More on Nothing & dependent origination

I always thought that "relationship" mentioned before would enlighten me somehow - it seems to have been through awareness of the process of grasping and needing. To have needed something more than ones own life is ridiculous on closer examination - because we must have valued our own grasping more than the thing in order to need it that much.

On Saturday I woke up with a closer approximation to nothing and emptiness. It is the space before and after my life that is nothing. It is neither an absense nor a presence, but the peaceful irrelevance of myself. Neither positive, nor negative. I then examined a passage from the Diamond Sutra I never understood before - the bit of things being nothing more than their parts.


Building a Chair.
So I want to build a chair and I do some quantity surveying and write a list. Say 10m of wood, a flat panel, a saw, 10 screws, 5 hours of labour and 3 cups of tea (6 items). I get to work and finally have my chair. I sit back in it and relax enjoying the fruit of my labour.

The question is: have I made a new thing. Obvious answer yes else how am I sitting down now, where before I was on the floor. However if there is a new things where did it come from? If it is really a new thing different from the 6 items in the quantity survey then doesn't it need to be added to the survey to make 7 items. In which case what is the need for the other 6 items? We know however that it was created from the other 6 items. So on one hand it is new because we are sitting in it, but on the other hand it is just a composition of 6 other things and not new itself.

Simple but profound. We tend to think of a chair as a unique thing, something distinct and special, something which unlike many other things cannot be sat in. To comfortable solution to a special part of life, sitting down. Imagine a world without chairs. However at the same time a chair is not any different from it component parts - it is the plain sum of things which in themselves are no use for sitting down. The chair then is a different type of thing from its components, it is just an "apparent form" which emerges from its components, but which has no real substance - i.e. something we need add to the ingredients.

Just the really confuse matters, when this is understood we need consider that the starting ingredients themselves are just "apparent forms" of other components and so on.

The conclusion then is that form (the way things seem) is actually an "apparent form", it is like an illusion which is not really there. In reality it is just the sum of component parts which are quite different from the "apperant form", and if we wish to understand the origin of the "apparent form" it comes from nowhere - it itself is made from nothing.

This "nothing", i.e. the striking emergence of distinct unique forms from component parts, is the real emptiness of the "apparent world". The world is still apparent it is true, nothing there changes, but we realise that the apparentness is only that, it has no realness.

Thus in connection with the previous post: what "I" was before the component parts came together to make me 35years ago was nothing, and to nothing this "apparent form" of myself will return. And underlying that "apparent form" is emptiness, which is the same emptiness which enables me to grasp and take in all the apparent forms of the universe into myself as my life and existence.