Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 12: On Emptiness

The ego avoids the experience of emptiness, preferring instead to cling to its attachments, narratives, and sense of forward momentum in time. But emptiness, or what the Buddha called "Sunyata," is the primordial condition that is required for anything to exist at all. By fearlessly embracing our essence as emptiness, we discover not oblivion, but infinite creativity and freedom.

Transcript

In this episode we'll be exploring subjects like emptiness,

Awareness,

Spaciousness,

The sense of deficiency that lives at the core of the ego,

But also this possibility that when we are empty we can be filled,

We can be fed and come to understand the true qualities of our inner essence.

You wanted to talk about emptiness.

Why do you want to talk about emptiness?

Yes we shall.

Because it's such a delightful subject.

I don't know.

Why do I want to talk about emptiness?

That's a good question.

Why do I want to talk about emptiness?

The importance of talking about emptiness is that it's such a fundamental experience within spiritual unfolding and also one that people have a great deal of trouble with,

One that people avoid.

And I think the experience of emptiness is so often deeply misunderstood that it is,

Well you know even looking at the translation of the Eastern teachings to the West,

The notion of emptiness in the East has a positive connotation.

In the West it has a negative connotation.

And that says a lot about how we experience that state.

So Rumi says something of our lives are a frantic running from silence and we equate silence with emptiness,

But we equate it with a negative emptiness.

That's makes us uncomfortable.

So I think for those reasons it's important to talk about.

Yeah.

You know emptiness automatically invokes a fear of non-existence and death.

The absence of anything would include the absence of me,

You know whatever we conceive me to be.

Right.

Well and that's within our structure of mind,

Within our structure of ego,

The absence of me,

The absence of itself,

The ego,

There's nothing else perceived from the level of ego.

So emptiness has a very negative connotation,

Right,

Non-existence.

I think in the East there's a greater appreciation for what lies beyond our egoic framework.

And in the West we largely don't think that anything lies beyond our egoic framework.

And so the notion of emptiness feels threatening,

It feels like dissolution,

It feels like,

I mean even just in the experience of boredom that one has,

One begins to experience emptiness and we treat boredom as a problem,

We treat it as something that is deeply,

It's a very unwanted state and I think that speaks to our discomfort with emptiness.

The discomfort with boredom,

The discomfort with silence,

All of those states that imply some kind of emptiness.

One thing that occurred to me is that this is an excellent topic to explore in the context of the pandemic because I think everybody right now who isn't an essential worker or something and still going about what used to be their daily life,

A lot of us are dealing with huge spaces in our lives.

You know,

We're locked in our homes in some cases,

Not getting the same level of contact with other people in the course of the day.

It's taken a pretty big chunk of our experience away.

One thing that jumps into my mind,

What you're saying,

Is the ordinary human experience that most people are living out is one that is intrinsically without a lot of substance or meaning and I think what happens in a situation like this where life comes to a halt as we know it,

Is that the underlying emptiness of our situation,

The underlying unsatisfactory quality of our life becomes much more known to us.

It rises up in our aware,

It meets us.

It's like we can't avoid it anymore in a lot of ways.

We can't avoid it by staying busy or occupied or entertained or what have you.

Yeah,

So a lot of people I think are confronting this underlying emptiness in a new way.

We all know what it's like to be bored for a short period of time but to have to sort of contend with yourself and your own experience over weeks and months with very little interruption,

It's kind of like a do-it-yourself Vipassana retreat almost.

I wish.

I wish.

Unfortunately,

Alcohol sales have gone through the roof.

Well,

Yeah,

I don't drink and I don't think you do either so that hasn't come up but the temptation has come up.

I have found myself sitting here in the late afternoon which is kind of my least favorite time of day.

It's too early to eat dinner and it's like,

Boy,

A glass of wine would be good right about now and I haven't had a drink in five years and I rarely think about it but in the context of this extended empty space in my life that's not being filled by a relationship or really a formal job of any kind or any kind of mythic quest,

Whatever,

The things that we normally sort of think that we're devoting our lives to,

In the absence of that I'm looking for all these little things to kind of occupy my attention.

Yeah,

Well,

It seems that the ego will do anything to avoid emptiness because emptiness is its death and we come very close to the emptiness at the core of our ego when we know the deep experiences like loneliness and the gnawing dry boredom that we can go through and to be honest,

The ego will entertain itself by being miserable actually.

It's one way to fill the space is by being miserable.

Right,

Because at least it's something.

It's something you can point to.

Yeah,

Like Gangaji said I think once,

Maybe I'm repeating myself but she said something like it's easier to be a miserable somebody than to be a nobody,

A nothing.

Yeah,

For the ego.

Right,

The continuation of the ego requires that we have an image of ourselves in some form and as we begin to encounter emptiness,

We begin to encounter the absence of an image and all that that image relates to such as relationships and activities and entertainment.

So there's an encroaching emptiness that we face when we're forced into solitude.

