No Distance

The sun is not out there. “Out there” is a quality of the sun. The name “sun” is a quality of the sun. Size and shape are qualities of the sun. The location (i.e., the sun’s orientation relative to everything else) of the sun is a quality of the sun.

From zero, there is no distance. There is nothing to measure from and no means to measure.

The ruler between zero and an object, if used to measure, when turned around to measure, becomes a point, not a ruler.

In the case of the sun, from zero, from where I am as emptiness for the world, the sun is no distance. When I turn the solar-system-sized ruler around and place it with one end here and the other end at the sun, its length becomes a point at the sun’s location.

The distance between you and the sun is in your imagination.

Before you stop reading and assume I am crazy, let me explain. Based on direct experience, from where I am looking, there is nothing here but empty awareness. To experience the distance to the sun, I have to imagine myself here as a person with a head that has a relative position in time and space. To see the ruler’s length, I have to imagine the ruler and imagine my observer not co-located with the headed reference point I call me. Then I have to imagine reading those numbers on the ruler I see from the imagined observer and apply that quality I call “distance” to the imagined human figure I imagine is me.

Yes, the earth, on average, is approximately 93 million miles from the sun. Still, even that distance is changing and is relative to a set of standards (that are also relative). It’s like measuring the distance between two bouncing balls, tumbling in space, with a wiggly ruler that changes length based on its location in the universe. Yeah, it’s all relative and not fixed, like everything we experience. Our brain corrals the chaos into concepts like distance. Concepts are images in the brain or, you guessed it, imagined. I should also add no two brains agree on every aspect of any concept.

In the last few posts, I talked about headlessness and some experiments for you to try. When you directly experience headlessness, you begin to see the cosmos as it is instead of as you’ve imagined it. The business of moving the point of observation in your imagination is necessary for survival. The lion’s tail gives away the lion. But when we are lost to the imagined world, we miss what we are. We fall asleep to what is. We are dreaming a dream, and until we wake up, we suffer. What we thought was a lion’s tail is a rope and the rope is not a snake. What we imagine others think about us is as substantial as the monster in the closet. What we imagine will make us happy can’t make us happy because it isn’t real.

In my direct experience, if I look from zero, I am space for the world in which all I have imagined appears.

Wake up to your headlessness and experience the cosmos as it presents itself, free from illusion. It’s OK and normal to use your imagination, but it’s liberating to see you are not a product of your imagination.