The Hollows

THE HOLLOWS

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Perhaps at one time, a formless innocence is all that we are. 

When we become form, our innocence becomes a hollow space within. 

This hollow is somehow separate from what we are & yet inseparable. 

We sense this hollow within; a space of absence contained by our presence. 

Like a hollow in a rock wall from whence a bird might come & go. 

The condition of this space is that it remains a secret from the world.

For a while, we have no way of knowing if others have this space within or not. 

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In childhood we build secret worlds, instinctively recoding the relations of things. 

The child intuitively engages with the emptiness within form. 

It is our innocence that has the faculty of discernment and imagination.

To locate the emptiness within form allows separate realities to emerge, the purpose of a thing becomes separate from the potential of a thing. 

These separate realities within reality are the worlds of the hollows; the innocent world and the spaces of all creation. 

The purpose of things is foreign to the awareness of the child.

Childhood is a type of exile in the world of things and purposes. 

The child contains a hollow, and childhood is also a hollow. 

The hollow within is surrounded on all sides by the purpose of things.

And yet the world of purpose and of things can only exist as an actualized potential within a larger hollow. 

The purpose of a thing appears real due to our ignorance of its emptiness.

The form of control used by ignorance is encapsulation, purpose has no reach into the hollow, and no awareness of emptiness.

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At some point in development the child learns to reason.

To reason is a way to express understanding in the world of purpose and things.

At first, the ability to reason gives the developing child a degree of agency that feels expansive.

We become better suited for navigation in a world of purpose and things. 

We learn desire.

Desire is wanting the purpose of things to align with our will. 

We learn to care for things, and by caring for things they become opaque, we forget their emptiness.

Our outer expansion into reason is also an inner contraction around the hollow. 

The child has not lost the instinct to protect the hollow, but has not yet consciously discovered it either. 

By instinct there is an awareness that the tool of reason can be a way to formulate strategic walls of defense around the hollow. 

We become capable of making changes in the world of things, and they feel more real as we become more ignorant of their emptiness.

The world urges us into behavioral models of reason and agreement, and we learn to negotiate with the world’s urgings.

Elementary reason is the beginning of the risk of becoming ignorant of the hollow. 

The hollow is our innocence. 

Our innocence lives in the hollow, and is nourished only by the immanence of emptiness. 

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At some stage of development we feel the difference between who we are in the world and how we feel within.

Enlightened reason is the raised awareness that reason can be used as a defense system to protect the hollow. 

Enlightened reason is also the beginning of the capacity to lie. 

Enlightened reason is the recognition of the patterns of reason as a logical system absent of true intrinsic meaning.

It is our innocence that makes us capable of evil. 

Or perhaps, it is our innocence in relation to to enlightened reason that is the possibility of evil. 

When one learns to lie about an action, and therefore create a secret, one is reminded of the innocence of the hollow. 

The lie is a negative relationship to innocence, but the behavior of holding a secret is patterned similarly to how we carry the hollow.

Whole systems of reasoned secrecy and lying can take form.

The system of secrecy and lying feels like an inhabiting of a hollow, but this is an illusion.

To inhabit a lie is to become isolated. 

The lie, the obsession, the compulsion is the avoidance of responsibility for maintaining one’s hollow. 

The responsibility is consumed in maintenance of the lie.

Forgetting innocence is tragic. 

We can begin forgetting at any time, slowly or all at once.

It’s never that one’s innocence has flown, but that it has been forgotten. 

Innocence is immanent, permanently pervading all substance. 

We abandon our innocence to find our place in the world.

One struggles to remember their own innocence while the world of purpose speaks of our guilt. 

We lie to avoid occupying the space of guilt in a world of purpose and things.

We lie to conceal that our hollow is not attached to any thing in this world. 

We lie to forget so that we don’t have to be responsible. 

The conscience becomes confused, and one forgets the innocence of the hollow. 

One no longer knows how to interpret the conscience, and uses reason and strategies of relativities to understand one’s own behavior. 

We soothe ourselves with comparisons. 

Many become lost here in cycles of repetition and amnesia, attempting to control a compulsion one ceases to understand. 

Imagination and discernment is consumed by desire.

This is the land of ghosts and shadows and unending hunger. 

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Somewhere along the way the catastrophe of love occurs. 

