Emptiness Dreaming (eBook)

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A Bristlecone Named Raintree

“All of Reality emerges from nothingness….

And the trunk of this tree is nothingness.”

Nissim Levy

If you were a tree, you would unquestionably possess a solid trunk, branches of several lengths, leaves of various shapes and, of course, a strong set of healthy roots. Actually, this simple analogy of you and me as trees appropriately describes us, and every human being we know. Here’s what I mean.

Like a tree’s trunk, you appear to be a solid person. Your identity as a human being gives you your ‘trunk,’ your core identity, your basic nature, your tangible presence and sense of being. When you’re ‘grounded’ in this solid human trunk, you can navigate the human scene confidently. You can stretch out your personal branches—your creative talents and skills—to create relationships, master your environment and achieve your goals. These thoughtful expressions are the leaves that put your personal touch and imprint on your life, that give you a well-earned sense of personal fulfillment.

What we all also know, however, is that every tree, while drinking in the sun’s health-giving rays and soaking in air’s life-enhancing energies, receives the vast majority of its nutrients from the soil, from the life-filled earth itself—fed to the tree through its intricately woven root system. Here, in an unseen underground nursery of nutrient-rich soil, the tree’s roots weave their way through earth’s fertile buffet of organic foods, finding and imbibing a rich diet of vitalizing sustenance. Indeed, without this root-based, underground world of nourishment, there would in truth be no trunk, limbs or leaves to enjoy. This invisible world of intangible nutrition is what makes the visible world of the tree thrive.

You and I are created in precisely the same way. There’s something powerful in our unseen ‘underground,’ our hidden roots, our quantum void, that feeds and nurtures us. It performs this task much more fully, in fact, than do the more visible nutrients that we’re so familiar with—nutrients such as the food we eat, the air we breathe and even the love we drink in from others. This mysterious underground is something most of us rarely think about, maybe don’t even know about, because it’s so indiscernibly silent, so intangibly hidden within us. What is it?

Raintree

I had heard about an historic bristlecone pine tree named Raintree that grows and thrives in the high mountains of the American southwest. It is forty feet high, sixteen feet wide and measurably 3,000+ years old—birthed into life on our planet before the birth of Jesus, of Buddha before him, and even of Lao Tzu before both of them. It grew and thrived when only a miniscule number of human beings had arrived on this continent. It now allows the admiration of human visitors, but only after they have endured an hours-long, high-ascent climb from a distant trailhead. As if to say to them: “If you want to experience me, you have to earn the privilege.”

Since I wanted that privilege, I set out to find Raintree. After enduring the arduous climb and surviving the trail’s thick-treed challenges, I ultimately came upon a large opening only to see, majestically revealed before me, the mighty giant who had claimed this special space for millennia—Raintree.

It (or perhaps he, or she) was indeed impressive—tall and majestic, claiming a wide berth of expression and boasting thick roots that spread many yards above the ground before plunging to unknowable depths in the waiting womb of the earth. Most noticeable, though, was its obvious old age, which included an entrancing power, a surreal wisdom. I felt as though I had just endured a sacred rite of passage in order to gain access to an ageless wise sage who had something special to say to me.

I found a nearby rock on which to sit and settled in for an intimate time with my newly found teacher, this learned sage standing self-assuredly before me in the form of an ancient tree. For this mentoring adventure I opened my mind and heart to whatever the sage wanted to share with me. What follows is the picture I saw in the receptive chambers of my awareness. It occurred in four distinct stages.

First, I observed myself metaphorically portrayed as a large tree, looking somewhat like Raintree, in fact—with a solid trunk, nimble branches and expressive leaves. It was clear that my trunk represented my human form, my branches symbolized my expressive actions, and my leaves portrayed the gifts I give to the world. Quickly, though, my focus was strongly drawn to my root system, to the hidden underground of my being.

This focus brought me to the second phase of my experience. Perhaps to give my questioning mind a meaningful reference, I was reminded of the discoveries of recent scientific studies. These studies have showed us that, in the secretive mechanics of your and my bodily cells—specifically, in their sub-cellular, sub-atomic depths—space and time literally do not exist. That’s right, even though three-dimensional space and four-dimensional time are very much alive and well throughout our visible bodies and in our tangible world, they simply aren’t at all present in our depths.

To put it simply, we earthlings exist in at least two dimensions at the same time. First, we live tangibly in the dimension of our visible creation. This world is guided by the “classical laws of physics,” that is, the mechanics of time and space. Second, however, and in stark contrast, we live in an invisible sub-atomic realm, one that is directed by an entirely different reality—the “non-laws” of a notably ‘other’ dimension. This other dimension is what we’ve come to call the quantum realm and, especially, at its depth, the quantum void.

With that scientific finding fresh in my mind, my attention moved back to my own personal depths, and to the third phase of my mentoring. Raintree showed me my own invisible root system and introduced me to my own endless emptiness. Way down deep, in my very own other-worldly root system, I could now witness this entirely “other” dimensional source of power. My vision was now fully focused on the very sub-atomic, quantum dimension that the researchers had described—the quantum void.

It became clear to me that, as roots are to a tree, this silent emptiness is to you and me. Its zero-dimensionality acts as a mighty invisible force, one so immensely powerful that it creates us “from nothing” and repetitively re-creates us from that same “nothing” every day. And not just us. It also creates and maintains our visible world and the entire creation we appear to occupy, right under our unsuspecting nose and before our cleverly clouded eyes. In fact, it does so using only the other-dimensional mechanics of pure nothing-ness.

What does our human world look like from the quantum void’s vantage point? If you and I somehow would enter into this other worldly realm, sit as a welcomed guest in its zero-dimensional power, and look back upon our human creation from our seat in its invisible emptiness, what would we see?

I’ll share with you what Raintree helped me see on that day of our unique time together—in my fourth and last phase. As I immersed myself in the tree’s pure wisdom, it showed me a unique vision. First, I saw its physical roots working their way into their deepest earthly source. Then, at some immeasurable point, its roots simply disappeared from view. They gave way to an invisible ‘non-space,’ a silent quantum force. Their earlier reliance on the earth’s nutrients actually ceased to exist—just like space and time ceased to exist in the physicists’ laboratory. They now began to rely for their sustenance on a time-less, space-less emptiness—that of the quantum void.

In hindsight, what struck me is that Raintree is a metaphor of all creation—our earth, space itself, all visible life, you and me. We all appear physical and real, but that physicality has its source and roots in a non-physical, beyond-human source. In short, our ‘something-ness’—the trunk, branches, leaves and roots of each one of us—is created and sustained by absolute ‘nothing-ness.’

Imagine that. You and I—multi-dimensional beings, all wrapped up in a single unified package! We’re something and nothing mysteriously bundled together in a way that defies rational explanation! We actually exist and don’t exist at the same time. We’re concurrently visible and invisible; simultaneously physical and ethereal beings. Yet, these seeming opposite qualities gracefully unify within us in a giant act of life-giving wonder. Aren’t we something special?

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That mighty blend of quantum invisibility and human visibility is precisely what this book is all about. I’m inviting you to take a dramatic leap with me into our mysterious, enigmatic quantum nothing-ness—this utter “absolute zero” that we can neither see nor sense. Once we are fully present in its empty embrace, we can then discover what this...