The prospect of an entirely blank universe, an empty shell. Of course such a prospect is unimaginable to the human mind, but usually we substitute in its place four white walls, the equivalent of a film set’s green screen. Within this empty shell, sound would echo infinitely, and yet there is no sound.
Does such a prospect scare you, or does it feel inexplicably soothing? Do you wish to create such a space on earth? How close to our reality do these images already feel?
Neither the Buddha nor Hitler would reel at the above descriptions, and yet between the two there are critical distinctions. For the Buddha, the fundamental recognition is that reality already is the blank space, that underneath our every sensory stimulus there lies the same emptiness and homogeneity. For Hitler, these facts are elusive, and out of misperception arises a terrible psychosis.
You see, Hitler’s unconscious thesis is that reality strays too far from the blank space; it is too rich and diverse in its many colors, its constant flux. For these reasons, reality must be converted into the descriptions above; multiple races must be made a monolith, nation states converged as one, narrow ideologies asserted as universal. Emptiness calls, and yet heeding this call manifests as a hatred of reality, a deeming of reality as insufficient or in some way flawed. Reality is imperfect; the human hand must refine it.
For the Budda, who sees more deeply, every waking phenomenon already betrays the emptiness, at the very least because it emerges in process of so becoming. In this moment, the flower may indeed be young, may even be a bud submerged beneath soil, but in the future that same flower will mature, will wilt, will go brown and fall asunder, will decompose into its own soil and nurture subsequent life. That is, in the very same moment that we encounter this flower alive, already it is dead; nothing must be done in order to facilitate this process, because the outcome is inherent and inevitable.
To summarize these stances differently, Hitler believes in the power of his own agency, as well as that agency’s importance; he believes that he must intervene in the universe in order to guarantee an acceptable result, a state approximating blankness. For the Buddha, on the other hand, futility dovetails with peace; nothing needs be done nor can anything be done to forestall ephemerality, and hence the passing of events is witnessed with bewilderment, with love. While the former archetype meets reality with both anxiety and, in a sense, discontentment, the latter feels lucky merely to participate as vessel.
As two opposite sides of a coin, both the Buddha and Hitler respond to the same ineradicable structures in reality, and in a way both covet and adore the same thing. For the one, however, this ideal is a given, is unable to be altered and therefore constant; for the other, the ideal must be forced upon an inferior plane, an ontological error which produces grave results.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 