Love is of course incredibly problematic for reason and the relative world of purpose and things and lies.

Love offers both rescue and destruction. 

Rescue from the illusion and the destruction of the lies. 

Love does not obey reason and has extension into the hollow. 

Love does not speak of our guilt.

Love is true. 

Love is also a secret. 

When Love occurs one’s hollow feels like it overflows with an emptiness that can only be filled by the beloved. 

One learns both ecstasy & torment.

But love, like the bird, comes & goes. 

Even if the bird makes a nest in the hollow, which is a promise to return. 

Love teaches us tragedy.

The unrequited tragedy of offering your hollow to one who will never return.

The tragedy of the lovers who don’t understand the mode of intensity they occupy.

The tragedy of the beauty of love becoming formalized in a world of purpose.

The lovers are always attempting to recover their own innocence, and are torn between the beauty of each other’s witness, and the witness of the world upon the hollow of their love. 

What the lovers offer each other is protection and honor.

A space of protection apart from the world and an honor apart from worldly striving. 

The cycle of protection and honor can be given or withdrawn. 

Love tests the depth of our ability to commit to living in relation to an other. 

The capacity for depth of commitment is informed by one’s integrity to their own hollow. 

Many here become lost, and many succeed. 

The form of life with the beloved does not have to become fixed for one to learn what is necessary. 

What is necessary is that we make our heart singular, and rescue it from doubleness and ambiguity. 

After one suffers the repetitions of love long enough, one recognizes that when the particular beloved has flown, there is still something else in the air of the hollow. 

It feels like particles of air that are aware of themselves, making patterns in emptiness.

There is something caring for the hollow that is apart from us.  

This care for the existence of the hollow comes not from ourselves, and not from the beloved, but from something beyond and yet within. 

Commitment to our own integrity is the realization that we are witnessed by more than what is seen by the eyes.

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We remember ourselves as children, long ago, looking out from a window.

An invisible pattern undulates in absence. 

Delicate & indestructible.

There is a secret world of transparency we awaken to in our heart. 

The beauty of this calm electricity scorns one’s striving in a world of purpose and opacity. 

We feel the accumulated weight of our own pride. 

Recognition that the tools of reason taught one oblivion. 

That love taught one aloneness. 

We remember our innocence by realizing our abandonment in the world.

This is humility, and this is enough to begin again. 

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Our wound from falling becomes our receptive capacity to the beauty of the transparent world.

The transparent world is full of hollows. 

Things cease being things of limited purpose and are revealed in their thingness, as offerings from a consciousness permeating every thing equally. 

A bird is not a bird but the birdness of the mind of God.

Relations between vast things are hollows we are always immersed in.

Relation between all the stars in the sky is an angel’s hollow.

Relation between all things blue in the world is the hollow of a blue angel.

There is a hollow of a world of the awakened hearts. 

Hollows of the fragrance of flowers. 

Bird songs are understood by the silence of the heart. 

All we must do is learn to carry our own hollow & bear witness to the world that we occupy.

We nourish our own hollow with immersion in the Hollows. 

We turn the care of our own hollow back over to the calm constant presence of consciousness that permeates the Hollows.

And we offer new commitments of love. 

But now we make offerings in transparency, rather than lies and relative opacities. 

There is less need for destruction or torment, more space for acceptance and receptivity. 

Recognition of beauty is perhaps the most encompassing Hollow known to mind.

We learn to perceive again with the faculty of discernment and imagination.

Things in the world of purpose may cease being seen as good or bad. 

And yet there is much to be avoided.

We learn the depth of our freedom to choose.

We become free to withdraw our consent from the world of purpose and to give our love to the Hollows of overflowing absence.

We are free to bare witness to world full of pride and striving. 

We learn to see it, and by seeing the fallen world of pride and compulsive obsession, we also learn to witness the world from a perceptual faculty that is different than our eye.

We see with the transparent eye, our conscience having been purified by pain.

At the threshold of pain there is nothing but space. 

We have flown over this landscape and returned to the hollow. 

Now our heart resonates from our position in time into infinite space. 

We have compassion for those that are striving and that have forgotten they once protected hollows.

We see past the codes of reasons lies and oblivions and tragedies.

We honor our own heart, and feel beauty.

And we live a life in this strange foreign land, this strange speed of time. 

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