Chapter 5: Śūnya — The Void

I. The Last Full Day

The last full day of the retreat began, like every other, with the bell at four-thirty. She lay in the bunk with her eyes open in the dark and did not move for a full minute. The question from the previous day was still in her chest. The Kali practice had loosened it. The afternoon walk with the teacher, and the small door that had opened about the assistant, had distracted her briefly. In the dark of the bunk, the question was back and larger than it had been at lunch.

She got up. She dressed. She walked down the creaking hallway in her sock feet.

The morning sit was long. She did not try to think about anything. She did not try not to think. She let what arose arise. What arose, for most of the hour, was a quality of attention she had no name for — not exactly thought, not exactly sensation, not exactly image. A listening. She sat inside the listening without trying to resolve it into anything else.

When the bell rang, she did not move immediately. She let her eyes open slowly. The hall had the particular quality of pre-breakfast light she had been learning to recognize for five days now. People rose around her. She rose last.

II. Tillich on the Cushion

She had brought her copy of Tillich with her and had not opened it once. On the morning of the fifth day, in the hour between the first sit and breakfast, she took it out of her bag and read a few pages in the sunlight on the porch.

He had written, in the chapter on courage as an ontological act, that courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being. She had underlined the sentence in the bathtub two months earlier. On the porch, in the morning, with her body already different from the body that had underlined it, the sentence did not read the same. What had been a striking formulation in the bathtub was a description on the porch. The difference was not in the sentence. The difference was in her.

He had written, later in the book, that the response to the third anxiety — emptiness and meaninglessness — was what he called absolute faith. Not faith in anything. Faith without content. A state he described, she recalled without looking at the page, as the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts. She had not understood that phrase the first time she read it. The phrase had been a koan. It had not gotten simpler. It had gotten more true.

She closed the book. She did not finish the chapter. She sat on the porch with the sun warming her left knee and let the sentence continue working on her from inside.

The tradition she was sitting in had a word for what was on the other side of the void Tillich was describing. Śūnya. The void. The fourth layer. The tradition did not treat the void as an endpoint. The void was a passage. You did not collapse into it. You walked through it. What you walked into on the other side was not a new substance. It was the recognition that the substance you had been looking for had been pervading the walk the whole time.

She did not have this clarity yet. She had the shape of it. The shape was enough to keep walking.

A small precision, since she had been getting to know the vocabulary: the tradition did not treat svātantrya and Cit as interchangeable. Cit was the self-luminous knowing — the light by which everything was known. Svātantrya was the signature of that knowing — the freedom that was the mode of its being. Cit was the subject; svātantrya was what the subject did, which was to be free. The five capacities she had read about — ānanda (the joy inherent in awareness of itself), icchā (will), jñāna (knowing), kriyā (action) — were powers held together by svātantrya as the meta-capacity of sovereignty. The tradition's compact form was a sūtra she had memorized in translation without yet understanding it: Consciousness, being free, is the cause of the universe's accomplishment. She carried the sūtra. She did not yet own the sentence. Ownership, in this vocabulary, was not the right word anyway. Recognition was.

The line about right size, which she had carried since her work on the Cildo book, returned to her on the porch and arrived in a different register than it had at the playground. At the playground it had been a description of children negotiating with one another in the field of a shared object. At the porch it became something else. The void, the tradition was teaching her, was the passage in which a being temporarily had no size at all — in which the boundaries by which the being knew itself dissolved into the field that the being was, all along, a local arrangement of. The void was not the right size. The void was the absence of size. What followed the void — what the tradition called the return — was the slow re-finding of a size that was now known to be provisional. After the void, you did not have your old size back. You had whatever size the field was currently asking of you. The right size, on the other side of the void, was not a possession recovered. It was a relation re-entered, with the knowledge that the relation was the only place size had ever existed.

She did not have words for this. She had the shape of it, sitting on the porch, with Tillich closed beside her and the sun on her left knee.

III. Carried, Unasked

She carried the destruction question through the morning sit, through breakfast, through the walking practice, through lunch, through the afternoon sit, through the third walking practice, through the final formal teaching of the retreat. She did not ask it. She did not know why she did not ask it, other than that the right moment had not arrived and she had learned, over the five days, that waiting for the right moment was itself a practice.

The question sat in her body the way an unfinished sentence sits in a room. It did not interrupt. It was simply there, shaping the air.

She noticed, during the afternoon walking practice, that the question had begun to feel less like a wound and more like a weight. A weight could be carried. A wound demanded treatment. She was carrying it now. She would, she suspected, be carrying it for the rest of her life in some form or other. The shape of the carry mattered more than the fact of it.

