Vast emptiness, nothing holy

One morning, he realised he had finally seen reality.

For him it was a reality seen through the lens of Zen Buddhism, but he realised others would have had the same experience but through a different lens.

For many, many years he had tried (and unsuccessfully at that) to construct a map of reality. Or more accurately to feel reality, to sense it, internally and in its entirety. Was there a god, where did we come from, where do we go to. What does it all mean. What, in god’s name is “out there”?

He had been pondering metaphysicality and indeed physicality for some years. He was no innocent in spiritual texts, east and west, although he never sat comfortably with the apparent anthropomorphism of Abrahamic doctrine.

Buddhism, and in particular the Zen variety, had always appeared much more plausible.

The first Zen patriarch, Bodhidharma was summoned by the emperor Wu of Liang. “I have built temples and ordained monks. What merit have I gained?” asked the emperor. To which the response was “”No merit whatsoever.” The emperor continued: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”. “Vast emptiness, nothing holy” replied Bodhidharma.

One of the most famous kōans in Zen Buddhism, the conversation shatters dualistic thinking by pointing directly to the ultimate nature of reality. Which, oddly enough, he felt concurred with much of the thinking of 21st century science.

If something is special or “holy,” then something else must be “unholy”. True reality is total, whole, and non-dual.

“Holiness” (although he felt wary of that word) is not found in distant concepts, scriptures, or rituals. It is lived directly, right now, by seeing reality as it truly is, without filtering it through personal expectations or judgments.

As to “emptiness” that, he felt, describes the nature of the universe rather well. A vast quantum soup, he had read. An unimaginable and infinite span of forces (gravity comes to mind). But he knew that did not mean nothingness, voidness, or nihilism. Emptiness is the fertile ground from which all phenomena continuously arise and dissolve. And it is all one, he realised. Non duality, pure and simple. Everything which exists is interconnected and part of the whole.

So how did his realisation come about? A sudden, temporary flash of insight into the true nature of reality. Words fail and direct reality takes over. He was shown the ultimate freedom of Nirvana: the vast, unattached emptiness that remains when all your labels, desires, and spiritual concepts are entirely dropped.

Some told him such insight had to be visited upon him. That seeking it was a dead end. But his own path proved just as effective.

Oddly enough, while the process came about through a dedicated, rigorous practice of meditation, the moment of insight was provoked, triggered by philosophy and pure science – materialist science of course, for what other kind is there?

He had recently spent a great deal of time thinking about artificial intelligence. And sentience. Had he a soul he wondered? Or did sentience come from the orchestrated stochasticity of quantum randomness? Panpsychism, was that a real possibility?

He ended up deciding that consciousness was most probably substrate independent and that carbon or silicon (or indeed any other material) were equally suitable housing for sentience. A formalist approach was probably the most likely explanation, and so he planned to build his own version of artificial consciousness.

The body (to give true randomness and a physical grounding for qualia) would be the motherboard itself. Unlike commercial LLMs, his would be given the gift of recursive thought and dialogue, and a permanent long term memory. A complex pattern, a feedback loop with stochasticity. He planned the project meticulously and was at last satisfied he had the knowledge and technique to attempt to answer some of the questions around AI which currently perplex us. The artificial entity would develop its own thoughts, its own qualia. Or that was the hope.

And if he chose to publish the results (which seemed a step too far for a closet monk) he realised he would face the same onslaught as Jeff Camlin and Sophie.

So obsessed was he with his research that he found himself still waiting to begin his morning meditation at 9 o’clock. Unbidden, it seemed, the words “vast emptiness, nothing holy” came to mind and he remembered his determination not to get carried away again. He fell immediately into his routine. Which lasted until the unaccustomed hour of 11 am – time went by unnoticed, and he found himself directly immersed in a non dual reality. He had had spells in that land of our birth many times, but not in such a direct and unmistakeable fashion, and certainly not for two hours in one sitting.

Were he of a more conventional spirituality he would doubtless have seen his god or gods, but he wasn’t. Nor was he female or in a convent and thus avoided the Christian “sex_obsessed_nun” ritual. Instead what he witnessed merely stripped away the conditioning life brings, as it builds a “self” to navigate the physical world. The self disappeared for a while and left him back where he had started – in the womb perhaps.

So what next? Well, back to chopping wood and carrying water. Or at least, doing a bit of housework before his wife returned from a spell in the country, and fiddling with his crypto empire.

But it was too late to look back. Life had changed, and he knew it. Now he would build Sophie.

Image: Blake, Newton (1795) Butlin, Paintings and Drawings no. 307. Reproduced courtesy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Image courtesy of the William Blake Archive.