So what I'm showing you is that all this hocus-pocus about the fear of nothingness
 is that, truly speaking, nothingness is what we want to talk about when we talk about the
 spiritual.
 Only, it's all been ignored, it's all been put down.
 Say, "Oh, nothingness, bleh! Heaven preserve us from that!"
 But that's where the secret lies.
 And obviously the secret always lies in the place you never think of looking for it.
 In mythology, this comes again and again.
 Okay, this is Christmas.
 Where is the Christ born?
 In a palace?
 No.
 Where nobody would think of looking.
 In pigsty.
 Although I have a Japanese friend who once said to me, he said, "You know, the real difference
 between Christianity and Buddhism is that Christ was the son of a carpenter and Buddha
 the son of a prince."
 I thought that was rather funny.
 Well, we don't know who the prince is without the carpenter, do we?
 Now it's in that sense, really, that I could suggest to you that you meditate on nothingness.
 I know you can't think about it.
 But yet, when it becomes perfectly clear to you that that's what you are, and what you
 were before you were born, where can anybody stick a knife into you?
 Fundamentally, you see.
 Alright.
 Get it, because this is really the secret of the whole thing.
 If you see that, now, we want to go on and be able to answer all the people who will
 come and bug us about it.
 Because whether you say anything about it to other people or not, people are going to
 bug you about this.
 And say, "Oh, no, no, no, no.
 You really are something.
 You know, you'll know it.
 Oh, wowee.
 You know, life isn't the way you think.
 Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
 It's going to be awful, see?
 It's going to be real.
 Oh!"
 And they'll say, "Oh, you can't.
 Where in such a philosophy as this is there any basis for the love of one's fellow men?
 For joy in children?
 For cultivating gardens?
 For doing this and that and the other?"
 Well, I say, "There is no basis in it."
 That's the same way there is no basis in emptiness for form, or so it seems.
 But only precisely to the degree that you have discovered the nothingness that you are.
 You find you're suddenly full of energy.
 That is energy.
 It's the source and origin of energy.
 So that when, you know, there's a sort of nothing in your way, then you can do exactly
 what I was describing as having this glee for going into doing this, that and the other
 thing and being thoroughly creative.
 But you can't be creative out of just plain somethingness.
 You need nothingness to be creative.
 And that's what we are.
 And this too is real nothingness.
 And I think it's not darkness.
 It's not like being buried alive forever.
 It's not like rest.
 Even when the Catholics sing, "Rest eternal, grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual
 shine upon them."
 This isn't rest, because it isn't motion.
 Neither motion nor rest.
 What is it?
 It's the thing you imagine.
 And it's at that point you see where the imagination completely runs out and stops.
 There we've hit the thing.
 See, there you are, right at the fundamental mystical reality.
 Now, what this is we're talking about is what mystics have quite often discussed.
 This isn't read very much.
 It's a state called agnosia, which means unknowing.
 There's a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an English monk in the 14th century.
 But it's based on another book called Theologia Mystica, which was written in the 6th century
 by an unknown Syrian monk who used the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.
 It's an absolutely fascinating, very short little book, which I translated long ago,
 back in 1943, and I'm about to reissue it.
 But this book ends up with a description of God, which is all in negatives.
 Not any kind of anything you can imagine at all, not light, not power, not spirit, not
 fatherhood, not sonship, not this, that, and the other, all the way down the line.
 Everything that anybody's ever said or thought about God is denied, because God is infinite
 and therefore beyond the reach of any conception at all.
 So he says that anybody who, having a vision, thought he saw God, would not have seen God
 but some creature that God has made that is less than God.
 So again, you approach, in a Christian context, said in such a way that even St. Thomas Aquinas
 bought it, that you can't impute heresy to it, because everybody's got to agree that
 God is the witch, than which there is no witcher, and this guy spells it out.
 So in the same way you get Nagarjuna saying that the ultimate reality is shunyata, voidness.
 So Shankara gets at it, where he says, that which is the knower or the knowing in everything
 can never itself be an object of its own knowledge, for fire doesn't burn itself, although it
 burns other things.
 So we never know what the Brahman is, just like the eyes don't ever see the head.
 If you put something there, you are stopping short of nothing, and you don't get the whole
 benefit of it, that's all.
 If you insist that there is something there, that there is the loving father at the end
 of the line, or the paradise garden, you are really cheating yourself, because it's only
 when you have thorough emptiness and real downright nothingness at the end of the line,
 that you get the full impact.
 No holds.
 Look, Mama, no hands.
 See?
 Now I really think that's the simplest thing I can possibly tell you.
 I really don't know what else there is to be said about this whole Zen project or mysticism,
 Vedanta, what have you.
 It comes down to that, and there are infinitely many ways of evading.
 But what I'm trying to point out to you, you see, is the way in which you see the point
 by taking the line of least resistance, by facing the facts, by not super-adding to truth
 something you contribute to it, your own business that you put up.
 But saying, "If I follow what I conceive or can see with my senses to be reality, as
 far as we can look," it seems that this is sort of the inevitable conclusion, which everybody
 has spent endless effort in arguing about and resisting, not realizing that if they
 went the whole way, how splendid it would be.
 And that's all you have to do.
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