When I read Ordinary Extraordinary’s excellent post on emptiness, I was reminded of how well reversals fit in with the Buddhist Middle Way. They both reflect the same insight, so it is not surprising: any story is only a relative truth, and each of its reversals have truths to it as well. And, when they all cancel each other out, we can taste the inherent neutrality of any situation… emptiness dancing, God’s will, God expressing, exploring and experiencing itself.

There is a self: Yes. (a) There is indeed the appearance of an individual human self and soul, as a holon in a much larger holarcy. Through an overlay of stories, we can differentiate within the world of form, split it up freely in any size and shape, and individuals are one of the things we can differentiate out. And (b) there is a Self… as Big Mind, Brahman, Tao… The Self absent of an Other, not any more or less identified with any aspect of the field of awake emptiness and form.

There is no self: Yes. (a1) Within the seamless world of form, there is no separate self. We can differentiate out an individual human self and soul within this seamless world, but there are no absolute boundaries there. Any boundaries come from stories alone. And (a2) all forms are no other than the brilliantly clear and awake emptiness itself, which is inherently absent of any separate self… no boundaries, no beginning, no end, timeless, spaceless, allowing any and all forms… And finally, (b) there is no Self. Any self requires an Other, an in the absence of an Other there is no Self either.

There is an I: Yes. (a) When there is an identification with one region of form, the sense of I is placed there, making the rest of the world of form (and the rest of Existence) appear as Other. This creates the appearance of a separate I. (b) There is an I, as the awake emptiness and form itself, as Big Mind, Brahman, Tao… This is the I without an Other. It is the same I as under (a), but now clearly realized to have no Other, and not more or less identified with any aspect of the field (of awake emptiness and form) than any other.

There is no I: Yes. (a) There is no separate I anywhere, no I with an Other. Only the appearance of it, when there is a belief in the story of a separate I (self), and the field is split into the appearance of I and Other. (b) There is no I even as the I without an Other, because without an Other, no I either. There is only what is… the field of awake emptiness and form, already and inherently absent of any center and any separate self or I.

None of these stories are absolutely true, yet they are all relative truths… each with a grain of truth in them. Together, they fill out the picture within the realm of stories, and they also point to that which is inherently free from (and prior to) stories.

When we take ourselves to be a separate self, an I with an Other, then any talk of selflessness sounds mysterious, or even deluded, and maybe as a reference to some sort of annihilation or dissolution. (The best we can hope for is a union with the absolute, an I here in union with God as Other.)

But even a mild taste of selflessness, for instance through the Big Mind process or the headless experiments, shows this to not be the case. The only thing that is different is that the sense of a separate self, placed on this human self, is gone. What is left is what is always there… this wide open field of what is happening right now, as awake emptiness and form, yet with absolutely no center and no separate self anywhere.

As Meister Eckhart said (paraphrased): when I am gone, God is.

Apart from tasting it on our own, maybe the simplest way to look at it is that God is all there is. God is awake emptiness and form, an I with no Other anywhere.

This awake emptiness temporarily takes itself to be a small segment of form, most typically this individual at the human level, and sometimes even at the soul level. There is a belief in ideas, including the idea of a separate self and various identities defining who and what this separate self is. The seamless and centerless field is now split into an I here, located in the region of the perceptual center of this human self, and Other out there, as the rest of the world.

When it awakens to itself as this field of awake emptiness and form, absent of I and Other, then it sees that the whole sense of a separate self only came from taking an idea as true. It temporarily took a relative truth, the existence of a somewhat separate individual at human and soul levels, and tried to make it into an absolute truth, and in the process gave birth to a great deal of drama and excitement. The whole human drama, as we know it from our own lives, societies and cultures, all came from this temporary misidentification.

Nothing is annihilated or dissolved, apart from the taking of a relative truth as an absolute. This individual is certainly still around, at human and soul levels, with all its sensations, thoughts, relationships, actions in the world, and everything else. The content of all of this does not need to change. The only thing that changes is the sense of a separate self placed on this perceptual center, which, when released, reveals the wide open field of all of it.

The bottom drops out of it all, revealing only a field of awake emptiness and form, without a center, absent of an I with an Other.