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February 26, 2010
Mu
Philippe Claudel dedicated his creepy but ultimately life-affirming novel Brodeck's Report to 'all those who think they are nothing'. Quotation from V.Hugo (The Rhine) starts off the book: "I am nothing, I know it, but my nothing comprises a little bit of everything."
As a number Seven of the Enneagram I'm quite fond of a little bit of everything in my nothing. But a more serious question is this:
How is it that there is a world of difference between the feeling of being nothing (the despair of someone feeling so totally worthless that in some cases only taking one's own life offers solution),
and the 'nothing' as a spiritual aspiration of those 'on the path' to 'enlightenment'?
How come the apparent lack of ego in the first group leads to extremes of suffering, but the so called spiritual person who strives to shed their ego is so often driven by the very beast?. My nothing is better than yours, you can imagine them thinking .. My nothing comprises of a little bit more of everything than your nothing.. My nothing is quite something, while yours is not really up to scratch, it.. it lacks something.
The grave of the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu (of the Tokyo Story) bears no name, only the Japanese character Mu - literally "nothingness". Mu is a central theme in Japanese worldview. It doesn't refer to a state of nonbeing, but rather it transcends all ideas of existence and nonexistence, thing and nothing, yes and no, leading to.., you got it - enlightenment.
This concept is too much for my vagrant mind and my brain is starting to hurt as I think and write this.
But I guess this is rather like being asked: " Have you stopped beating your wife?", if you either have no wife, or never beat your wife in the first place. Both straight yes and no as an answer would give the wrong idea and would -one way or another - be self-incriminating.
The right and only answer would be one of the following: 'pass', 'your question has no answer as it starts with wrong assumptions', 'unask your question', finally- ' whatever'.
Or you could simply say: Mu. That would be quite something, or maybe even quite nothing..
Posted by Marzena at February 26, 2010 05:57 PM