no edges

[AUDIO AND TEXT]

What follows is a little bit esoteric, maybe even confused, and for that I beg your forbearance tonight. This is about an experience that I’ve heard related from others who practice the way we do.

There are times when we perceive the field of our experience as being full of objects with no edges, where the edges of one thing seem to blur into the edges of another thing. Whether that’s a visual perception – it could be just an experiential perception – doesn’t matter, but this is what I’ve heard reported from other people and, on occasion, have experienced myself.

Here are the final few lines of the long verse from Pseudo-Dionysius, which is titled in our prayer booklet as “If Only We Lacked Sight and Knowledge”:

If only we lacked sight and knowledge
So as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing,
That which lies beyond all vision and knowledge.
For this would be really to see and to know:
To praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way,
Namely through denial of all beings.
We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue.
They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image,
And simply by this act of clearing aside
They show up the beauty which is hidden.

These lines seem to be telling us that the less we can see, the less we can know, the better off we are in coming to really see and know ourselves. This sounds totally contradictory – to wish away seeing and knowing in order to see and to know. But really, it’s just a matter of blurring lines in order to dissolve the edges of the matter.

When we look at ourselves, look deeply into ourselves, what do we see? Individual beings or … what shall I say … effects of the essential nature that forms the Universe? Isn’t it possible that we are all just that – effects, manifestations, shades perhaps – of the living force that animates all that is and gives it and everything light and life?

In the New Testament, John 1 verses 3 and 4 give us this:

Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.

What came into being
through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.

I think we can all testify to the sense that the more we know, or think we know, the more confounded we become about what is real – about the world, about ourselves. That’s one reason we come here to sit in silence and try to get behind and through what our individual and group minds show us and tell us. That’s where the life is, where the reality is – behind what we think we can see and what we can know.

Behind, within, underneath (choose your preposition) these faculties of seeing and knowing lies the true essence of our being. And when we encounter that essence, we are encountering a form without edges. We are experiencing the form within the essence, or the essence underlying the form, both of which show no edges.

Everything runs into everything else. Everything depends on everything else. Yes, our phenomenal vision can distinguish one thing from another. But just as Adam and Eve named all the animals and plants and living things in the Garden, we can distinguish forms from one another without ascribing comparative value to them. They are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, even alive or dead. They just are. And not until we give them some mind-created value, do they appear with edges. Not until we cast them under the shadow of the Tree – the proverbial Tree of Knowledge.

Just like the stone under the sculptor’s hands and tools, the edges of these imagined forms are chipped away. And, as the philosopher says, “simply by this act of clearing away,” the hidden beauty is revealed.