the density of space

Desire is the root of all suffering. Our desire is exclusive, exclusionary. We need only abandon our desire and begin to see things as they are, abandoning the delusions that ensnare us all in an endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death. By abandoning our desire, our will to exclude, we become free to embrace the Infinite in which there is neither embrace nor exclusion because there is nothing to exclude or embrace.

To embrace is to commit an act of self-donation, to see things as they are, to see things in the double vision of my perspective and your perspective and back again, without imposition, unity without conquest. Each act suggests an action, a continuity, a flowing into. Yet we have no maps for these liminal territories, these in-betweens, these fissures separating you from me. I open my arms. Desire is dangerous, a liminality. My invitation is dangerous for both of us. I wait. I will wait, not invading, not rushing into the gap I’ve created, the distance between you and me that I’ve acknowledged in opening my arms (and waiting).

What is it about the persistence of memory, the persistence of loss—we are absent from our own histories, from our own memory. We forget. Forgiveness demands a peculiar sort of forgetting, of knowing and not knowing. Forgiveness demands remembrance and forgetfulness in parallel, in parallax. Violations and the pain they cause must be remembered. Memory calls the violator to grieve, to appropriate the hurt they inflicted on the other, to recognize the truth of their act, suffering embodied. How can one learn to both remember and forget? How can one forgive? In our suffering, we project our violence, our desire, onto God. Our tracings of God should not be mistaken for the Infinite. Our tracings are worthy only of being swept away like ashes from last night’s fire, no matter how we may desire otherwise. If we condone violence in any form, human or divine, we condone violence in all forms—there is no in-between. All is suffering.

How can we forget suffering and forgive the other, forgive ourselves in this memory palace of all things, unremembered, unforgotten? How can we desire to forgive, to embrace all things within and without? We are all rooted to our delusions, our wishful imaginings, arborescent, complacent in our longings. The truth remains hidden from us because we refuse to see it. We prefer our own truth and dust upon the surface of the mirror. But we must no longer refuse to speak the truth about ourselves, about desire. Instead, we must embrace the suffering we experience and the suffering we inflict on each other. There is no duality in this place, as we draw ever closer to the Ground, the centre, this densest of spaces.