Filling Emergency

When I practice silence,
When I honor the absence of words,
I become familiar with the force
that calls, demands, urges, summons to fill the furrow of the moment with a flow of words.

When I practice fasting, I become familiar with the force that
calls, demands, urges to fill the furrow of interior space – literally – with food.

These two exercises, as they are outlined here, highlight two constants, thus suggesting that this is always the case once spiritual practice is established.

-Familiarization: It is etymologically, the very heart of meditation.
The interest of abstinence practices (speech, food…), lies in its capacity to establish a dialogue with ourselves.

We question this craving for filling. They are so dazzling and so powerful that apart from these gifts of practice, it is very difficult, unless perhaps one reaches peaks in inner tension, to notice them.

Rather than familiarization, we could speak of taming.

In fact, it may be the second step.
After becoming familiar with the behaviors of these interior volcanoes (expressing oneself, feeding oneself are two of the very low functions of the human being, in this respect their power of conditioning is radical, these are areas of atavistic patterns. )

We begin the dialogue, we allow ourselves to be questioned by its phenomena (what is really the degree and nature of the influence that they exercise?) and in our turn, we question them (to what extent do we exist, through these filling diktats?)

-The second common trait that we observe throughout this brief presentation is precisely this: it is a question of filling.

The force that pushes us here and there.

That pressures us to express ourselves, to verbalize,
such injunction to fill.

Filling is the rawest form… (the most brutal, sometimes) that these moments of nourishment or verbal expression take)
…When it comes to plastering a stomach or a patch of silence without attention, without delicacy ; we are dealing anxiety in both cases.

Filling is a response to anxiety. The dialogue we were talking about allows this anxiety to be tamed. We are therefore invited to observe to what extent these injunctions are justified.

Justification, here, means wisdom,
Wisdom in food intake,
Wisdom in speaking.

This wisdom implies a broad awareness of the context, of external phenomena and a fine awareness of internal phenomena.

From these considerations then arises the expression of the notion of rightness (in the Buddhist sense, perhaps from the use of the word ‘right’ in the eightfold path). (4th noble truth).

Accuracy is the intersection between the external and internal context.
Right action is a crossroads, a point of truth.

To be neither the fruit of the injunctions of others nor the toy of our undomesticated wild animals.

Having approached them sufficiently to understand that the tiger is a cat and that the cat remains a tiger.

‘Filling’ is the watchword of modern man. In this, modern man is the epitome of spiritual immaturity; despite technological advances, cults of progress and proclamations of all power, this man is a capricious kid.

Filling is also at the center of other physiological and psychological behaviors.
The sexual act is a matter of filling.

Intellectual activity, culture is a matter of filling.
The CV, the career, the social network is a matter of filling,
Hobbies, passions are a matter of filling,
The household, the family, the children are sometimes a matter of filling.
Filling is the form taken by the anxiety of emptiness.

Without becoming familiar with it, without taming this anxiety, without discovering the point of accuracy, there can be no wisdom.

And Man plasters and cements all around him, inside him, until he can no longer breathe and smothers himself to spiritual death.

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