Full Aliveness
Father Bede Griffiths was a Christian monk who went to live, study and meditate in India. After his spiritual awakening, he wrote: “Ah, so many believe that enlightenment would be some sort of lobotomy, that our mind stills into a passive blank sterile state of no-thing. And that the peace that surpasses all understanding would yield a tedious dimension stripped of diversity and contrast, yet that is the furthest from the truth of this Edenic dance and hum of all Life coming to its essential awareness of its full aliveness … ”
Moving then to the Buddhist tradition, Bede draws on a quote from a great Zen teacher, Suzuki, in which he said that “Sunyata is not static but dynamic.” So even in Buddhism, even in the great emptiness of sunyata, notes Bede, there is a movement, a tendency towards outpouring.
“In the void there is a constant urge to differentiate itself. And the whole creation is the differentiation of the void … At the very moment of the differentiation it returns to itself. It is always coming out and returning.”
The void flows out in differentiation and simultaneously returns to the void. “That is why the Buddhists say that Nirvana and Samsara are the same,” says Fr. Bede. “Ultimately they are one.”
From: “Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith“, by Bede Griffiths, as recounted by Brian J. Pierce in: Trinity, Creation and the Energy of Love
