DanielBrenton--
Yeah, I did read some of your site before posting my response. I enjoyed your post because I think we're seeing the yin and the yang of the same principle. The absolute and the non-absolute only exist because we haven't transcended them, but sometimes you can see both sides and sense the whole that is bifurcated by our perceptions. The absolute is the essential self, but because we don't experience the self in totality our experiential self is non-abolute.
Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness. (The Heart Sutra)
The absolute and the non-absolute are both sides of our self; the experiential cannot exist without the essential and the essential seems to need the experiential--otherwise why would we be here?
Shunryu Suzuki comments that we hope to reach a point where
form is form and emptiness is emptiness--this, he says, is right practice. I suppose that means that the essential and the absolute begin to coexist without tension, where the essential can just be and the experential can just experience. No more striving, no more clinging. Funny that it's easier to understand the paradoxical than the unitive state.
For now anyway.