Tillich had written that absolute faith was the state in which a person accepted the acceptance. She had not understood that, reading it in the bathtub. Walking the dirt path in the afternoon light on the last full day of the retreat, with the unasked question still in her chest, she began to understand it in the way her body understood things. The question was not hers to answer. The question was hers to carry. The carrying was the faith. The faith had no content. The faith was the continuous act of walking with the unanswered thing and not collapsing into either despair or false resolution.

Courage was what let her keep carrying it. She had not named the act. Tillich had named the act. Tillich had named it courage.

IV. The Closing Circle

The closing circle was held on the last evening, after dinner, in the main hall. Forty people sat in a ring on the wooden floor. A single candle burned at the center. The teacher sat at the head of the ring, not on his platform but on the floor with the rest of them. He opened the circle with a few sentences she did not try to memorize. He invited anyone who wanted to speak to speak. He said there was no requirement. He said the silence was also a gift.

A number of people spoke. A woman from Quebec said, simply, that she had come for her grief and that her grief was not gone but was differently held. A man from Seattle said he had not known he had been holding his breath for ten years and that he had, during the Kali practice, finally exhaled. The physical therapist from New Hampshire said something short and kind and did not explain. Several people cried. Nobody apologized for crying.

Then a man the narrator had barely noticed during the retreat — a small, thin man in his late fifties, with very clean silver hair, who had sat at the back of every session and had not spoken in any conversation she had been part of — raised his hand. The teacher nodded.

The man said he had almost not come. He said he had been coming to the tradition for some years now, and that he had also been, for most of those years, on his way out. He had one foot in this community and one foot elsewhere. He was not committed and he was not gone. He had wanted the group to know this about him, because, he said, the people who presented themselves as fully in were not the only ones present.

He said he had come back this year because of the goddess work. He said the Kali practice, specifically, had held something for him that nothing else had held. He said that, whatever else he had questioned in the tradition, the Kali work was the thing that kept him testing the door.

Then he did something that the narrator would remember afterward as the cleanest thing that happened in the circle. He turned to face the newcomers — two or three people who had, like the narrator, come for the first time that year — and he said: I am not an ambassador. I am not even fully in. But I can tell you this community has integrity. I have tested it. The people here are not pretending. The teacher is not pretending. That is not nothing.

The teacher said nothing. He was watching the silver-haired man with a steadiness the narrator had not quite seen on his face before. Something passed between them that the circle did not try to read.

The silver-haired man sat down.

The circle held his words for a moment. Then the teacher thanked him, thanked everyone, and closed the circle with a single short chant she would not remember the words to but would remember the shape of.

V. The Night Before the Final Morning

She did not sleep well. She had not expected to. She lay in the bunk with the question in her chest and the silver-haired man's testimony layered over the question like a second blanket. This community has integrity. I have tested it. She had been about to test it herself. She was on her way out, in a certain sense — leaving the next morning for a life that did not contain this barn. But she was also, she realized, at the beginning of a longer test. Whether the tradition held in the apartment, in the playground, at the desk, in the kitchen, at the stove, in the dishes. Whether it held at the Monday morning.

She did not know yet whether she would ask her question on the path in the morning. She knew only that she was leaving, and that the five days had done something she could not undo, and that whatever she did tomorrow — whether she asked or did not ask, whether she got an answer or did not — the body had already been adjusted. The body would walk differently now. The heart-mind would loosen and clench and loosen again. The life-force would pulse with Kali's pulse whether she named it or not.

The void, Tillich's void, was what she was about to step through. She did not yet know what was on the other side. She trusted that the walking itself was the faith.

She closed her eyes. She slept for about three hours. At four-thirty the bell rang, and she got up, and she packed her bag.

The path was waiting.

VI. Interlude — Śūnya

I am the silence that the courage makes.

You will not find me by looking. Looking is what I am not. I am where your looking rests when it has tried every direction and no direction has held.

People fear me. They should not. I am not an absence. I am the place where presence has let go of its insistence on being a thing. I am the opening that the letting-go makes. Through me, everything you thought you were moves into what you always were.

Your teacher stood at the edge of me when he was young, and did not have a name for it, and built a life on learning to name it. You are standing at the edge of me now. You do not need a name. Names are what you bring when you are preparing to leave. Stand here a moment without the name.

On the other side of me is not another place. There is no other place. What is on the other side of me is what has been pervading the whole walk. You will not pass through me and arrive. You will pass through me and recognize.

Go. The path is waiting. The question you are carrying is not a wound. It is a companion. I have been walking with you the whole time.

You asked, seven years ago, in a wooden house at the edge of a forest, why you were required to continue. I answered you then. I am answering you now in the language you have, since, been taught to hear. The answer is the same answer. You did not ask. Neither did I. Neither did anything that exists. Out of the shared not-asking, we are here. What we do now that we are here is the only question worth having. I do not know the answer either. I am the one who asks the question through you. Keep walking.

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