is everything really nothing more than emptiness?
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Many scholars and mystics have contemplated and taught that fundamentally there is only emptiness. Some use the terms void or nothingness. The problem with grasping this concept — whether life is emptiness — is that intellectualizing it is not the same as personally realizing it. It takes a certain amount of unattached enquiry — pure observation — to have this realization, and then it may become quite obvious as a fundamental truth. However, it remains a paradox when put into words or when one tries to figure it out.
The complete emptiness or void of reality is at the same time completely full of all that exists. This sounds like double-speak, but it is obvious when you can realize it. At some point, when thought, feelings, ideas, memories, and the senses cease to exist there is nothingness. As nothingness there is no thought, action, self, consciousness, movement, forms, expressions, or senses. It is only when the mind contemplates having ceded to the emptiness that you have a realization. If you only read about this, learn about it, study it, or intellectualize it then it is not a realization, but rather an intellectual idea or concept, or even a belief. Further, my explanation, because it is made of words to convey what cannot actually be conveyed, falls short of accuracy. Hopefully, though, you get the idea enough to do your own enquiry.
seeing like a mystic
People often ask how they can see things like a mystic sees things. How, they ask, can they be awakened? The answer is that they — we — already behold the entirety, but we are just not paying attention to what we are seeing, due to the way the mind has been trained. By analogy, a person from the Middle Ages, if somehow transported to the 21st Century were to see a computer he would not know what he is looking at. However, there is no doubt that he would be seeing it. We see the totality of consciousness, for instance, but we may not be aware that this is what we are experiencing. Instead, we place our attention on some specific aspect, such as driving, having sex, playing tennis, studying, praying, participating in rituals, or watching a movie. The totality is ever-present but our attention is at best fragmented awareness.
To see like a mystic is to behold the emptiness that is within, around, and prior to the contents of life, consciousness. To be awakened is to realize that all is this emptiness as its essence.
“It is as if, in the middle of one’s being, there were a non-being. The Confucians call it the centre of emptiness; The Buddhists, the terrace of life; the Taoists, the ancestral land, or the yellow castle, or the dark pass, or the space of former heaven.”
— The Secret of the Golden Flower, ancient Chinese book on meditation
an analogy of sorts
A brilliant lady full of fond memories sits in a chair beside a glass of wine resting atop a table in the midst of a field — all of which exists within emptiness. Remove the wine and the emptiness within the glass still exists. Remove the glass and table too, and the emptiness yet exists and is unmoved. Remove all of the memories, ideas, and knowledge of the lady and the emptiness in which they once existed is still there. Remove the lady and the space that she once occupied yet exists. Remove the field, the ground, the dirt, the microbes, the fungi, the moisture, and the air, and the emptiness still exists. Remove the entire planet and the emptiness is still unaffected. The emptiness exists whether or not it is filled with anything or everything.
removing the image
The sense of self is an image and an image-maker. It is the product of a psychologically conditioned mind that places everything into a category, judges, criticizes, and labels. We have been trained to think this way, and it’s very practical for living and interacting in our world of everythingness. But this conditioning is worthless in beholding the emptiness in which the everythingness is contained. Thus, no matter how hard a person tries to understand emptiness, nothing more than an intellectual concept can arise. If, however, one were to remove the image-making self then the emptiness becomes evident. For this reason, knowing reality is a matter of subtraction and not addition — remove all that is not you and then you arrive at you, and this you (which is not really a you) is emptiness that is full of everything.
“Great spiritual teachers say you are not your appearance — deep down, secretly, nearer to you than your breathing, you are capacity for the world.”
— Douglas Harding
the capacity
Another word for emptiness, perhaps more illustrative, is capacity. This word suggests that there is a latent potentiality that exists that may erupt into existence, or present something, out of the emptiness. In such terms we may contemplate that the emptiness is somewhat analogous to space. Space has the capacity to contain whatever is within it. If we remove that which is within it, the space yet remains.
A most under-recognized teacher named Douglas Harding suggested that we are all capacity for what occurs within our perception or awareness. Thus, when someone is speaking to us they are actually speaking to the capacity that exists and not really a person. We as persons, he argued, are no more than images created out of other people’s ideas of who we are. Without the image of oneself, any look, thought, comment, idea, or object presented to us is actually presented to the capacity that receives them. When someone is looking at me they are seeing an image, but I know that they are staring into a void or capacity.
Harding said, “Great spiritual teachers say you are not your appearance — deep down, secretly, nearer to you than your breathing, you are capacity for the world. They say that to discover this wonderful truth about yourself you must look simply and innocently, as a child looks. Where do you look? Right where you are, at the Looker. When? Now.”
how do we know we are only emptiness?
To know we are only emptiness takes looking so closely that the body, mind, characteristics, ideas, memories, and thought all completely disappear. Similarly, if we look at an object, such as a tree, very closely it stops looking like a tree and begins looking like fibers and then molecules and then atoms. If we had an instrument that could see closer and closer to it it would eventually lose all of its characteristics and disappear into atoms and then nothingness. If we were to apply this same magnification to ourselves we would yield the same results — all would disappear to the emptiness.
Miguel de Molinos, chief apostle of the religious revival known as Quietism, was sentenced in 1687 by the Inquisition to life in prison where he died for his insight. He said, “Penetrate into the centre of nothingness. Creep as far as you can into the truth of your nothingness, and then nothing will disquiet you.” Chinese sage Shen-hui (670–762) founder of the Southern Chan School of Buddhism, said, “Seeing into one’s self-nature is seeing into nothingness. Seeing into nothingness is true seeing and eternal seeing.” And the poet Rumi said, “When a man is awakened he melts and perishes.”
emergent properties
Things seem only to exist due to emergent properties, a term used to describe the process of becoming something through accumulation. An example is to be found in a beach where so many grains of sand create a shoreline. It takes many grains of sand to coalesce so that a beach emerges. One, two, five, or a thousand grains of sand do not create a beach, but the beach emerges when the right number has accumulated.
We can also use the example of a human body. One human cell does not make a body, but trillions of cells do. How many cells must be clustered together in a relationship before we can say that they represent a body? If we deconstruct our sense of self in the same way, it disappears into smaller and smaller properties made of ideas, memories, and thoughts, until it no longer exists and only emptiness remains. Thus, we may say that beyond thoughts, ideas, memories, attachments, beliefs, and identities, we are really nothing more than emptiness. But when all such things accrete then the idea of a self is created.
all or nothing
So what are we, something or nothing? Perhaps both or neither. The only way to find out is to enquire into what you are. Look deeper and deeper, past all the thoughts, concepts, beliefs, and senses to find what lies beneath the image of what you take yourself to be. If you find your answer it is yours to keep, because it will be impossible to share with anyone else.
