More than 2,500 years ago, Shakyamuni Buddha realized the ultimate truth of reality. Legend has it that he entrusted this wisdom to the ocean-dwelling nagas, who protected the texts known as the Prajnaparamita Sutras in their watery domain until humanity was ready to receive them. According to the legend, the nagas offered them back to the earthly realm in around 100 BCE. For many hundreds of years, the concepts expressed in the Prajnaparamita Sutras must have seemed supremely abstract to the rational, intellectual mind, until the ultimate truth of reality became personified in exquisite female form through the wordless language of figurative symbols. There was now another way that practitioners could learn to understand the Buddha’s Perfect Wisdom through devotion, reverence, and the embodiment of the creative divine feminine and Immortal Mother. Visual information in a form the intuitive mind could understand, bypassing the analytical and linear aspects of the brain.

As many are aware, nothing recognizable exists at the absolute core of our reality. That is to say, at the fundamental level of the known universe everything is energetic and holds no inherent form. In fact, according to recent scientific understanding, some of the smallest measurable particles do not even seem to reside in this reality for more than a tiny fraction of a moment, vanishing as quickly as they appear, giving possible scientific validity to “realms of existence” beyond our own, as understood by the ancients. One can therefore say that embodying the Heart Sutra of the Prajnaparamita is embodying the heart of this reality.

A conversation about the Prajnaparmita is a discussion on this fundamental nature. And while any grasping of limited mental concepts seems fatuous and unachievable, given our human subjectivity and lack of appropriate language, we are nevertheless pattern-seeking creatures and enjoy musing with analogies. Here is one of mine on emptiness and embodiment.

There is an analogy about consciousness being like water. Water has no inherent form. It fills a container, assuming its shape, but remains water even if the container is shattered—even under circumstances that require it to adapt its state to that of a solid or a vapor. Thus water is often considered analogous to the experience of emotions and sometimes reincarnation.

I have mused over air in a similar regard—and balloons! Air is typically used as an analogy for the intellect and spirit. In this case, I'm using air to represent something like the other side of the Plank constant, if you will—beyond the photon, maybe even slipping into the 96 per cent “dark universe” and ambiguously dancing between the veil of all realities: the void; sunyata—our formless true nature, beyond intellect, feelings, and consciousness. Beyond anything we regard as “real,” or anything we can grasp with words.

Unlike water, air is invisible to the naked eye. We cannot grasp it; we only perceive its influence and, on occasion, see the debris it carries or the vapor sucked into its vortex. We know we need air to live. We know that within this biosphere we call Earth, there is not one breath we breathe that has not passed through and been processed by every organic entity on this planet since the ozone’s creation.

Please stop reading for a moment to allow that fact to really sink in . . .

Air’s vitesse varies between utter stillness and destructive maelstrom, but it always remains simply air. Even with fluctuating chemical measurements or at whirlwind speed, it is still air. Always air.

Now think of a balloon filled with air. The balloon is now identifiable as independent and tangible until eventually, one day, it explodes or deflates and the balloon is no longer. But the air is still there, now free again. It was always invisible, unchanging air that simply held a particular temporary form.

The essence of the Heart Sutra states that nothing inherently exists. “Existence” only appears and is typically experienced when adopting form. The discoveries of quantum mechanics suggest a very similar understanding. At the quantum level, existence as we recognize it only seems to take form when a wave function collapses into a particle. Before this, the wave is everywhere and invisible. Similarly, to our limited senses, air would seem non-existent were it not for its recognizable effects, such as the balloon that it fills.

“Balloons” need to be filled and experienced—and hopefully enjoyed—for only when it is fully inflated can a balloon truly fulfill its purpose of experience as that particular balloon. Some balloons can be transformed into new shapes or intertwined with other balloons to form something even more complex. Some are decorated, others are small some are extra large, and all have differing colors. Quantum mechanics and the Heart Sutra both underline that “form” is necessary in this plane of existence, however transitory or superficial. Differences and boundaries are merely masks and illusion, and the balloon itself is, of course, merely a construct of chemical composition and therefore cannot inherently exist either.