It is quite strange this feeling that I am getting nowhere in meditation and yet there is also a feeling that there is progress. I am much more conscious now of what I have to do – concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on the breath as it comes in and as it goes out. Doing it is still very difficult although I am much more aware now of these squalls of thoughts and feelings which emerge from nowhere and carry me away. These are ‘me’, or rather, they are the various ‘me’s’, depending on who, or what, is preoccupying my attention at the time. And I have to let these go. That is difficult. It is like dying and there is a very deep-seated instinct which resists, hanging on to the life of these ‘me’s’ because that is all there is. If they are allowed to go there is nothing.
I now understand why ‘nothing’ holds such a prominent position in Buddhist thought. Meditation very quickly leads to the experience of ‘nothing’; not to no experience at all, not to blank, empty thoughtlessness. The experience of ‘nothing’ is an experience, not the absence of experience. Paradoxically it is not an experience of something or anything. Nishitani talks about it as coming up against an iron wall. That is not how I would describe it although I understand what he is trying to say. ‘Iron’ implies impenetrability – thus far, no further. ‘Wall’ implies closure. It also implies a beyond. Like the horizon, which can only be seen when one can see beyond it, wall implies an other side.
For me the experience of ‘nothingness’ is like being suspended in the void over a bottomless abyss. Wisps of thoughts and feelings emerge from nowhere, coalesce around me, drawing me into them. When they are thick enough I am no longer aware of the void. When I manage to dissipate them panic and vertigo urge me to reach out and cling to these insubstantial strands. I have to hold myself there, suspended, motionless above the abyss of nothingness. I am suspended by faith, by trust. I have yet to learn how to hold myself there. We are created out of nothing. Nothing is of our very essence. To experience nothing is to be on that cusp between nothing and being. But holding oneself there – that is another matter and what lies beyond this experience?