Yeah,

And that's the problem with boredom as well and even long pauses in conversation which we kind of touched on.

I was thinking about this because what does the ego require to sustain itself?

It likes images as you stated.

It likes narratives.

It likes this feeling of propulsion like it's moving in a direction towards something that we usually think of as being better than where we currently are.

It's not getting rewarded for anything that's done necessarily unless there are people around just kind of feeding up compliments or something.

It needs an object to relate to.

Every me depends on something else.

Yeah,

And none of that's being reinforced.

And so we're not … Well,

It can be but … Well,

I suppose there's lots of ways to reinforce yourself by yourself.

That's why people become so unhappy is because when you're in a situation where you can't reinforce your sense of self with another person perhaps,

Then you fill your mind with other entities,

Other objects.

And it's not a physical feeling of free-falling but in a way the ego feels like that's what's happening.

It's like the rug has been pulled out and it has no support anymore for what it thinks it is.

And that's the inherent condition of the ego that it is always in avoidance of.

It is always in a state of free-fall with some kind of false ground beneath its feet.

Right.

So it was interesting to me just watching my own brain in this extended state of interruption from what I used to consider my normal life is the way that my brain in order to kind of fill that space will tend to offer things up.

Like if you've ever tried to train a dog to do something,

The dog figures out that there's a treat but it's not quite certain what it needs to do to get that treat.

So if you wait long enough,

It'll start filling in by offering behaviors.

It might sit down or roll over or bring you something trying to get it right.

And I noticed that that's what my brain does too.

It's like,

Is this going to make you happy?

Is this thought going to get you excited?

Is this going to delight you in some way?

And so these various sort of phantom experiences will kind of cross through my mind filling in that space that would have been empty and silent.

It's quite incredible that the egoic mind will use anything,

Anything,

Even the most random of things to fill that space with something that seems to be an object to reinforce its existence.

I believe this is what happens actually when people report their life flashing before their eyes before death.

It's a sequence of very rapid images that the mind is trying to find something to relate to in some kind of solid fashion as it is dissolving.

As that selfhood is dissolving.

Yeah,

Yeah,

I could totally see that.

What a wonderful perspective on that.

And it can be positive,

Negative,

Anything maybe unresolved or anything lingering,

Anything that's created some kind of stain in the past is subject to remain there as an object to be rehashed.

When I was thinking about talking about this topic,

The first thing that came to mind was Pratyahara,

The idea of withdrawing one's senses.

And for listeners who may not have heard this word before,

It's one of the eight limbs of Raja Yoga.

And it's a practice where we systematically withdraw our senses from the outside world and instead turn them inward.

And by withdrawing our energy from perceiving the things around us,

We can then discover the inner state of emptiness.

And as we systematically kind of peel away the sources of incoming information,

We're sort of shutting out light and sound and then going even deeper to a place that's beyond sensation,

And language,

And ideas of self.

There's a place where nothing exists but your awareness alone.

And even that can vanish.

Even our sense of consciousness can vanish even.

You know,

This is why there is a systematic approach in any path.

You know,

Yoga is very good at detailing and making it sort of systematic and scientific in its approach.

You know,

We have to be brought to emptiness slowly because there's great resistance in our subjective mind,

The mind which perceives objects,

To experiencing absence,

To experiencing nothingness.

And you know,

We associate that absence with death,

As we've said,

And we associate death with fear.

And so there's great terror in approaching emptiness.

There's a really good inquiry to make into why,

You know,

As we started out talking about this,

Why are we so afraid of emptiness?

Aside from the death thing,

You know,

Why is it so difficult to be bored?

Why is it so difficult to sit through 30 seconds of silence with a partner,

You know,

Over the dinner table or something,

You know,

Or have a gap between jobs?

You know,

Anything that represents a bardo of some sort,

Where we're waiting because,

You know,

It's that uncertainty comes in.

The ego doesn't like not knowing what happens next because that makes it feel a loss of control.

I think the ego is very addicted to routine and predictability,

Maybe above almost anything else.

And emptiness is the ultimate absence of all of those things.

Yes.

With any of those things that you suggested,

There's a discontinuity that takes place.

The ego,

Not only does it like its familiarity and sense of comfort,

But it also craves continuity.

Continuity of itself.

And so anytime that that is disrupted,

There's a great discomfort and a great uncertainty that arises.

And you know,

When it comes to boredom,

Or such states are waiting or those moments of silence,

We can't help from the egoic point of view of associating that emptiness with some kind of deficiency.

It feels negatively charged rather than positively charged,

And that's the difference between ego and spirit is that from the ego's point of view,

From the ego's logic,

Emptiness seems negatively charged.

It seems like a deficiency,

Such as boredom,

The gnawing dry emptiness,

You know,

Whereas from the point of view of spirit,

Emptiness has a positive connotation.

Right?

Yeah,

Because from the.

.

.

But it's still,

It's quiet.

Right,

Because from the perspective of spirit,

It's simply being.

