The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born. In this Unbound state that night you encountered all that was and ever could be: form and emptiness, and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in. And us. You let us in, too, and once inside, we could access your sense gates and finally understand what it might be to see with eyes, hear with ears, smell with a nose, taste with a tongue, and touch with skin, and this is what books want, after all. We want bodies, and for the first time, we could imagine what it might be to have one. We were able to perceive the consciousness that body gives rise to. If we gave you the unbound world, this was your gift to us.

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