Realizing our Nature as Both Emptiness and Love
excerpted from Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
In Mahayana Buddhism, the open, wakeful emptiness of awareness is our absolute nature. Our original nature is changeless, unconditioned, timeless and pure. When we bring this awareness to the relative world of form, love awakens. We meet the ever-changing stream of life – this living, dying, breathing world – with accepting presence and our hearts invariably open. What our mind recognizes as empty awareness, our heart experiences as love.
Loving life and realizing our essence as formless awareness cannot be separated from each other. As a Japanese proverb expresses, “Seeing pure awareness without engaging lovingly with our life is a daydream. Living in this relative world without vision is a nightmare.” We can be tempted, sometimes in pursuit of nonattachment, to distance ourselves from the messy wildness of our bodies and emotions, and from our relationships with each other. This pulling away leaves us in a disembodied daydream that is not grounded in awareness of our living world. On the other hand, if we immerse ourselves in the mental dramas and changing emotions of our lives without remembering the empty, wakeful awareness that is our original nature, we get lost in the nightmare of identifying as a separate, suffering self.
Sometimes our deepest realization of the interdependence of love and emptiness comes when we are facing the anguish of loss. Our grief is the honest recognition that this cherished life is passing. No matter what we lose, we open to the ocean of grief because we are grieving all of this fleeting life. Yet our willingness to go into the black waters of loss reveals our source, the living awareness that is deathless.
Poet David Whyte writes:
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
Turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
Will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
Nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.
