Kinosis: Entering Loss

To meditate is to enter the convergence of all pairs of opposites. This is the bindhu, the ayin soph, at the center of the Cross, a black hole where polarities collapse in a burst of self-annihilation. It is at once the supreme loss and the supreme luminosity. 

To be crucified with Christ is the infinite negation at the heart of the world, where creation explodes from emptiness, light from darkness, life from death, the subtlest particle of matter from the quantum vacuum. Positive energy flows from negation, creation from the un-created. 

Only when consciousness is naked and freed from every thought can one enter this needle's eye at the center of the Cross. Belief, memory, and imagination must be abandoned, along with the me who thinks, remembers, and imagines.

In deep meditation, loss is unbounded. No-thing remains. Emptiness is absolute. The word absolute comes from the Latin ab (away) and solvere (to loosen).  Absolute, loosen, and loss share the same Indo-European root, leu.  

Meditation is not meditation if I cling to any concept, even the concept of meditation. It is not meditation if I name it "yoga," "advaita," "zen," "christian," "jewish" or "muslim." But when I transcend all names and forms, ego loosens it grip. Meditation is the fullness of absolute loss. 

Is this not what Jesus means when he says, "Whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will save it"? (Luke 17:33)

The Epistle to the Philippians declares that "Jesus emptied himself." (2.7) The rarely used Greek word kinosis lies at the heart of Christianity. It means "self-emptying." Self-emptiness is the hollow at the center of the Cross. Kinosis is precisely what the Buddha called anatta, "no-self," and what yogis call nirbija samadhi, "seedless meditation." 

In the depths, no eye encounters the void. The void is the dissolution of I. So God tells Moses, "Nobody will see my face and live." To merely encounter the void may stun me for a moment, like a dumbfounded hiker staring into the Grand Canyon. But to become the void is quite different. There is no observer. The one who was standing on the edge leaps in. No ego remains in that experience. No meditator there to think, "I am meditating." 

And yet, an ancient Tibetan proverb declares, "emptiness engenders compassion." What a paradox! To become no-thing is to radiate loving-kindness. 

When I Am no-thing, my Being entangles with every electron in the cosmos, which physicists actually call "quantum entanglement." Each particle in the field is every other particle in the field, just as each wave of the ocean is, at its base, the whole ocean. 

"I" dissolve, yet "Am" remains, a vast ocean of cosmic entanglement. The poet Keats called this experience, "negative capability." In his experience of creativity, he became nobody; yet in that negation he felt himself merge with every creature. Buddha calls this, padikka-samupadda, "interdependent co-arising." Sir Arthur Eddington, founder of modern quantum physics, wrote: "When the electron vibrates, the whole universe shakes." 

My awareness is the quantum vacuum, where virtual particles vibrate out of empty space into creation. My surrender takes me into the boundless space between the heartbeats of a mouse. My silence envelopes the trillium growing in virgin forest shadows where no man has ever walked. I am thousands of light-years away, pulsing in the photons of your belly button.

This process of surrender and self-annihilation is the real meaning of the Cross. For when "I" am crucified in Christ-Consciousness, the whole cosmos receives new life.

The practice of Vedic and the way of the Cross are exactly the same. The heart of the Indian tradition, and the heart of the Christian tradition, are the same heart. This was revealed to me at the Prioré de la Madeleine, a small 9th Century monastery in the village of Bedoin, France, while offering my heart before a single candle on a primitive stone alter, carved with the figure of Mary Magdalene.