Ponderability and Substantiality
Ponderabilidad y Sustancialidad
A question about the relationship between form and emptiness, and whether Franklin Merrell-Wolff's teaching on ponderability and substantiality maps onto the recognition that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
Ponderability and Substantiality
A question about the relationship between form and emptiness, and whether Franklin Merrell-Wolff's teaching on ponderability and substantiality maps onto the recognition that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
I've been contemplating: what is the world? What is the object? I'm in and out of real recognition, in lived experience, that there are no objects. Sometimes that's really my experience, and sometimes it's just a thought. It goes back and forth; it's not there all the time.
I've been trying to contemplate this, and yesterday someone made the point that what we perceive is only change. That makes a lot of sense to me in terms of space and time, but with something that seems to be a material object, I don't know all the physics of it, though I trust that's the case.
So here's my question. I'm starting to see that form is empty. But the other direction, that emptiness is form, I'm stuck on. I was wondering if it has something to do with what Franklin Merrell-Wolff talks about: ponderability is inversely proportional to substantiality. Is emptiness form because it is what's substantial?
Well, when you recognize it both ways, it is substantial. Everything is. What is this?
So "form is emptiness" and "emptiness is form" are not just two statements with an equal sign between them. They're exactly the same thing, right?
The identity of form and emptiness
It is that. They are the same thing. But you can also go both ways in the sense of a translation. If we step into something like math and science: E=mc² says that if you have mass, you can convert it into energy in a specific quantity according to that formula. But it also means mass is energy. It's just a form of energy.
Right. But energy is not always mass.
No, it's not.
So is there some sort of difference between emptiness and form in that way?
Yes. Emptiness doesn't always have to be form.
But form is always empty.
Yes.
Okay. So the substantiality and ponderability distinction doesn't map onto that as neatly as I thought.
What Merrell-Wolff was pointing to
Let me talk about my interpretation. Franklin Merrell-Wolff is a teacher I respect. I would say he's very much in the Advaita space. He also had a background as a mathematician and philosophy professor at Stanford, an extremely brilliant mind. He used a lot of logical pointings, and he expressed a realization as: "Ponderability is inversely proportional to substantiality."
What he means, or what I interpret it as pointing to, is this: what we think is substantial (appearances, matter, thoughts, sensations) the more that appears to be substantial, the more it actually is not. Ponderability is that which appears to be a thing in itself. The sense of objects being absolutely real, matter being absolutely matter: that is ponderable, but it is not substantial. The essence of it is not the thing in itself.
So what the teaching is pointing to is that form is emptiness, and what is actually substantial is emptiness. But it only goes one way. It could then suggest that once you recognize that what is ponderable also has an essence, the emptiness of it is also the substance. But I think what he's referring to by "ponderable" is illusion. In that sense, the more you are in that illusion, the more it is insubstantial. The more you believe that an object is a separate thing, real in and of itself, that is what is ponderable, and that is actually not substantial.