When I was meditating last night, I had a revelation. Yes, really. And it's related more to Radiant Cool than The Spread Mind... but is perhaps more relevant to Buddhism.
I'll try to explain.
OK, so harking back to the idea that all we experience is overlaid or mixed up with predictions and expectations and memories and the fabric of who we are and what we have experienced... that means that all we experience is kind of FULL. Nothing is what it is, but it's what we think it is...
Take a chair. It could be a collection of molecules, a few bits of wood put together in a shape, a chair, a work of art, firewood, the last place my mother sat before she went to hospital and died, the place where I was tied up and tortured (that never happened), a thing I want to buy, the thing that's overcrowding my room, the dog's bed and so on or any mixture of these things.
The p of the chair is all the things we think it is; the not-p would be, say, if we thought it was the dog's bed and then someone reminded us it was the last place my mother sat etc. So to that extent it could be p and not-p, but the not-p would change the way we thought about it afterwards and become the new p.
Everything we see for the first time, if we had no expectations at all - like a baby - is empty, though. There is no p or not-p. The thing is just the thing. Then we label it as p and that labeling gets fuller and more complex the more times we see or experience the thing.
The beginner's mind is making everything empty again - stripping all thoughts or conceptions of p and not-p.
That's emptiness. And acceptance is being willing for it to be itself.
This, it seems to me, is what the Dogen Zen means. He says, 'Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.'
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