From the perspective of the ego,

It's an absence of doing,

And aren't we conditioned to simply keep doing and achieving and moving forward and having a trajectory and.

.

.

And being stimulated and.

.

.

Yeah,

Yeah.

All of our sensory addictions,

Once those stop,

You know,

It's sort of like a withdrawal,

Isn't it?

Yeah,

Right.

Like we're withdrawing from the things that typically feed us.

Yep,

Like when Rumi says we're frantically running from silence,

That's the way that we're doing it,

By chasing the objects of the senses,

Stimulation,

Like intellectual,

You know,

Puzzles,

All sorts of things that stimulate and invigorate the egoic consciousness and intellect.

Emptiness removes the agency of the ego.

You know,

Being in this bardo,

This interruption,

This emptiness of experience,

The ego is not being allowed to do what it normally does,

Which is to try and further itself,

To expand itself,

To glorify itself.

Which is why we see people going mad,

Reading the news endlessly,

Occupying themselves with every,

Every manner of conflict and struggle,

Because when the ordinary flow of one's life has been disrupted,

The ego can't tolerate it,

So it replaces it with something.

Let's look for a moment.

When the Buddha has his enlightenment,

He refers to it as nirvana.

Of course,

Nirvana is almost always misunderstood as some kind of conception of heaven or bliss.

And really,

Nirvana means cessation and extinction.

And that implies emptiness.

I mean,

That's the hallmark of the Buddha's teaching,

Is sunyata,

Emptiness.

And that's where the evolution that the ego is involved with is leading to emptiness,

Is leading to an ultimate cessation and extinction.

That is necessary before we can ever know and come into contact with the dynamic quality of existence.

I mean,

If we were to really know this emptiness as a gift,

Like this bardo,

This space that's been revealed as a gift,

We would actually experience it as the Buddha experienced it,

As a cessation of the life that we have known.

The birth of something new,

Actually.

But I fear that very few people,

I mean,

I've met a couple of people who are using this opportunity that way,

But very few people seem to be.

When you say they're using that opportunity in that way,

What are they doing?

They're befriending the decadent nature of this ordinary flow of life ceasing.

They're embracing the destruction of it in their own psyche.

Actually sounds kind of romantic.

There is a romance in it.

Yeah,

It does.

Yeah,

There is a romance.

I saw this a lot right at the beginning of the pandemic.

I saw a lot of people were really moved by this notion of,

God,

The world's come to a rest.

We all can take a rest.

That was shortly embraced,

But then it was quickly sort of,

Because that was ushering in something,

That was actually bringing in a possibility of going deeper into the emptiness.

I think it got to be too much for people.

The emptiness started to get too real.

People began to fill that space again with something.

There's this tendency to think that it's always going to be this way.

I have to remind myself sometimes.

I wake up in the morning and it's been the same day for six,

Seven,

Eight months now.

I have to caution myself against falling into this resignation that,

Okay,

So this is my life now and it's always going to look like this,

Because that's what my mind wants to do.

I don't get to go down the whole emotional rollercoaster of feeling sorry for myself.

That's the vanguard of emptiness.

Really?

Yes.

Because I don't feel like that's what I'm approaching when I do that,

But you're probably right.

Nobody ever approaches emptiness with some kind of glee.

It's always approached with dread.

I don't know if dread,

I mean,

I'm not arguing with you.

The resignation that you're describing is the vanguard of emptiness.

Yeah.

I remember what you said about a couple conversations ago.

We talked about Dark Night of the Soul and I felt that I had gone through that period over the course of,

Well,

Several such incidents over a week or two at a time.

You mentioned years and years of clinical depression.

And I got to thinking about that,

Unfortunately,

Because then it was like,

Oh,

Maybe I am depressed.

And I started to notice,

In combination with what we're talking about as far as the pandemic,

Started to notice that,

Yeah,

If this is what my life is going to look like forever,

That is kind of depressing.

And so I inquired into that.

It's like,

Well,

Why?

Why does that trouble you?

What is so bad about this?

And it's all the things that we discussed.

There's this absence of things like delight.

I'm not surprised by anything anymore.

There's not a lot of magic in my experience in the world.

I don't really know how to navigate that.

Let me first clarify that when I spoke of the long period of the Dark Night of the Soul,

I don't say that in a fatalistic way that it's like that's everyone's going to go through that.

But I think very few people who see to the full mystical unfolding of realization don't traverse that long desert of the Dark Night.

And it has everything to do with resignation and gnawing boredom and dryness and just the arid atmosphere of no delight,

No stimulation,

No entertainment.

And you see,

The dynamism of life has not ceased,

But the dynamism of the ego is ceasing.

And it is our task to learn to embrace that entirely,

To actually get to the very bottom of what's there in our resignation,

What's at the core of it.

Maybe it's just because I've spent a lot of my adult life being depressed.

It's kind of just an extension of that.

And it's not debilitating or anything.

