Original Face

“What was your original face before even your parents were born?”

The first time I heard this koan the question seemed absurd. But over time it began to carry a certain promise. It seemed to point directly at the enigmatic insight of “emptiness”. Today the curtain lifted a bit further as I meditated on this koan.

My heart began to fill with marvel at the experiences that had filled my day. It had been a very fulfilling day, spent outdoors with my wife and child, and perhaps that helped summon feelings of wonder and gratitude. How did the day end up unfolding this way? From where did all this experience arise?

“What is your original face, the face you had before you were born?”

My earliest memories are from when I was three years old. Presumably I was conscious before then, but when did the first spark of awareness arise? Could there even be a moment where I went from a dead thing to a conscious being?

There seemed to be a clue in the way I now perceived the events of the day. Events arising through a vast interplay of precedents, being experienced for a moment, and passing back into the void, leaving only the residuals of memory and emotion. Short lived yet brilliant sprites emerging from and disappearing into...nothing?

As a matter of experience, everything arises out of this nothingness. Senses and thoughts are only known once they arise. My original face before thought, before perception, before a sense of self, is this void; not a dark forbidding place, but an endlessly fertile field of possibility.

 

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