beyond, and bigger than oneself.

Chances are slim, though, that they will tell you in as many words.

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