I'd say it's the result of spending our adult life entertaining ourselves and distracting ourselves from the underlying emptiness of the ego.

Yes.

And like you said,

In the beginning of this pandemic,

There was that sort of like,

Oh,

This is so nice.

Everything stopped and we can just be now.

And then after a while,

That got to be tedious.

It's kind of like what you see with people on retreat.

It's like the first three days.

I do a week-long retreat.

The first three days,

Everyone's in bliss.

About two days that follow that,

Everyone starts to become restless.

And the last two days of the week,

Everybody's talking about what they're going to do when they get home.

Yeah,

Exactly.

Eric Seinfeld does a stand-up riff on all of that,

Where he's talking about all the steps you went through to get to the theater and then your friends.

Oh yeah,

Yeah.

Have you seen that one?

That's hilarious.

And it's like,

Okay,

We've got to go home.

Yeah.

And that's how the ego works.

It's like there's something in that bliss that actually,

Bliss is the byproduct of emptiness,

But it takes us from our ordinary orientation of self.

And so in order to feel like our self again,

We come into conflict again.

Yeah.

It's like we need a war.

We need a problem.

Yeah,

Exactly.

It's something to kind of bump up against so that we know that we're real.

Yes,

Right.

And that points to the emptiness because without that thing to war with or that thing that is a problem,

The ego begins to know its own insubstantial nature,

Its own empty nature.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And it dreads that.

It's kind of the same thing as when you try to get into an argument with someone and you're just like raring to go and that person isn't going to fight with you and they just stand there and look at you like you've lost your mind.

And it just kind of deflates you,

Right?

Like somebody pulled the plug out.

Yeah.

And you're like,

Oh,

They're all sound and furious.

Yes.

Yeah,

And then there's nothing to fight with.

That deflation.

That deflation.

That's exactly the experience the ego has as it approaches emptiness is it feels deflated.

Yeah.

And the problem is that ordinarily we emotionally or psychologically react to that sense of deflation instead of seeing it as part of a natural process.

Right.

And I've noticed in my practice that what happens in response to that deflation is that things that I thought I had already dealt with and dissolved and transcended or whatever,

Old issues will kind of represent themselves to be recycled because they feel familiar.

It's like,

I've seen you before.

I've already dealt with you.

Yes.

Why are you back here,

You know,

Jealousy?

I'm not part of my entourage anymore.

Papaji said something extraordinarily wise that I always adored.

He said,

As you begin to awaken,

All the gods and all the demons of your past will come to reclaim you.

And so he would say,

Be absolutely vigilant against those both,

Not just the demons,

But the gods also.

Yeah,

Definitely.

Because it's almost like they're kind of sneaking in the back door to try and,

You know,

Rethink the territory.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so he had an experience under the Bodhi tree in his,

Let's say,

Descent into emptiness or ascent into emptiness as the gods and the demons came to tempt him into something,

Into some kind of,

You know,

Seduction or into some kind of fight or war.

And he just sat motionless.

You know,

He just sat in his own being.

Yes.

And then when those gods and demons go quiet,

Emptiness reveals itself as it really is.

The confusion in that is that we often conflate the sense of lack and despair of emotional emptiness with the pristine stillness of emptiness as it really is.

Once we can separate them,

It's clear that real emptiness is stillness,

Not deficiency.

I'm going to throw something super weird out there.

I wrote down on my paper this morning,

Envious of the Dead.

And this is pure me.

When I wake up in the morning and I have that sense of like,

Oh,

It's the same day again,

How long is this going to go on?

And then my mind will sometimes leap to,

Well,

You know what,

I could always kill myself.

It would be easier to be dead.

And I don't mean that literally,

But I'm thinking about what would be lost.

What's the difference between emptiness in life and emptiness in death?

Except that there's no bills to pay in death and the sort of logistical—I don't know if that's intolerably dark for what we're talking about.

Everything's too dark for me to shed light on,

For us to shed light on.

If you wake up in the morning,

Met with it—because I think this is common to probably a lot of people who are going to listen to this.

We wake up in the morning with a sense of dread,

And if we don't have a sense of dread,

We can quickly construct one.

Let's consider that the impulse towards suicide is a desire to put an end to that miserable narrative to kill that.

Yes,

It definitely is.

To kill that with love,

To kill that with an act of release,

To actually liberate ourselves from the bondage to that narrative.

The mind is so intransigent though.

The mind doesn't want to give up what it thinks it knows.

I'm a prisoner of narrative all the time as a writer.

Like I think in narratives,

That's just the way my life has constructed itself over time.

Everyone does.

Yeah.

And cultures run on narratives.

And I can feel that sort of the intolerable sense of,

Well,

If I get rid of that narrative,

Then I don't know anything,

And I can't predict anything.

Emptiness.

And that doesn't feel so good.

You know?

And it's like,

It's easier to be miserable and be somebody or to know what's next.

And this is what I meant about that conflation because when we begin to touch emptiness,

It feels like lack.

