I am using my newly purchased Russian Nesting Dolls as a working metaphor to help answer the question—or how to ask the question—Who Am I?
The question is fundamental: Who am I? Am I created? Am I the creator of I? Am I a thing or am I the knower of all things? The problem is that we approach this question with Classical logic or either/or. I must be created or the creator, but either way, I am divided, yet I must be One, but my logic creates two. So I cannot answer the question Who am I? logically. This is like a butcher trying to put the cow back together. What is a cow? Let me chop it up to find out. Logic is a cleaver because it is the law of things and objects. But am I an object? Obviously, I can be the object of my own mind, but what is the mind that knows myself as an object? That is the nothing that knows myself as something.
Zen arrives at Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Translated that means the known (form) is the Knower (emptiness); the knower is the known. Try to understand that with the logic of thinking. You see thinking as we use it is On/Off thinking. Binary thinking cannot computer ambiguity. On/Off thinking cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The creative mind sees wholes; thinking mind sees parts and pieces.The question is fundamental: Who am I? Am I created? Am I the creator of I? Am I a thing or am I the knower of all things? The problem is that we approach this question with Classical logic or either/or. I must be created or the creator, but either way I am divided, yet I must be One, but my logic creates two. So I cannot answer the question Who am I? logically. This is like a butcher trying to put the cow back together. What is a cow? Let me chop it up to find out. Logic is a cleaver because it is the law of things and objects. But am I an object? Obviously, I can be the object of my own mind, but what is the mind that knows myself as an object? That is the nothing that knows myself as something.
Zen arrives at Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Translated that means the known (form) is the Knower (emptiness); the knower is the known. Try to understand that with the logic of thinking. You see thinking as we use it is On/Off thinking. Binary thinking cannot computer ambiguity. On/Off thinking cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Creative mind sees wholes; thinking mind sees parts and pieces.
The lessons of the Nesting Worlds is that no matter which world or moment you are in (every moment is a new world)
You as the Knower are whole and undivided by what you know. Everything we know can be doubted, but you as the Knower cannot be divided, so no matter what world you are in, you are OK. You are the Source or creator of everything, every mind world (experience) you know. So the Russian Nesting Dolls are a helpful working metaphor for understanding how our mind works, how it creates the world we live in, but forgets that it is the creator, and so, having forgotten we are the creator, we hurt because our world hurts us…yet, when I know that I am the creator of worlds, I may hurt, but it’s OK. When it’s OK that I hurt, the hurt cannot stay.
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