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Praise emptiness
Jun. 23rd, 2010 09:10 amThe empty hub at center
Allows a wheel to roll
The vacancy within defines
The function of a bowl
One of the reasons I turned to Lao Tzu is that I started thinking about the pleasures of emptiness. Specifically, I started to feel that my mind was full of nonsense and needed to be emptied. By nonsense I mean worries about things I don't understand, imaginary political arguments with people that leave me furious and humiliated, emotional feedback loops that never resolve and simply fill me with unhappy noise. I got stuck in an imaginary mental scenario on my walk to work this morning, involving somebody I haven't heard from for months, and it was essentially a projection of my worst fears into a situation about which I have almost no information. And I think that's what most of my mental noise is: an attempt to create meaning where there is no real basis for meaning or understanding. Which is something I think humans do a lot. The brain is a pattern-seeking device, and if there is no obvious pattern, it still attempts to find one, even if it has to generate a false pattern of its own.
Thus the Tao Te Ching constantly reminds us that it's better to be empty than full. It's better to let meaning come to you than to try to force it onto a murky situation. The hard thing is to accept that I don't know. The hard thing is to keep my very active mind from just making shit up out of sheer business/busyness. And that, I suppose, is why people meditate: to empty the mind of nonsense. That's why gardening is therapy for me: a simple task that clears and calms the mind.
Allows a wheel to roll
The vacancy within defines
The function of a bowl
One of the reasons I turned to Lao Tzu is that I started thinking about the pleasures of emptiness. Specifically, I started to feel that my mind was full of nonsense and needed to be emptied. By nonsense I mean worries about things I don't understand, imaginary political arguments with people that leave me furious and humiliated, emotional feedback loops that never resolve and simply fill me with unhappy noise. I got stuck in an imaginary mental scenario on my walk to work this morning, involving somebody I haven't heard from for months, and it was essentially a projection of my worst fears into a situation about which I have almost no information. And I think that's what most of my mental noise is: an attempt to create meaning where there is no real basis for meaning or understanding. Which is something I think humans do a lot. The brain is a pattern-seeking device, and if there is no obvious pattern, it still attempts to find one, even if it has to generate a false pattern of its own.
Thus the Tao Te Ching constantly reminds us that it's better to be empty than full. It's better to let meaning come to you than to try to force it onto a murky situation. The hard thing is to accept that I don't know. The hard thing is to keep my very active mind from just making shit up out of sheer business/busyness. And that, I suppose, is why people meditate: to empty the mind of nonsense. That's why gardening is therapy for me: a simple task that clears and calms the mind.