It seems like deficiency.

I don't know anything.

I have no life force.

There's no joy in life.

There's nothing entertaining in life.

But that's just the beginning of our descent into emptiness.

Gangaji used to say in regard to this descent into emptiness,

She said,

You know,

We spend so much time becoming somebody,

But as we descend into this emptiness,

We'll be delighted to be nobody,

To know nothing.

Because that's the state of the child.

That's the innocence and the delight of the child.

Yeah.

And there is such a delight in that.

You know,

It's not something that I'm personally able to sustain all the time,

But I have had that experience of being nobody,

And it's so liberating.

It's like moving through the world as a ghost and nothing touches you.

And there is a magic in that.

Like I was complaining a minute ago about there not being enough magic in the world under this lockdown condition,

But the magic in being nobody is palpable.

Yes.

So the ego starts rubbing its hands together saying,

Okay,

So how do I become nobody?

I know.

I think it didn't romp up actually make a movie called Becoming Nobody,

I think.

He did,

Yes.

Uh-huh.

It's not something that you can force to happen.

No,

It can't happen as an act of will of the ego.

Right,

Right.

Because then you would be creating something in place of something.

That's right.

And that's what a lot of spiritual people do.

They have spiritual experiences,

Whether it's through meditation or psychedelics,

And then they want to reconstruct something,

Something that's more spiritual,

More true,

More loving,

But it's just another construct.

Right.

Yeah,

The mind cannot tolerate not having a me to relate to.

That's right.

Okay,

This is silly,

But I'm going to say it anyway.

You know,

I have this little piece of a basil plant that my dog knocked off by accident,

A little six-inch sprig,

And I stuck it in a jar of water so that I could keep it fresh until I used it in cooking.

And within half a day or a day,

It started to send out these little roots into the clear water,

These little white roots.

And then the next day,

They were like an inch long,

And the day after that,

They were like two inches long.

And now they're starting to fill and take the contours of the inside of the jar.

And it's just been fascinating because that was an empty space in the beginning.

And now this intelligence that's somehow inherent to this little sprig of basil has determined that these things are going to form,

And they're fairly random,

But they also have an intelligent pattern to them.

And I should probably plant it at some point,

But I've just been having such an enjoyable time watching what it does next because I have nothing to do with it.

It's just something coming out of emptiness that I can observe.

And yeah,

It's just kind of a neat thing.

I love that example because it goes back to that very old,

I think it's a Zen phrase about having an empty cup.

Unless there's an emptiness,

If something's already full,

It can't be filled.

And so,

Or like in Taoism,

The Tao Te Ching where it says that we tend to perceive the house as the walls and the windows and the doors,

But it's the space inside that makes it meaningful and useful.

It's the space inside.

Exactly.

And that's a really good point,

Is emptiness is necessary for anything to manifest.

Yes.

For things to flourish and grow and yeah.

Right,

Right.

And so in that sense it presents,

Well as we said,

Sort of a canvas that can be filled by whatever the Divine chooses to fill it with,

And opportunity for something new to arise.

We talk about this in terms of things like jobs and relationships that end,

And you know,

You can't really move on to something new until you've resolved and cleared the space,

Cleared all of the old away and made space for something new to fill it.

So without that emptiness,

Nothing new could arise,

Nothing new could inform us,

No new whimsical creation could emerge to delight us.

Right.

Right.

I love that point.

It's brilliant because we perceive,

From the ego point of view,

We perceive things as empty,

All lifeless,

Dead.

But when we truly encounter emptiness and space,

It's exactly as you say,

It's a space of potential where things can grow and flourish and emerge,

And we discount that.

We discount what the artist knows so readily in that for the painting to come through or the music to come through,

There has to be an emptiness.

There has to be a readiness to be filled by something.

And instead of filling,

You know,

Our task in being spiritual practitioners is to not fill that space with the ordinary junk of our mind,

Emotional reactions,

But to really cultivate that open space where life can fill you.

Yes.

Yes.

You know,

There's a way in which,

In modern Western culture at least,

We tend to over-clutter our lives with stuff and people and activities and,

You know,

Whatever the hot new thing is,

Whatever,

You know,

Conversations and cultural memes and controversies and whatever it happens to be as almost a wall against experiencing the emptiness,

Which if we could really,

Yeah,

You know,

We're just kind of like piling it all on.

And you know,

What's funny about that is the flip side is,

At least for me as my practice has sort of matured over the years now,

I find myself annoyed by stuff.

Like I always want to like get rid of more and more stuff because it's just,

It takes too much energy just to perceive it around you,

You know,

Let alone care for it and,

You know,

Have to sell it when you're done with it or,

You know,

Repair it when it breaks and all the stuff that goes along with that.

I'm not talking about people so much,

But you know,

But things.

Yeah.

I mean,

It's an enormous drain of energy,

But like so many of our other bad habits,

It keeps us from really kind of confronting our stuff.

