the medicine

 

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If there were a way for someone to be, at the same time, before and behind things, he would understand to what a degree time's opening, that simply devours events, loses its meaning; exactly as in a poem.


—Odysseus Elytis
To Anoint the Repast XXIV, excerpt
Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris version

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Every spiritual wisdom tradition from time immemorial has pointed out in its own creative way that grasping onto the idea of intrinsic, independent existence─both in the seemingly objective outer world and within the subjective domain of our own selves─is the fundamental mental affliction, the root cause of our self-created delusion with all of its concomitant suffering. 

Clinging onto the idea that we exist in a way that we simply do not is a deeply entrenched unconscious disposition, a habitual pattern that at a certain point gains enough momentum to develop a seeming autonomy such that it re-generates itself, as we invest our life force into an illusory identity and unconsciously recreate it moment by moment. 

These same spiritual wisdom traditions point out that the realization of what in Buddhism is called “emptiness”─the lack of intrinsic, independent objective existence of both the outer world as well as ourselves─is the fundamental cure for our psychic dis-ease.

[...] In discovering that there is no objective world out there and no objective subject in here, quantum physics is discovering the medicine─the fundamental cure─for the psycho-spiritual illness that ails our species.

—Paul Levy

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When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
As the well does when the plates of earth move,
Or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.

The peony says that we have been given a gift,
And it is not the gift of this world.
Behind the leaves of the peony
There is a world still darker, that feeds many.


—Robert Bly

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