When I say something is done in a void, I mean the doing constitutes the entire universe. I write; the whole world writes. I am the world, there is nothing else. The world is nothing but the writing at that moment.
The Buddha is reported to have said there is no abiding reality. Thus “you drink from an empty cup and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.”
How best to cope with estrangement from reality.
Alienation is a mode of experience in which the person is estranged from himself and/or reality. To the existentialist life is a project to end this estrangement. From the ancients to Hegel the philosophical task was to find the universal essence, the immutableness of being – key Buddha’s statement. Hegel was the last of this trend. Kierkegaard rejected this classical notion that man should seek universal essence objectively (Heaven) asserting that it should be found subjectively, within man himself.
If there is no abiding Real then whatever fills the moment becomes realities’ surrogate.
Does this mean that everything is permitted? Perhaps. Is the boundary condition only that there is no boundary? If there is no abiding reality on what basis is there morality?
Plato uses Beauty to describe a way out of this conundrum. We can come to understand what is really going on here by realizing that we actually “see right through beauty, past the object, to the real itself.” The Buddha, of course, is right. Were there an abiding reality then it would take on the characteristics of a material object. We need to understand that though it is indefinable, unknowable, unfathomable, the abiding reality is there, just not in a way sentient life forms can grasp. One cannot grasp, hold, own, Beauty, Truth, Moral Justice. A kind of Ontological Undecidability (Kelly Ross) is the result.
Though unknowable we yet participate in the Real. And, since Faith is, at least I think so, a facet of the same Divinity as Beauty, the we might see right through Faith to to God ‘himself’.
And, finally, the Buddha’s saying there is not an abiding reality is tantamount to saying there is no God which is what Soren Kierkegaard said, though he added salient context. God Does not Exist. He is Eternal. To me that is beautiful beyond words – we see right through the thought to Reality itself. God is not – because material existence doesn’t pertain.
An abiding Real is not, because material existence does not pertain.