Emptiness and Fullness

One of the new discoveries of modern physics and cosmology is that what looks like a vacuum or the complete emptiness of space between the stars and around atoms is, in truth, a great fullness. The emptiness of space is the fullness of unlimited possibility. The empty vacuum is nothing less than infinite potential boiling up into material existence and then, just as quickly, collapsing back into the “empty” field of a seemingly infinite fullness.

This understanding is both a paradox and a mystery, and perhaps paradigmatic of something larger, a metaphysical truth that was well understood by the mystics  from across traditions and all generations.

Read, for example, Rumi’s powerful poem. Read it both ways—one using emptiness as a sign of the divine and limitless Infinitude, and the other way as an expression of an unlimited and eternal Fullness.

In the end, they are the same and our “existence” stands in the Light of an eternal grandeur from which we have come and to which we are returning.

Praise to the emptiness (fullness) that blanks out existence.
Existence: The place made of our love for that emptiness (fullness).
Yet somehow this emptiness (fullness) comes, and existence goes.
Praise for that happening, over and over again.

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness (fullness).
Then with one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is all over.

Free of who I was, free of my own self,
free of dangerous fear and hope,
free of mountainous wanting...
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness (fullness).

These words I am saying begin to lose their meaning.
“Existence, emptiness, fullness, mountain, straw.”
Words and what they try to say--
all swept out the window and down the slant of the roof.
               --adapted from Coleman Bark's translation.