When I walk through the gate of the high cedar fence surrounding my garden, I enter into a secluded place, a sanctuary of the soul, wherein worldly knowledge, incessant noise, frantic motion, aggrandized stimulation, and competitive ambition fall away.
‘If a man can be absolutely quiet’, a Chinese teacher once told his students, ‘then the Heavenly Heart will manifest itself.’ Here, in the solitude of my garden, the heartbeat of the Universe is palpable.
It beats in the rustling of dragonfly wings about my pond and in the cold North Wind blowing far from its Arctic home; it is felt in the rain coming off tropical currents of the Pacific Ocean and is seen in the twinkling light from distant stars. It is in the howling fury of a Winter storm and the silence of a Summer’s day when the world hangs limply in relentless heat. In this ‘wise silence,’ as Emerson termed it, is the eternal centre, ‘the still point of the turning world,’ which is best expressed in the Sanskrit word purnata – a stillness that is completely full.
A place of soul-nurturing
The antithesis of my garden's hush is the disenchanted outer world, where it is absolutely imperative to get somewhere and produce something. Yet, as Thomas Moore explains in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Living, time spent in a garden gets us nowhere. ‘A garden,’ he says, ‘entices us to slow down and stop,’ which, he adds, is an important dynamic of the soul, for anything of the soul requires time and a lowering of productivity and effort.
Gardening is thus a monk’s way of nurturing the soul, which Moore calls a ‘fruitful silence,' where movements of the soul are amplified. A life that honours solitude is a requisite for self-mastery, living with a sense of direction, and discovering the true song of one’s own soul.
When thus I enter into my garden I am on holy ground at the centre of the Universe, for all relationships begin and end therein as they are gathered up and given forth from the spirit of my being, which is diffused throughout the cosmos. In Muslim countries, the old part of the city was called medina or ‘holy place.’ And so it is when you enter into your garden or medina, the centre of the Universe is everywhere and nowhere.
The axis of silence
One of the great classics of the East states, ‘The universe turns upon the axis of silence.’ It moves when we move and rests when we rest. If therefore, I am simply content to be in the moment, I am filled with the vast emptiness of inner solitude, which I long ago experienced for myself in the deserts of Egypt, when I was too young to understand.
There is a silence in the deserts of Egypt that wraps like a cloak around the heat by day and the cold by night when the wind is still and not a grain of sand stirs. On such a day in the Nubian Desert East of the Nile, one piece of ironstone dropped upon another can be heard by a Dorcas gazelle a mile away.
It is there, in the silent splendour of the desert, that the early Christian monks went to live that they might find emptiness. This is the contemplative life to which monks are called. The root of the word ‘contemplative' carries the sense of cutting out a space for divination, setting apart space for sacred use, for the building of an inner temple, as noted by Thomas Moore in Meditations. ‘Contemplation,’ explains Moore, is the primary work of the monk if he or she is to achieve the necessary emptiness in all things.
Tending emptiness
The early Christian monks, according to Moore, were experts at doing nothing and tending the culture of emptiness. Their existence denoted a complete absence of driven-ness. In the exact measure to which they were empty so were they in like measure full, for emptiness, instructs Brother David Steindl-Rast, is the necessary condition for fulness in all its forms.
One evening in that long ago, I sat down to rest on a large boulder of ironstone. As I surveyed the enfolding magnificence of the Nubian desert, watching the waves of heat dancing in the distance, I had a profound sense of company. Looking around, I discovered that I was sitting on the same rock on which a Paleolithic man sat more than fifteen thousand years ago as he chipped hand axes from the ironstone. One of them lay at my feet.
Picking it up, I discovered that the tip was broken. I could almost feel his frustration at breaking the tip just when he thought he had a finished axe. I felt a kinship with this artisan of antiquity and intuitively knew that time was only an intellectual construct that trapped my worldly mind: that behind the veil of illusion, in complete stillness, was the omnipresent unitive state. Because I so keenly felt the ancient one’s presence, I also felt the roots of all humanity embodied in and passing through the craftsmanship of one man, stored in the seemingly timeless silence of the desert.
As I sat where my Paleolithic brother had sat and pondered his countenance and frame of mind, I knew that I somehow stood on the shoulders of what he had learned and passed on when, to me, time seemed younger and the world seemed newer and more innocent. In that moment, I entered the emptiness of eternal solitude as one liberated in timelessness. All that existed for me was the presence and the touch of my Paleolithic brother.
