Thoughts on Emptiness

      Emptiness generally refers to a negative; an empty place. We don’t do well with negatives. They represent not having; a nothing which carries no value and value is usually given only to things that have substance. I wrestled with statements that described all things as empty. It seemed to defy logic. If it is a thing, how can it be empty of an essence, or core something, that made it substantial and solid as it seems to be?
      What could be meant by the statement, the self is empty”? If the self is what I mean by me then would that not be equivalent to saying that I do not exist? Or does it mean that this entity called self doesn’t exist? And if so doesn’t that lead me back to my own non-existence? But how could that be if I’m sitting here typing? Troubling questions to be sure.
      I remember those early months and years of toying with this idea of no self and finding myself puzzled and yet strangely believing that it was true; but how so? I just didn’t get it. The lucky thing for me was that I didn’t just dismiss this idea like I had so often in my life when I came upon something I wasn’t prepared to understand. My pattern was to simply judge it as wrong and dismiss it on the unconscious premise that if I didn’t understand it, it just wasn’t true. I came to realize later, after allowing for the fact that I might not be emotionally or intellectually prepared to understand some things, that if I just put these ideas up on a shelf somewhere in the back of my mind, I might grow into them.
      Somehow I knew this idea represented thinly veiled truths that spoke to me, and I just needed to give myself time. What a liberating thing it was to have done. It allowed be to suspend disbelief until I had gathered enough perspective to see some things differently. There is a character named Adrian in the foreign film Lucia, Lucia who, in awe of a beautiful semi-arid landscape, says to his friends, “A true journey of discover isn’t about changing our surroundings but about changing the way we see.”
      At some point my way of seeing changed and I was enlightened to the fact that emptiness refers to every aspect of our universe. The solidity and substance of the objects of our senses are the result of our mind. As I have stated earlier, this is due to the electrochemical processes that determine what we are capable of seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling. All the seemingly substantial objects in our lives are, in their concrete form, empty of anything that is unique to them alone.
      All things arise in a dependency with others and while it appears that the table is solid we find upon very close inspection that it is empty of anything other than a co-emergence of raw data and our sensation of it. Thus emptiness actually speaks to a dependent-arising of all things, as well as the absence of any one thing that is the core constituent of the desk upon which I write, the food that I eat, or any of the seemingly solid things that are processed through my senses.
      Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. This is one of the Zen statements that relates not only to the thing we refer to as self but to everything we experience as well. Emptiness is the natural condition of all things in that it is an ever changing amalgam of all there is inside and outside of our world of form. Form is the result of our sense organs and the narrow scope of their ability to process raw data. Once again it points us directly to the fact that we create the illusion of our solid world through the operation of our senses. Emptiness is the absence those discreet aspects which we believe constitute the body of individual things and at the very same time points us to the wholeness or connectivity of all things in the One.
      If nature were an organism and were able to see itself, it would recognize itself in total; a completeness, containing all the varied forms that we create through sensory discrimination of raw data (experience) plus all that we are not privy to based on the biochemical entity that we are. An entity severely limited in its ability to process the data available in the universe. See the previous post titled The Mind and Emptiness, and the mind experiment therein.
      Emptiness is a statement about the universe and ourselves that is upstream of the limited ability we have to translate raw data into recognizable sensation. Our universe of things, or form, is empty of discreet entities that reference the name we have given what we perceive. Form is the partial truth we comprehend with our senses, when in fact its real nature is “Oneness.” The One that has no need of name - for nothing is left out - and this totality denies a comparison. We are part of that One…but only a part. And it is when I acquired the new way to see the meaning of Emptiness that I was able to see myself as but a part of the great mystery of life.
      Maintaining a loving and compassionate perception of the world is important and it’s my responsibility. It requires my constant attention to the truth of Emptiness. It is the manifestation of what might be referred to as a Divine Principle. A principle that embraces all things as part of the single process that supports all that we know about the world - and so much more that we are unable to understand. Meditation allows me to touch those quiet moments when this truth shines clear and bright upon my path.