(Continued from volume 13)
What I have hitherto been expounding may sound superstitious to some extent. One might even proceed to claim that the theory which has been illustrated so far is hardly anything more than a typical rambling of pseudoscience.
But I am not here to talk about "crystal energy", "astral projection", or any other sugary morsel of mysticism. My goal instead is to put aside all such fantasies which have been confounding the minds of truth seekers, and simply endeavor to divine the essence of reality by means of honest speculation.
The so-called "emptiness" and "fullness" are rather concrete analogies intended to help us grasp the overall worldview in a tangible fashion. The spirit of what is being implied by their duality is the concept of diversity - the realization that we are able to distinguish one thing from another.
Space is a womb which gives birth to either emptiness or fullness, and form is a cradle which simultaneously embraces both emptiness and fullness as a whole. In computer programming (C/C++), space is a union type and form is a struct type. And since emptiness and fullness are two sides of a dyad, it is not hard to fancy that space is a boolean variable (aka "bool") and form is a set of all boolean values.
What appears to be troublesome, though, is the fact that I have been treating space as a singleton here. Common sense tells us that there must be a multitude of spatial locations in our universe, each of which is occupied by its own material state. Plurality should apply not only to the dualism of our senses (such as the opposition between emptiness and fullness), but also to the notion that there are more than one place in which our senses possess the right to dwell.
But here is a question; in which circumstance do we say that there are "multiple places"?
Have we always been observing every single object in our universe simultaneously, we would've not been able to assure that space consists of more than one location.
The reason why we do not believe that the whole world is just a single point is that, at each moment, we only manage to perceive a tiny subset of what we can ever perceive.
Some may argue that this line of logic is flawed, by telling that it does not account for the possibility of entities appearing and disappearing over time at a fixed spot, which will then create an illusion of motion from one position to another. Such a proposition, however, holds true only when we imagine that time is something that is fundamentally separate from space. Inside the panorama of spacetime, different points in time (i.e. past, present, and future) are indistinguishable from different points in space, and nothing really "changes" over time on a holistic level.
If our domain of experience is made out of two atomic sensations called "emptiness" and "fullness", we will be able to say that the act of beholding either emptiness or fullness (but not both) occurs when the scope of observation is confined to one of at least two discrete places, for there must be somewhere outside of one's range of vision which sustains the "other sensation" that is not being seen immediately but can potentially be seen.
Neither the idea of space (i.e. emptiness OR fullness) nor the idea of form (i.e. emptiness AND fullness) renders a moment of either exclusively observing emptiness or exclusively observing fullness. There are of course two elementary ideas which are called "emptiness" and "fullness", respectively, yet they are purely conceptual entities, independent of spatial presence.
Here is the thing. Suppose that there are multiple positions in space, and that my field of view is currently trapped inside one of them. I only feel emptiness surrounding myself, yet I know that there is also the idea of fullness which does not "exist" in the sense of being present right before my face but still "exists" in the sense that it has the potency to present itself later on.
The overall implication of this becomes quite clear once we break it down to bite-sized pieces.
First of all, I am certain that I only feel emptiness right at the present moment. This means that, if I am to represent the current scenario as a single idea, it will be obliged to involve "emptiness" as one of its components.
Secondly, I know that there is some chance of feeling either emptiness or fullness at another moment. The content of this "another moment", therefore, ought to depict itself as "emptiness OR fullness", which is synonymous with "space".
Thus, the whole situation must be defined as the state of coexistence between the (1) "feeling of emptiness" and the (2) "possibility of feeling either emptiness or fullness".
And as you may have already realized, this is just a verbose way of defining a composition between emptiness and space. The same logic applies to the case of fullness, too.
The idea of "emptiness AND space" is one of at least 2 positions in space which is entirely filled with emptiness, and the idea of "fullness AND space" is one of at least 2 positions in space which is entirely filled with fullness.
(Will be continued in volume 15)