The Empty Cup
La Taza Vacía
An invitation to rest in simple presence, letting go of your self-image to discover the timeless awareness already within you.
The Empty Cup
Just be comfortable.
My teacher used to say meditation is simulation.
What is the most evident and overlooked,
misinterpreted,
misunderstood aspect of reality?
You can't think about it, can't grasp it with concepts or understanding of the mind.
It's a reality that exists before the mind,
before the mind came into being.
A child knows it before it learns to think.
We know it and obscure it with thought.
You can write infinite riddles to point to it,
as the Zen masters have with their koans.
They are the most direct pointers.
Seemingly sufficient.
We just can't believe it's so simple.
Being now,
this,
nothing more, nothing less.
The gardener digging with his shovel.
The king and the feet,
all with a flavor of eternity.
What is timeless
What is timeless? What is spaceless?
This.
Before you reflect on yourself,
just being,
before you conceive of time and space there is being.
As you observe how going into your paradigms constricts your reality,
as you observe this, a door opens for grace.
You invite the infinite,
all forms that point to it, the source.
It's not here or there,
or the past or the future.
It's what gives birth to here and there, the past and future.
You and me, self, other.
You are that
You are the alpha and the omega.
Christ,
Buddha,
point.
Siddhartha knew it,
Jesus knew it,
you know it.
It's love itself.
It's what embraces the struggle,
the pain,
suffering.
Every word I say complicates it,
engages the mind,
offers a false promise of something to get,
something to find.
Only silence can be truthful.
The words are just for dancing,
relating.
Just one taste,
an instant,
and it'll burn.
Nothing you do can stop it.
Slow it down and write the gentleness,
the tenderness.
The heart has no bounds.
Welcome the knowing.
Daring to welcome
We must become heretics to a religion that is not ours.
Dare to welcome what you were told doesn't belong to you,
what has been hidden from you.
Dare to allow the possibility that you know what Jesus knew.
You know what Buddha knew.
In your being, you are that.
It's not a bearing for the faint hearted.
It pours through your veins,
so intimate.
It ignites your mind with infinite imagination.
Makes the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary the most ordinary.
Emptying the cup
My cup is empty,
the new tea can come in.
The emptiness makes space,
but nothing enters.
There is no new tea.
The empty cup.
Who are you without the images of yourself right now?
For an instant drop the self-reflection.
Like, believe there is no one there,
just playfully, like a child.
What remains
if you'll empty the cup from all sense,
an image of yourself, a past or a future?
It's just an empty looking of now.
Extend that to all living beings,
all minds empty cups,
one empty space with empty looking.
Offering and grace
You only need to do half of the work.
Offering, intention,
and consecration.
Grace, reality,
divinity,
truth does the rest.
It's just welcoming.
Sanctity is not a void.
That's the reflection in the mind,
projecting fears.
This emptiness is sweet.
It's delicious.
The nectar of the gods.
Even when the mind is full,
stormy,
you can notice
beyond this space.
Any sense that you have lost it,
you can't find it,
it's just a thought.