Peeking Through the Emptiness

essay | 630 words — reflections on your all-embracing portal of perception

Question: I heard a spiritual teacher speaking about complete acceptance of what is.

What does complete acceptance look like?

Response: Complete acceptance is not something that starts to happen at some point after not happening for a while. You can’t “make it happen” and you can’t get away from it. Complete acceptance is embedded into your every experience. Or actually, it’s the other way around. Everything in existence – including all that you experience – is embedded in complete acceptance. Complete acceptance is what allows your experience, and everything else, to appear in awareness.

Simple awareness by its nature accepts everything as it is, does it not? If you look through a hole in the fence into the neighbors’ yard, does that hole accept some things and not others? Does it accept the tree only if it has green leaves, or does it accept the autumn tree and the bare winter tree and the man who chops it down in the summer? Does it accept the stump and the children joyfully playing on it and the adults arguing about whether the tree should have been cut? That hole accepts everything to pass through its emptiness-portal. By virtue of its emptiness, it manifests complete acceptance.

So what does that hole look like? The hole itself is nothing really. We could say it is made of wood or it is round or large or small, but that describes what is around the hole; it doesn’t describe the substance of the hole itself. We could say the hole is empty. That’s getting closer to the point. But when we look at the hole as close up as we can, we find pretty much the entire universe on the other side of the fence. Wow! That’s pretty full — not empty at all! We could say that the hole is nothing. But again, we find everything inside of it. Empty and full. Nothing and everything. Hmm… starts to sound a little like Zen, doesn’t it?

But when we look at the hole as close up as we can, we find pretty much the entire universe on the other side of the fence. Wow!

If the hole itself looks like anything, it looks like what we see through it. We can’t say what the hole itself looks like, except that it is empty or nothing. But that wouldn’t do justice to its great function of spying on the neighbors!

Your eyes are your very own built-in peep-holes in the fence of the universe. All your senses together create a living, breathing 3D portal of perception. And more fundamentally than that, your awareness perceives the whole of your human experience — including all of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. 

So, complete acceptance looks like you — exactly as you are. It looks like that guy who goes about his life enjoying some things and not others. It looks like everything you see in your life, including people and nature and pollution and beautiful sunsets and ideas and thoughts and experiences — like resisting some things and not others, accepting some things and not others. Your built-in peep-hole allows everything of your experience into awareness — like it or not.

“Start giving your attention to this all-embracing view, this ever-open window of your human experience.”

But then, as people (pronounced “peep-hole”), we learn about a spiritual ideal and try to make ourselves transform from partial acceptors to complete acceptors. It doesn’t work that way. There is some-nothing that is already and has always been in total and complete acceptance. To experience the freedom of total acceptance, we don’t need to change ourselves. All we need to do is become aware of this open empty window into the world, give our attention to it, and stop believing that we are separate from it. The truth is that we already are aware of it in every moment, but we don't realize the significance of what we are seeing. Start giving your attention to this all-embracing view, this ever-open window of your human experience, and its all-embracing significance will gently reveal itself to you.

❤ 2005-2021 | Maja Apolonia Rodé

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Reflections and Connections

Mandala: The Sacred Art of Awakening Retreat with Dr. Judith Cornell and Dr. Maja Apolonia Rode. August 10-15, 2007, Mount Madonna Center, Watsonville, CA

The above ideas were in part influenced by the deep and delightful “Headless” teachings of Douglas Harding, whom I met in 1995 at the Association for Transpersonal Psychology conference at Asilomar. I “got it” (ah-ha!!) at the time but didn’t realize the significance of that realization until much later.

When you zoom in on this “peep-hole” it becomes the “Big Window,” which I first named in my Fruits of the Divine poem and repeated later in my It’s All Sublime rap. In my rap video, I’ve visualized every speck of space as a peep-hole into the universe.

I also shared my “mandala-ized” version of Douglas’s Headless Experiment at the Sacred Arts retreat I led with the late Judith Cornell at Mount Madonna Center in August 2007.

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