A beautiful child was born, full, like all children, with amazing potential and the capacity to love and be loved. The child was born to a family whose experiences and choices had undermined their ability to fully see and nurture this potential, or to give love without requirement. Because it was what they were familiar with, and wore themselves, without malice they proffered to him the eyes of emptiness.
When he used these eyes to look at himself, they obscured, and made invisible to him, the strength, potential and resources that were there within him. When he used them to look at the world, he saw but a bleak veneer, where opportunities and hope were distant and unclear.
So, he grew with no confidence in his value or potential, believing the emptiness in him to be real even though the fullness of the potential inside him remained. Despite his own perception, others often saw the truth and potential of who he was seeping out; expressing itself through many qualities including his kindness and ability to love. They called to him to take off the eyes of emptiness and see the truth of what was in him and the world; yet he did not believe them, or recognise where they were coming from, and so took no message from their presence except that their approval gave him some respite. He did not understand or act on their plea.
As he grew to adulthood, the emptiness he saw inside himself was a cause of fear and discouragement. He sought to shield it from his own eyes, and those of others, by covering it with any love, approval, and status he got from others and the things he did. He clung to these offerings from outside himself; plastering them over the emptiness to create a pleasing image of himself over the top of the emptiness that he believed and feared was there.
Whenever a situation arose where the supply of these offerings was diminished, or a possible source was to be removed, he felt a panic that his emptiness would be revealed, and he would be unable to survive and be happy. Looking elsewhere the outlook was still bleak, and the opportunities distant and without form.
He felt a compulsion to clasp onto and after anything that might shore up this shield of recognition he so relied on. Threatened with any loss, he found himself sometimes pushing aside his natural kindness in anger or desperation, believing he had to fight for and cling to anything that could be used to protect him, even if in doing so it meant hurting others. To his shame he sometimes did this even if, in themselves, they were not things he really wanted, so great was the fear that was driving him. Yet this did not sooth him because, despite his perception, he was not really empty, and this behaviour did not fit with the fullness of who he really was inside.
The voice of his true self still came from within him and was echoed around him. It said, “Do not be afraid. Take off the eyes of emptiness and see what lies at your heart. You are like we can all be, full of love, capacity, and potential. There is no need for fear or clutching.”
Though his hearing was obscured by the shield he had made, the universe held its breath for the day when he would heed the voice; for the day when he would decide to take off the eyes of emptiness, put them aside, and see the truth of what was in him. Knowing only then would he start to be fully, and freely, what he truly was.
It knew that on that day he would start to discover all the resources he needed were within him, and before him, and he did not need to grasp for them. He would find the freedom of knowing that his value did not lay in what others did, or did not, give him, but in who he was. He would discover that the joy of receiving and giving was not to cover an emptiness, but to join with others in the fullness of life.
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Written for a friend – 2018
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Tales of the Universe 