Editor’s Note on December 30, 2023: This chapter is towards the end of Diary of an Adamant Lover. For now, we’ve removed it from the book and set it here. We used a pretty big chunk from Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, and we want to make sure Plum Village is cool with us using it in the book.

From our center line we turn inside out while pushing out from within
We let the Love in
We breathe the Love in and out
Glowing brighter and brighter
The Love bursts our shells
There is no separation between the Love shining within and the Love streaming in
Love is All.

Whenever we interact with anyone we think/glow/smile at them:
I love you.
You love me.
We know and are this Love.
More fundamentally than we are ideas, feelings and or actions.
Help us, Love, to together find the way forward for all.
And to be good to each other and be glad in each other.
Help us to see that and in what way it is True to say we are all in this together, bound in and through and for the joyful gentle Love that creates, sustains, shines through, love-lifts, and overwhelms everything — swamping all our notions with a Light so bright as to be All.

————

Stand up straight within yourself.
Let the Love beyond all being and nonbeing flood you and explode you.
Accept how the Love loves you and everyone.
Go with the Love to where It leads.
Start over and over.
Try and try again.

————-

… and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He [Jesus] said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

A dual motion
Inward to the Love within each of us
And
Outward to the Love shining out of everyone else.

————

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self-entities.

…

From A New Translation of the Hearth Sutra by Thich Nhat Hanh
[https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation]

Thich departs from the original text by refusing to say that in emptiness things like bodies and feelings don’t exist. Instead, he says that in emptiness nothing has a separate self-entity. Because he says it goes too far to say either that anything does or doesn’t exist.

What about Parmenides?

He reasoned that “It exists” has to be true, but “It does not exist” can’t be true. And so everything is one thing. Because if separate things existed, there would be a space of “does not exist” between them.

Maybe Parmenides is correct up to the edge of human reason, but lighting upon that edge, human reason dissolves itself and accepts how everything flows beyond being and nonbeing.

Maybe!

The practice that leads to the other shore is
Prajñāpāramitā: insight into the emptiness of all phenomena.

“The Bodhisattva (awakening being) stands in emptiness.”
“This is known as the Prajñāpāramitā of the bodhisattvas;
not grasping at form, not grasping at sensation, perception, volitions and cognition.”

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita#Themes_in_Prajñāpāramitā_sutras
Wikipedia says they got it from
Orsborn, Matthew Bryan (2012).
Chiasmus in the early Prajñāpāramitā: literary parallelism connecting criticism & hermeneutics in an early Mahāyāna sūtra (Thesis), page 201]

Beyond our perceptions lies a Love beyond being and nonbeing?
Why?
How?
What is Love?

Thich also said the wise rest on the impermanence and interdependence of all phenomena.
The wise rest on the Love beyond being and nonbeing that explodes through, dissolves, and ultimately is all phenomena?

———–

What about:

The Love is not impermanent, nor is It interdependent on everything else.
The Love is what really is.
It is not a separate self-entity.
It is an infinite explosion of kind joy, of delight in creating, sharing, giving, exploring.
Love is prior to being and nonbeing, but It loves playing at being and nonbeing.
And that play is reality as viewed from the perspective of impermanence and interdependence.
But that play is also Reality as viewed from the perspective of Love as Love: an infinite explosion of kind joy prior to being and nonbeing.
Is that how it is?

From the point of view of reality, everything is impermanent and interdependent.
From the point of view of Reality, everything is a smoke/illusion through which shines/explodes a Love prior to being and non-being, prior to all possible conception.
Like that?

??

How to perceive things as they really are?
We can’t perceive them — they are beyond observer and object.
We can at best awaredly flow with them like water droplets noticing themselves dissolved into the river, noticing themselves as the river, noticing themselves as neither being and nonbeing and thus noticing themselves as what?
How can they notice themselves being something prior to concepts, prior to being and non-being?
We cannot reason and/or feel our way there.
We have to open up and let all our daydreams dissolve.

———-

Meanwhile the cut saws through your gut.
Meanwhile the hatchet hacks at your belly.
Meanwhile your shoulders are always tense.
Meanwhile a twisted sickness and broken-hearted sorrow fills you.
Meanwhile you’re broken inside and can’t find a way to be yourself, particularly where you’d take your stand as man, take some woman by the hand, leave this lonely land for one you share with one you love.

Meanwhile

What now?

Pull the hurt out?
Barf the hurt out?
Spit the hurt out?
Intoxicate yourself beyond the hurt?
Talk the hurt out?
Confess the hurt out?

What?

What can be done but the let the hurt bleed?
Let the wound tell the truth about itself.
Let it bleed; and return to the practice.

Over and over again, you stand up straight within yourself, breath in, let the Love in, rest on the Love, let the Love flow out. The Love is everything inside and everything outside. Let the Love win. Let gentle kindness and shared joy win. Let Love rule. How does Love rule? Love rules by doing nothing except being Itself. And the rest of a conscious moment follows not because it’s commanded to, but because it loves to, loves to flow along with the Love that only loves, that does not pull-towards or push-away, but that only Loves like Light only shines.

———

What about a wisdom meme as a riddle?

In a [desperate? obsessive?] attempt to avoid intellectual error, the ancient skeptics suspended all judgement, suspended all judgements about “true” and “false”, about “real” and “not real”.

They were pleasantly surprised to find themselves thereby freed of all disturbances.

Is this the clue that links Jesus’s wisdom meme to the Buddha’s?

Jesus’s: Love the Love streaming from your inside out with everything, and recognize and thus love that Love as It streams out of others as well, and love them as you love yourself: as formless Love exploding through the forms of thought and body.

The Buddha’s: Rest on the impermanence and interconnectedness of all things and on the compassion for yourself and others that comes of seeing everyone flowing together.

Why is compassion engendered by experiencing everyone flow together?

What shines through when all illusions disappear?

What shines through when we stop saying “true” and “false” and “real” and “not real”? Is it not what Jesus posits in his wisdom meme? A Love beyond all time and space? A Godly, spiritual Love beyond being and nonbeing?

——————-

Author: AW/BW
Editor: BW/AW
Copyright: AMW

Saturday and Sunday, August 5 and 6, 2023
And then again Sunday, December 16, 2023