Nothing IS Love

In 2005, as I lie down, I enter the in-between place consciously. I observe myself with the Dalai Lama. He is on his throne and I am on a chair. We are looking into each other’s eyes. I look deeply into his great dark wells. There is nobody there, no form, nothing. I feel momentary terror. Then, compassion pours out of that place of emptiness, filling my entire being. I am given a mantra: compassion flows through emptiness.

This is an experience of two-ness. The source of the compassion is “over there” while I am its recipient “over here”. Now, fifteen years later, I have a dream experience in which two-ness disappears. I say dream experience because it flowed over into my waking life, its effects permeating my being. It led to this poem:

Nothing IS Love

two people I love
most in this world
appear in turn
to tell me 

we must part

grief begins
to tear my heart

before my gaze
each disappears
evaporating
no trace
no grief-filled memory
simply not there
no-thing there
and so, no grief

I gaze at the sky
trees clouds yard
everything in its place
yet nothing is here too

everywhere….
                    nowhere….
                                   nothing….

can I stand alone
in this nothing?

one last appearance
asking
why did you do this, why that?

my heart begins to fill with
overflowing Love
I tell him
it was Love all along

every Thing is Love
and…
Nothing IS love

Subsequent to composing this poem, I became attuned to unexpected “happenings”. For example I came across Wallace Steven’s poem The Snow Man. The last two lines opened my eyes…

One must have a mind of winter
    To regard the frost and the boughs
      Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
               To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
            The spruces rough in the distant glitter
     Of the January sun; and not to think
           Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
                                                                In the sound of a few leaves,
                                                                Which is the sound of the land
                                                                Full of the same wind
         That is blowing in the same bare place
              For the listener, who listens in the snow,
                                                                And, nothing himself, beholds
                            Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 

Also see my post:      Space or The Nothing