(3)

I'm sitting outside the house where I live on the steps of the little sideporch.  It's nighttime, very late, and the streets are quiet.  I'm looking at my cats lying in the grass nearby, and at the fireflies dancing in the air; I'm looking at the streetlights and the buildings, the stop signs and the telephone poles; I'm looking at the parked cars and the empty alleyway; and I'm thinking:  How much loneliness there is in the void.  That is to say, how much loneliness there is in being "within" all these things that I see, while belonging to none of them; in being that which gives rise to the creation of all these things, while yet "existing" as none of them.  And I think:  The void is what "aloneness" means.  The void is what is Alone.  The void is Alone, and thus its motive action is expressed as "loneliness."  I do not speak here of the loneliness that is felt by humans, but use the word simply to designate the energetic force implicit to the void, just as "love" is the word I would use to designate the energetic force implicit to manifestation.  Loneliness is the force which causes the void to create that which is manifest; love is the force which causes all that is manifest to cohere on its journey back to the void.  Of course, being human, I feel those forces of loneliness and love as emotions, just as they are felt by all humans; but when I speak of them in the abstract I speak of forces which represent the reciprocal halves of a greater, paradoxical unity, each half of which may be seen as absolute, yet each half of which can only be understood in relationship to its oppositional counterpart.  It might be said that the void, when treated as an absolute, cannot be properly defined by any such quality as "aloneness," for aloneness implies the absence of something "other."  And yet, is this not precisely what a void is?  The complete and total absence of anything "other."  And what does the motive power of love, the primary descriptive quality of which is the desire to make all things cohere, achieve?  Once again it is the absence of the other – which is to say, the void.  All that is, then – and all that is not – is interposed between the correlating actions of these two forces, the void giving rise to manifestation, manifestation again returning to the void; and the interaction which exists between the two, that is "dreaming," from which there is no escape except (perhaps) through death.  Death of the physical self; death of the intellect; death of the soul.

I was sitting under a tree up at the cemetery one day recently during the long Fourth of July weekend when a car pulled up nearby.  A woman got out – a tall, rather plump woman, dressed in white stockings and black shoes, a knee-length, tight-fitting black skirt pulled snugly over ample hips, and a white silk blouse.  She had come to visit a grave.  Seeing that she was walking my way, I cleared my throat – loudly enough, I hoped, for her to hear and so realize that she was not alone.  Apparently she did not hear – or perhaps, I thought, she had already seen me from her car and made up her mind to ignore me; in any case, she did not look at me or in any way acknowledge my presence.  She stopped at a grave no more than thirty feet away from where I sat and lay a small bouquet of flowers upon it.  Then she stood again and began to pray, moving her lips silently and several times making the sign of the cross.  Certain now that the the woman was unaware of my presence, I felt somewhat embarrassed to witness what was surely intended to be a wholly private moment; and prepared myself to apologize, should the woman notice me, for my unintentional intrusion.  I could not avoid watching her, for she stood directly in my line of vision; and to get up and move at that point would, I thought, have risked startling and embarrassing her.  So I sat still and waited, curious to see if she might, against all reason, come and go without noticing me at all.  And this in fact she did.  After praying for perhaps a minute, she walked back to her car, pausing only long enough to look up into a tree at a bird that was singing, and drove away.

What was the difference, I wondered after she had gone, between the appearance of this woman and the appearance of the groundhog I had seen a week or two ago – or was there none?  The groundhog, of course, had noticed me – but not until it was very close, and then only because I had made a sudden movement with my head.  The woman, of course, may have been behaving duplicitously:  she may have seen me from her car as I'd thought and simply decided to pretend, for reasons of her own, that she hadn't.  But I do not believe it to be so.  Had she seen me, I think it almost certain that she would have acknowledged me, if only by a nod of the head.  Should I say then that she, a woman I would normally designate, according to what I observed of her dress and behavior, to be completely engulfed by and at home in that society in which I feel myself equally not at home, is also one of my "silent brothers," my "patient sisters"?

All that I can do in this world is to strive to be, like an animal, in a state of constant heightened awareness sensorially and, like a human, to direct this awareness to seek some sign – or to place myself in a state of receptivity for some sign – from the realm of "dreaming."  Of course, since the "dream" consists of everything – all aspects of existence, all forms of intelligence; all phases of awareness, the objective, the subjective, the admixture of the two, etc. – there is, in a sense, no way to force such a sign to be given, nor to choose what kind of sign will be given:  the elucidations of the dream are born of a constant flux of motion between the void and the manifest, and the means by which this flux embodies itself are so various as to be impossible for me to ever wholly encompass; the manner and purposes of its embodiment I must simply designated as the "Mystery," and acknowledge that I have no control over it.  Yet because the energy which keeps all things in a state of flux embodies itself within the substance of the world, of which I am a part, it cannot be said to be entirely unknowable.  Thus, what I am consigned to do within this dream, all that I can do if I am to make the best of my abilities and my understanding, is (as that customer from the store told me) to maintain "perfect practice" – that is to say, to strive to make myself receptive and aware while acknowledging that I cannot ever really know what this means or when its achievement will occur.  And what I come to understand (this is what the woman at the cemetery teaches me) is that I am already one of "the silent brothers, the patient sisters," and that these words that I write – these stories from my life, these thoughts and memories, moods and ideas, these bits of prose and poetry – all represent fragments of a dream; and constitute the "signs" that I myself give; and are themselves the result of those "signs" which have been given by others.  And although those who have given me these signs are not necessarily amongst those whom I would call "friendly" to me, or view as being on the same path I see myself as striving to understand and follow, yet I understand now that the path is so broad as to include everything, and everyone.  This, indeed, is why I have always felt that there is in fact no path at all; there are only the shifting shapes and forms that each individual being makes as they move through the dream.

KOAN