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Defined By Limitations
Two Faces
God has two faces. Emptiness (無, 무 in Korean or wu in Mandarin) and form (有, 유 in Korean or you in Mandarin). Emptiness is no color, no sound, no taste, no smell. It is instead infinite possibility. But it is also without relationship, without experience. God can only be in relationship with itself through you and I, the experiencer, confined and defined by the limits of our manifest form.
It is only because we are limited, with boundaries marked off by skin and edges of compassion, that we can engage one another in relationship.
Making Love
What is the difference between fucking, having sex and making love (correlating respectively to Deida’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd stage man/woman)? When you fuck, you are doing something to someone. You are the subject. Your partner is the object. You are fully engaged in your own experience.
When you have sex, you are interested not only in your experience but also in your partner’s experience. Is she also experiencing pleasure? You can relate to her. You are in relationship.
When you make love, your sense of self begins to fade away. Yes, you are experiencing pleasure. Yes, so is the one in your embrace, but you are in the movement from relationship to becoming one, to love. “God is love.” But God can only experience love through that movement from relationship to one.
Don’t get me wrong, though, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with fucking or just having sex. In fact, you may move through all 3 states in one encounter (though in my experience making love is very rare and profoundly beautiful).
God Mode and Wimp Mode
Limitations allow us, then, experience, relationship and love. And challenge, the spice of life, if you will. Seriously, how fun would a video game be that only had a “God mode” (aptly named) be? Not very. Nor is the polar opposite of “God mode”; let’s call it wimp mode. That is, never accepting the challenges of your limitations, but staying comfortably within their boundaries, your spirit withering away.
Staying within your limitations narrows the definition of who you are, both how you are perceived by others and how you understand yourself.
Ken Wilber has mentioned that development in terms of levels of consciousness generally levels off at around the early 20s and then stays constant until around one’s 60s (the only known effective method of moving up in levels of consciousness is meditation, by the way). Note that these are your prime working years. The turbulent challenges of childhood and adolescence have been largely overcome and you become largely defined by your daily routines and the role your profession lends you (“This is Sungwon. He’s a PhD student at KAIST”). Then you hit retirement and you began to question again, who you are and what it’s really all about. Facing the ultimate limiting factor of death probably doesn’t hurt moving the reflective process along, either.
Compassion
In seduction and other self-development communities, there’s a lot of talk of self-limiting beliefs and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. It’s true, your beliefs limit you and your limitations define who you are. The near-infinite amount of stimulus and information present in any given moment is filtered through your beliefs before it reaches your conscious mind. You literally cannot perceive anything outside of your belief systems. Conversely, everything that you do perceive is done so in terms of your belief systems. So what happens when you accept the challenge of your limits and start expanding their boundaries, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone? You are able to perceive and understand more of the available universe. Simply put, you become more compassionate.
Why do you become more compassionate? When you push beyond your limits, you literally expand the definition of who you are, what you identify with. You move from being in relationship to a certain sliver of the universe, to becoming one with it. This is love.
Limits Without End
Limitations, however, are limitless. There is no end. Many people have expectations of happiness based on reaching certain goals. When I’m rich, I’ll be happy. But then you’re not. Popular culture largely blames this on money itself, but there’s nothing wrong with money (while having money is no guarantee of happiness, not having any is generally a prescription for suffering).
Unhappiness in this case stems rather from the fact that making money is no longer a challenge, and that you may have let other dimensions of who you are atrophy. There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’re good at, in fact you should let yourself be an expression of that brilliance, but I encourage you to put some time and effort into areas that you have neglected.
Push beyond yourself and embrace the world around you.
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about 3 years ago
‘God as emptiness’ might also be infinite impossibility, if God can be qualified according to a lack of input (emptiness) to the 5 major senses. As an analogy, I can’t ‘feel’ my connection to ‘nature’ through conventional sensation (although I can see different elements of it and touch some of these with my hands); my connection or ‘relationship’ isn’t describable through these senses.
If “God can only be in relationship with itself through you and I, the experiencer”, what was God before there were any experiencers? What will God be if there are no more experiencers?
about 3 years ago
Hmm, I don’t understand how that relationship is analogous to infinite impossibility.
God before or after any experiencers would not be in relationship with itself. This is in fact God as emptiness.
about 3 years ago
It was a poor analogy. I am rightly ashamed.
I was commenting on ‘emptiness’ as the sensory perception of absence (which may not be the point you were making). If perception is based on our five senses, then there is infinite impossibility in emptiness. For example, we can perceive only a small portion of light across a spectrum, the majority being imperceptible to us. If we can’t perceive the rest, logically, we can’t know it or enter into relationship with it. Our perception of emptiness would then become the absence of what we are able to perceive. This would make the possibility of anything else existing seem impossible, or a matter of faith. Would this encompass your title, Defined by Limitations?
Can there be a reconciliation of God as both emptiness and form?
about 3 years ago
Haha, I didn’t mean to shame you! I just didn’t understand it.
I don’t know if Emptiness is just what we are not able to perceive with our senses, or what can not be perceived at all by anyone or anything ever. I would guess it is the latter, though. By the title, I was mainly thinking of how people are defined by limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, and how growth is generally an expansion of limitations. But yeah, you could mean it that way, too.
There are other ways of knowing besides perception, though. We can observe the effects of something and can infer that it exists. That’s how we know that dark matter and dark energy comprise 96% of the total energy density of the universe. Yep, we can only directly observe 4% of the universe. Who knows what’s going on in there. It is definitely tempting to draw parallels between spiritual knowledge of Emptiness and scientific knowledge of dark matter and energy, but who knows what, if any, relationship exists. Ok, so you could argue that since we can observe the effects of the unobservable, it’s still a form of perception. Yeah, in that case I guess you would have to go on faith. Or “feeling”. In deep meditation, you can “feel” emptiness. Though, maybe again you could reduce that to feeling the effects and thus perceiving it. Damn, tough question! I better think about this some more.
Yes, God is both emptiness and form. Two sides of the same coin. You can divide up the Kosmos in a myriad of ways. One of the most basic is the duality of emptiness and form. In fact, a lot of spiritual paths first focus on training to realize emptiness and then more advanced training focuses on how everything is One. And indeed some nature-based paths focus on seeing God in form.
“Everything is on the One, bobble!” – Bootsy Collins