Yes.

I mean,

Our inner stuff,

Our psychological stuff.

Yes.

I love that association that you're making,

Whether it's inner stuff or outer stuff,

Either way it's filling space.

And as we mature and ripen and deepen,

We're not interested in filling space anymore.

We're actually interested in clearing space.

Yeah.

Becoming simpler,

Quieter,

More still.

Right.

Finding peace.

Because aren't we all just after peace mostly,

Happiness and peace?

Frantically running from silence.

I want to talk a little bit about the experience of finding emptiness within oneself because I think that as we progress on the path,

We are increasingly approaching emptiness as we begin to,

For example,

Bring up our old issues,

Heal them,

And then dissolve them or integrate them,

Begin to peel away our mental structures,

Our egoic structures,

The ideas to which we're over attached.

And as we do that,

This isn't just a theoretical thing either.

We're approaching sort of an inner emptiness that is experienceable.

For example,

If you sit,

As I was kind of alluding to earlier and I didn't say it very well,

But if you're sitting quietly and you have begun to remove your definitions of who and what you think you are,

Eventually there's almost nothing left except the emptiness that contained it.

And in that emptiness,

Like I said,

It's not actually empty.

It contains a power.

You begin to perceive that there's love there.

To me,

That potential feels like this vibrant,

Throbbing thing that's just waiting to be released or expressed or invoked in some way.

Yes,

Absolutely.

In one sense,

I mean,

There's many objectives to meditation,

But in one sense,

This is the objective of meditation,

To become empty,

To become still,

To become silent.

One thing I think that we should say about,

In following up with what you're saying,

Is the ego is terrified by emptiness.

And so our approach to emptiness is filled with resistance.

It's filled with fear along the way,

Or episodes of fear we should say,

Along the way.

I mean,

The first time I ever experienced absolute emptiness,

I was utterly terrified.

And it took me another four or five years before I even understood what had even happened,

Because I had lost all conscious awareness and experienced a complete void.

And that is not,

I mean,

In one sense,

It might sound attractive to some,

But it's not something that our egoic structure meets willingly.

It's not something that we,

Because we do,

As we've said already,

We equate that with annihilation.

We equate it with death and absence and non-being.

And so our approach to emptiness must be a gradual one.

And we encounter various levels and layers of emptiness.

Now you're making me wonder how much emptiness I've actually experienced,

Because,

I mean,

My experience of it was I reached a state in meditation where I did not recognize anything that I could have thought of as me,

Quote unquote me.

Like that had all disappeared.

My gender,

My name,

My,

You know,

There was just an awareness and some very vague impressions.

It was not,

I don't know if I could call it a void,

But it was just a still space with no me in it.

But power,

I felt power,

Like I felt powerful.

You know,

There were energies around me that I could perceive.

Yep.

There are grades of emptiness and it's probably beyond the scope of our podcast other than to mention them.

There are grades of emptiness and,

Or we could say levels of emptiness and they're all valid.

They're all important aspects.

But you know,

If we think of the analogy I like to make often in talking about emptiness is imagining your ego as a house and in spiritual work you're gradually dismantling that house such that in the end what you're left with is the absence of a solid structure,

Right?

If we go to that too quickly,

You know,

There's going to be a fight on behalf of the ego to maintain itself.

And so it's a very gradual process of thinning away.

It's as if what spiritual practice is doing is applying a sandpaper rub to the house little by little eroding that structure until there's a peaceful transition into that pure openness,

That pure emptiness of being.

But you know,

When I experienced emptiness the first time it was terrifying because my structure hadn't,

I had done no work on my structure at all.

Oh yeah.

Right.

So I mean I was,

Not to mention that I was using a psychedelic substance and so I had no association for that experience whatsoever other than just pure terror.

Oh wow.

You know,

And in that particular experience it was the absence of all experience.

There was no experience.

Zero.

And were you able to,

Did you just immediately snap out of it or did you have to stay there a while?

Well I had,

I had someone pulled me out of it.

I was with someone who saw that I had left and between the moment before and that moment,

You know,

All I,

There was no memory,

There was no recognition of anything,

Just pure emptiness.

But you know,

From one moment of recognizing the scenery in front of me to the next moment having him shake my arm and ask me if I'm okay.

So you know,

There's nothing in between at all.

You know.

Oh so then the terror came after.

Yes,

The terror came after and that's why,

You know,

Yeah it wasn't in the experience of the emptiness itself and the emptiness itself,

There was no experience.

Gotcha.

No quality,

Not even awareness,

Nothing.

Yeah,

Well that has happened to me a bunch of times in meditation and I always kind of associated with that with,

Associated that with the idea that oh well my brain has just gotten so quiet I'm not creating any new memories but you know I'm actually,

Must have been aware quote-unquote in that gap because there's a gap,

You know,

In my experience.

But maybe not.

Not necessarily aware because if you look at awareness as a product of consciousness or consciousness and awareness as being the same,

The absolute emptiness is before both,

Is before the existence or the arising of awareness.

