The Illusory Nature Of The Self

In Buddhism, everything is divisible by zero. 

It’s our calculators and mathematicians that mislead us.

Zero makes shadowy appearances only to vanish again almost as if mathematicians were searching for it yet did not recognize its fundamental significance even when they saw it.

Zero wasn't a numerical concept in Western civilization until its introduction by Moorish mathematicians, and the Mayans already had their concept of zero.

Infinity is something.

Amida is almost a direct translation of infinite. Amida means without measure, and infinite means without limit; one that is awakened and liberated by the Universal Buddhahood so to speak.

So in the nature of Buddha zero is taken as infinity; imaginary numbers are generated when you divide a number by zero.

It's these imaginary numbers that led physicists to look for anti-matter (Dark Matter, Void, etc).

We all know the universal language is mathematics, so with these imaginary numbers, you know it's there, because the math is do-able, even if the results are impossible.

Imagine holding a cut out of the digit zero with one hand on either end. Twist your hands in opposite directions, the center pinches in, and the zero becomes infinity. 

To me, that emptiness, the infinite zero, represents the permanence of impermanence; the stability in flux, the everything in the nothing.

The only thing that’s essential about the universe is change. 

All things share transience as a common denominator. By embracing evanescence, it is said, we come closer to freeing ourselves from the illusory nature of the self.

Life is energy conversion and biology is chemistry.  

We living ‘individuals’ think of ourselves as pretty special. No one would argue that a rock, for example, possesses a ‘self.’ But we are made up of the same stuff as rocks –boring, dead rocks. 

One might argue that as living creatures we are somehow above the rocks. But before our birth and after our death, we are nothing more than the ‘inanimate’ stuff that we attempt to distinguish as separate from and below our selves. 

And for those who view life as a miraculous or special occurrence, let us return to the analogy of the rock. 

When a volcano explodes, rocks take part in an awesome and powerful process, a product of the changing nature of the natural world. Life is just like that volcanic explosion – just another process in the never–ending flux of the universe.

To isolate the living self is to distinguish a single glob of lava from the rest of a volcanic explosion. Before the eruption, that glob of lava was just a rock. After the eruption, that glob of lava will be just a rock.  

And so, before and after, but especially during life, we are a part of the natural world. 

It is a mistake on our part to consider our lives distinct from the rest of the universe, just as it would be mistake for a rock, taking part in an eruption, to distinguish itself as separate from the rest of the volcano. 

It is only when we jettison the illusion of the self and accept our interconnected place within the natural world that we will finally be able to find balance with the rest of the universe.  [source]

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Resources
http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/buddha-nature http://www.livingdharma.org/Living.Dharma.Articles/WhatIsAmida-Haneda.html
http://100gallonteaspoon.org/  http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Zero.html http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Indexes/HistoryTopics.html  http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Mayan_mathematics.html