The Empty Center
From Stephen Mitchell, foreword to
The Enlightened Heart:
An Anthology of Sacred Poetry:
“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
and knows,”
Robert Frost wrote,
looking in from the outside.
Looking out from the inside,
Chuang-tzu wrote,
“When we understand, we are at
the center of the circle,
and there we sit while Yes and No
chase each other
around the circumference.”
This anonymous center—
which is called God
in Jewish, Christian, and Moslem cultures,
and Tao, Self, or Buddha
in the great Eastern Traditions—
is the realest of realities.
From Wallace Stevens’s
A Primitive Like an Orb:
The essential poem
at the center of things….We do not prove
the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known
in lesser poems.
From Namkaran Samskar:
There is only one center in existence;
the ancients used to call it
Tao, Dharma, God.Those words have become old now;
you can call it Truth.
There is only one center of existence.
