Emptiness Has A Twin

Recently I have been feeling increasingly vacuous, as if newer and newer levels of emptiness are waiting to be discovered in the deepest recesses. Somewhat tragically though, I realise soon enough that Emptiness is of two entirely different breeds falsely claiming a common descent. Firstly, there is that occasionally pleasant state of confronting a tabula rasa, whereby consciousness presents your ego with an empty slate; a canvas washed clean with hyssops of time and chance. How freely can seeds of inspiration then be sown, how indescribable the anticipation of fresh sprouts of renewal! You paint the sun and sketch the stars, and elect your most favourable azimuth for them to reside in. You feel cleansed of false memories and break free from the shackles of karma. Every opportunity becomes a handsome stallion, unopposed on the vast plains of your mind...And then there is the flip side; the profound realisation of Emptiness as Absence-Of; such that even the beginning of its contemplation is a cardinal sin, for then you presuppose some entity in inherent nothingness. Dare you speculate on the texture of this quintessential emptiness? What do you make of its colours and sounds, what do you surmise from its pulsating walls; its ripples of hurt and pain? An intoxicating invitation to endlessly descend, till you master the intonation of silence. O Fool, listen to your own chuckles of misery when you discover how similar it is to your heart!

Rebirth

Polemical whispers rejoice in the fall

They quicken my footsteps while redeeming my crawl

Shrivel and learn a shrivelling myth!

As if if I drift I might sanction the rift

Between the Giver, why do You relentlessly stare;

And author the line between hope and despair?

Your eyes are like knives;

Till I realise the greatest prize

To be still and await a second demise

Time and Time Again

The most fascinating aspect of time dilation must be what they term as psychological time dilation - the dubious yet undeniable feeling that time flies when we are having fun and grinds to a virtual halt when we deign to suffer. Its charm lies not merely in the absence of obstruperious equations - since anything psychological automatically divorces itself from arithmetic - but in the fact that genuine to the spirit of relativity, every individual experience and hence every unique frame of reference must be taken to be valid. That is certainly why a trip to the dentist or dinner with parents-in-law may be thoroughly enjoyable to some, but a descent to Hades for others. But how then does the "mind", or whatever ephemeral object demarcated by the constructs of psychology, participate in a seemingly material process governed and calculable by physical equations, to a satisfactorily vigorous extent? How can we be certain that psychological time dilation is not merely a metaphor fortunate enough to be blessed by a scientifically grounded source domain? But enough for now, I feel that this blog is taking me ages to formulate.