It's prior to,

Primordial to.

Not that we would crave or try to cultivate such an experience but it happens.

It happens where we experience absolute emptiness and openness.

But you said something there very valuable which is that all of the meaningful and rich qualities of our essence arise within emptiness whether it's joy or power or love.

They all arise within that spacious emptiness.

That actually sort of speaks to something else I wanted to touch on which was that the more that we are able to create the space of emptiness within our,

Even just our everyday experience because if you dispense with the egoic structures and with these attachments to ideas of you know who and what you think you are and even things,

You know fundamental things like your own body start to become increasingly irrelevant.

What that does I think is open up a channel for love to move through,

For God to move through,

Unobstructed.

Because all of those things sort of stand in the way until you know you are able to sort of tolerate that openness and to purify that space if that makes sense.

Can you detail something for people who are listening which is what you mean when you say that things like the body are irrelevant?

Can you help them understand what you mean by that?

Yeah,

Oh God.

Because I think I understand what you mean but you know.

Boy,

That's going to be difficult but I'll try.

Well fundamentally you know before we question it we identify with a body.

I don't think we initially identify with a body in life.

I mean when we come into the world as you've stated in past episodes the baby,

The infant first thinks that it is continuous with its surroundings and that they serve it at its beck and call etc.

Dual unity.

Dual unity.

But then gradually you know the baby finds its body parts and realizes that mom is over there across the room and not actually part of its physical form.

And so from that point forward you know human beings think of themselves as being identified with the body.

What begins to happen in meditation and pratyahara as you're withdrawing your senses,

The body kind of goes to sleep and liberates the consciousness such that you begin increasingly to identify with pure awareness that is unbound by the body.

You begin to realize that the body actually occurs as part of the fabric of your awareness and does not limit you to a space or to a time.

And so in that sense it's not like you don't take care of your body or you just go crash cars or something because it doesn't matter anymore or jump off buildings.

But the body doesn't define you.

So it's just one more definition.

Just like my name doesn't define me,

My gender doesn't define me,

You know my hair color or my national origin or any of the things that the ego likes to point to to know what it is.

As those things dissolve and as you see through them you also see through things that seem impenetrable like physical form.

And as we know,

I mean we can point to this scientifically when we say that you know the body is mostly empty space.

It's just that the way that we have a perceiving it makes it seem like it's solid,

Makes it seem like it's a separate thing from the other bodies over there or you know the tree over across the way.

But we are basically energy that has kind of temporarily taken this form and is ever evolving.

So maybe this is way too long of an explanation but in that sense I think there's like a balance between perceiving the physical and perceiving the emptiness in which the physical arises and that balance tips.

And as it does the physical becomes ever less relevant.

Does that work?

I think so.

I think so.

I think you know one of the things that probably would be useful for people to understand is that emptiness is not a physical experience.

You know it's not a … it's a psychic experience.

It's an inward experience.

And so when we experience emptiness or openness or spaciousness let's say,

I guess this is where we get into a discussion about the grades of emptiness because in some grades of emptiness we can actually experience our body as absent or dissolved.

And in other cases such as us speaking right now I can sense awareness being continuous with the field around me and aware of my body but bigger than my body,

Not limited to my body.

I was just going to say that like and this is almost a continuous experience for me now is that my awareness is something like a big bubble that contains the body and is watching the body all the time.

Even though I can't you know like literally see the back of my own head or anything but my awareness I can sense is much greater than it.

And you're right,

Yeah the body kind of disappears.

Like I almost don't feel the surface of my skin that much anymore.

I know it's there.

If I touch it I can feel it but I'm not continuously aware of it the way I once was.

And I don't know what to make of that actually.

I don't know if that's a vibrational shift or something but … Well just to clarify that at this point we are talking more about awareness than we are emptiness which is okay.

But you know as we touch on these parts of our being,

These dimensions,

We're actually talking about the boundless.

And you know awareness is boundless and that's what makes it so very hard to comprehend in a subtle way is because we're so accustomed to perceiving what is bound,

What has boundaries,

What has form,

What has shape and awareness doesn't.

Doesn't have a shape.

That perception,

That habitual perception of form is,

It's actually just a mental habit.

It's just the way our brains have been taught.

I mean it's sort of intrinsic to the way a physical body operates but it's a habit.

I mean our language refers to form,

Our way of moving through the world is informed by form.

So the mind doesn't know what to do with the absence of form.

But as it learns that form is not an imperative,

Its experience of the world changes.

Our experience changes because our framework has changed.

So this is one of the many ways that we're always creating our world.

Oh God,

Now I'm off on a tangent.

I know we're unpacking a lot of big things here.

I love this though because it was so exciting when I began to see that my mind was kind of the problem,

That my mind was the only thing limiting me because my mind habitually has a way of thinking about things and arranging things in space that is not real.

Or maybe real for some purposes but not the ultimate reality.

