| | From where I'm sitting (ha), the beginning of 3rd path involves seeing emptiness in an incredibly profound way. For me, the several months after that path were the most amazing, empty, effortless, and clear that I've experienced. Then emptiness seemed like it began to fade (which was actually just a new dark night). And since then emptiness has become more and more, nothing special. In Zen I believe they harp on the term, "ordinary mind." And actually, it has been more and more a process of having all my ideals about enlightenment, about what it gives, what it brings me, how it would make me special, how it would somehow be better than this, even how it should or would unfold (danger map geeks, this is painful!) slowly stripped away.
A little story to illustrate my point. Apparently, last night, I woke up and starting speaking in my sleep. My wife told me the next morning that I sat straight up and said to her, "I'm done, not done, done, but this is it. This is it. Just this. This is it." This wasn't a proclamation of realization, believe me, this was and is a proclamation of defeat.
That is why part of 3rd path, from my perspective, is the dark night of the larger cycle (the big cycle). It isn't because other people haven't seen emptiness, it's because one begins to see that emptiness isn't actually anything special. It isn't a refuge that is separate from anything else in this world (which it once seemed). It isn't, as Daniel often points out, a super-space that one can escape to. It's "just this" and from that perspective one in this position can't help but think, "I'm fucked." |