Lucid stillness
I had thus entered an alternative place of being, which the mystics have called a retreat or vacatio – an emptying of ordinary life, which affords the opportunity for a different kind of experiencing. In the emptiness of this ‘lucid stillness,’ the mystic is able to live on a deeper level in order to be keenly attentive to messages that come from God, as Thomas Merton puts it.
Before you can experience the ‘lucid stillness,’ however, you must empty yourself. A university professor discovered this when inquiring about Zen from Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master. Nan-in served tea. He poured the professor's cup full and kept on pouring.
His visitor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself: ‘It is overfull. No more can go in without overflowing.’
Nan-in replied, ‘Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’
The Nothing
Some years ago, I read about the Buddhist concept of ‘the Nothing,’ from which everything comes and into which everything returns, but I did not understand it. That night I had a vivid dream in which I actually entered the Nothing and found everything, a reality that I am not sure I can explain, but I will try.
In my dream, I passed gently through some kind of border or boundary, and found myself without form in a formless grey, the colour being more of a sense than an actuality. Blending into the formlessness as pure energy, I had ceased to exist in the morphological shape of a human being. I felt totally at peace, a kind of peace that permeated everything, that merged seamlessly into and through me, leaving room for nothing but itself and so became everything.
I awoke the next morning with an incredible sense of peace, and without fear of losing my identity beyond the veil – because, when one has absolute peace, there is nothing else of value and so one has everything. To this day, when I still my intellect, I can enter the Nothing and, for the eternity of an instant, find everything in the amorphous, seamless feeling of peace.
Trying to explain the Nothing calls forth for me the memory of an Emperor in a faraway land who, wanting to adorn his palace with a new and original painting, held a contest in which the greatest painters of the day were commissioned to paint a flock of geese just taking wing. Although many great painters presented the Emperor with works of delicate beauty, he chose for his palace the painting by a Taoist whose canvas was blank except for the upper right-hand corner, which held the foot of the last goose to take flight.
The primordial power of emptiness
In Goethe’s thinking, emptiness has an invisible power from which patterns emerge, much as a vase on a potter’s wheel forms itself around the active presence of a hollow, without which the vase could not exist. The vase is simply the external shell of a specifically-shaped void, which holds emptiness within itself.
From India, the Heart Sutra adds:
Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness is no other than form;
Form is exactly emptiness,
Emptiness exactly form,
...All phenomena are emptiness/form.
I am myself such a vase, and life is the wheel upon which the Master Potter is moulding and emptying me. And it is my singular goal in life to serve the still small voice within me. Thus, I must learn to empty myself of myself. And if I can find within a single-minded purpose, then I might also find complete emptiness or self-forgetfulness, and achieve both fulness and fulfilment, in keeping with the Sanskrit word apuruamanam, which means ‘ever-full’.
Nothing and everything
Although I began as a solid lump of clay, I am discovering little by little what in life is valuable and what is not, and I am discarding the latter with no desire to fill the space left empty by the sorting-out and relinquishment. ‘Give up what you do not want,’ suggests A Course in Miracles (090847, £21), ‘and keep what you do.’ Each time I discard the valueless, I find that spiritual peace not only abides within but also fills the emptiness to the exclusion of all else.
As I mature in spirit, and the sorting continues, I find, as Thomas Merton wrote, that to be truly silent one must let go of the yearning for recognition and cease worrying about making the right impression. St John of the Cross adds, in a verse that has a Zen-like flavour:
In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,
Desire to have pleasure in nothing.
In order to arrive at possessing everything,
Desire to possess nothing.
In order to arrive at being everything,
Desire to be nothing...
Finally, when one is filled with and enveloped by total peace, and the wanting of anything worldly becomes a foreign country, one abides in Divine emptiness, with its stillness and silence, in which there is nothing – and everything of lasting value is contained. Now when I go into my garden and simply sit with it, there are moments when the material world fades and I enter once again into the Nothingness of my dream, into the fulfilment of Divine emptiness, within which absolute peace overcomes the self and becomes the Self.
EMPTINESS IS LETTING
the chatter of the mind die away
and letting productive
hands be idle.
IN EMPTINESS ONE accesses
the law of Wu Wei, which
literally means ‘without doing,
causing, or making.’
IT IS UNDERSTANDING that
in the emptiness of inner
solitude, where one melds in
consciousness with the heartbeat
of the Universe, there is nothing
to do, hence nothing left undone.
IN THIS PLACE of ‘effortless
effort,’ of utter stillness
and inner silence one hears
the great universal sound,
the Voice of the Divine.
IT IS HERE that all sages
and saints have stood
and received the Grail Cup.
From The World Is In My Garden, copyright Chris and Zane Maser, 2000, 2003, published in the UK by Polair Publishing.
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