And in that sense if my brain habitually perceives form but my consciousness is actually formless,

Then my brain is the only problem here.

Yeah,

Well it gets very interesting here because we make a transition from the finite mind to the infinite mind.

And the finite mind is the mind which is interactive in an objective way with objects and things and phenomena.

But the true nature of the mind is infinite and is empty.

And this is not some elaborate concept.

I mean this is if we directly perceive what is the source of our mind,

What the source of our mind is,

We find an absence there.

So we know our mind more by,

We tend to think of our mind as thoughts but thoughts are still objects occurring in the mind.

We should ask ourselves the question from time to time,

What is this thought occurring within?

What is perceiving this thought?

And if we look honestly and clearly,

There's nothing there.

And yet there is this active principle of intelligence which perceives a thought.

And so this understanding of the finite mind and the mind in its original nature as emptiness is a profound shift in our consciousness.

In our first recording we talked about purifying the lens through which God can express itself.

As us.

The noose,

Yes.

The noose?

The noose.

The eye of the soul.

Spell that.

N-O-U-S.

Oh,

Okay.

I don't know that word.

Well,

It's related to gnosis and knowing and knowledge and the knowing of the soul,

Yeah.

In French it means we as in us.

More than in French.

So we were talking about that.

And in a sense that's also what we're talking about in the idea of becoming nobody.

If the brain has nothing to relate to,

Quote unquote,

As me or I,

Then whatever it is next is what it is.

It just keeps being whatever is required or whatever is unfolding in the moment.

And that doesn't have a name necessarily.

It doesn't have a narrative or a trajectory or rewards.

You are simply in service of life.

Can I share a sweet little story about this?

Yes,

Please.

When I was with,

I went to the park with Jai,

My son,

When he was about,

He must have been about three or four and we were on the swings together.

And I was just curious how he would respond.

So as we were swinging there,

I mean,

It was just such a beautiful fall day.

It was so relaxing and the sun shining.

And I said,

Who are you?

And he said,

I'm Jai.

I said,

Well,

That's your name,

But who are you?

And we were swinging back and forth and I could see that he was churning that a little bit.

He said,

What do you mean?

I said,

Well,

I know your name,

But who are you?

He said,

I don't know.

And I said,

Well,

Look and see.

And he just stopped.

And as he was swinging,

He said,

I'm swinging.

Wee!

And there was just this incredible delight and it was such a pure moment together where he saw the trap of thinking of himself as his name.

He saw the trap of thinking of himself as a thing and he recognized he was just the moment happening.

Yeah.

Oh,

That's beautiful.

And he articulated it in such an innocent and childlike way,

But I was so moved.

I mean,

I was moved to tears by the moment.

Yeah.

That's gorgeous.

It hits at what you're saying,

Which is that when we cease needing to be somebody,

We can become that which is happening now.

Right.

Right.

I had that exact same experience,

Except I wasn't three or four.

When we had that hurricane,

I was getting water out of my cistern to store,

To wash dishes and things after the power went out.

And it was exactly that.

I was standing over the pila and I had my bucket and I was lowering it and then hauling it out again.

I was like,

Four of them.

And I ceased to be me and I thought,

I am the hauling of water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's all it was.

It was like that was all I was required to be and that was the perfect expression of what was happening,

What life was doing in that moment.

And there was a freedom,

There was such a freedom,

Freedom's not even the right word,

But there was an indescribable joy in not being,

Quote unquote,

Me,

In the me being irrelevant to what was happening in that moment.

Yes.

Emptiness is joyful.

It's joyful to be nobody.

And we don't see that from the point of view of viewing emptiness as a sense of deficiency or lack or apathy even.

But yes,

To just be,

You know,

In that sense we start to understand that being is not a noun,

It's a verb.

Yeah.

We're having the transitory experience of God knowing itself always.

Our greatest joy then,

The highest joy may indeed be to be simply a blank slate for the divine to flow in moment to moment,

Fill in moment to moment.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who've become empty,

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven,

For God can flow into them.

Beautiful.

Did you bring a poem?

Yeah.

I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's long.

I'm just going to read the first six or seven stanzas.

So this is from Rumi.

It's called Craftsmanship and Emptiness.

I've said before that every craftsman searches for what's not there to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole where the roof caved in.

A water carrier picks the empty pot.

A carpenter stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush towards some hint of emptiness,

Which they then start to fill.

Their hope though is for emptiness,

So don't think you must avoid it.

It contains what you need.

Dear soul,

If you were not friends with the vast nothing inside,

Why would you always be casting your net into it and waiting so patiently?

This invisible ocean has given you such abundance,

But still you call it death,

That which provides you sustenance and work.

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire and all the beautiful expanse around it as dangerous and swarming with snakes.

This is how strange your fear of death and emptiness is and how perverse the attachment to what you want.

Yep,

Perfect.

It's perfect.

It goes straight toward the emptiness.

It's perfect.