it’s good to be empty

It's good to be empty

The word empty is of interest on our spiritual journey. In common usage, empty is usually a negative word. It means we've run out of something that we need or want. Perhaps the car fuel tank is empty, or the cupboard where we keep our groceries is empty. It has a negative connotation.

And if we take a western psychological view of our own mind, we would probably regard being empty as something of a problem here too. I feel a terrible emptiness, someone might say. It doesn't mean they're happy at all. It implies, rather, a state of despair in western psychology.

But if we move to eastern traditions, spiritual traditions, the word empty has a positive connotation, especially in some branches of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism teaches of emptiness. And in these teachings emptiness is a word used in a rather technical way to mean something very specific. It's not so much something that we might like or dislike. It's a statement of how things are. Everything in and of itself is empty. We can only really define things in terms of each other. There's no intrinsic identity in something, including a person.

But in Zen Buddhism being empty is something that we might want to aspire to. Often in spiritual teachings, the implication is you have to become empty of your old beliefs and thought patterns, in order to receive a new teaching. It's like emptying a cup before filling it with tea. If it's already full, there's no space for the tea. But with this metaphor, we are just replacing one set of beliefs with another. Perhaps the new set of beliefs leads us into a happier life. But this is not really what Zen Buddhism is talking about. It's not encouraging us to become empty merely in order that we fill up our mind with new beliefs or new teachings. No. In Zen becoming empty, emptying the mind of thoughts, concepts, any beliefs, allows us to taste empty consciousness itself. 

Whilst our mind is full of ideas, concepts –it doesn't matter what they are, whether they are secular or spiritual, atheistic or believing in God – it doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference at all, whilst we have sets of beliefs in our mind, we are unconsciously identifying with those beliefs. We might not realise it, but that is who we think we are, because those beliefs are there all the time. Anything that's there all the time the ego will tend to latch on to, to form part of this feeling of personal identity.

So tasting the empty consciousness, the space into which thoughts come, the space which harbours our beliefs and concepts, tasting it in its empty form, erodes that identity with the beliefs, because during those periods of empty mind, those beliefs are absent. So this causes something of a crisis for the ego. Either the ego, the sense of I, is absent during those periods, which is not the way the ego likes to operate, or the ego needs to attach to some of else. And of course it will try to attach to this empty consciousness itself. And indeed some teachers say, I am not the thoughts, I am the conscious awareness of the thoughts. This is identification with that empty consciousness, or with the sense of awareness.

Even this, though, I feel is misleading at least. If one delves deeply enough into this space of empty consciousness, it is felt as completely impersonal. And it is more accurate to say simply I am not, there is no I. Yes, there is the empty consciousness with its tremendous silence and stillness, and the unlimited spaciousness. But there is no I, there is no me in that. And this is really why it's good to be empty.

Only in that tremendous emptiness will we, in the very deepest parts of our psychology, come to understand that we simply don't exist in the way that we unconsciously, or implicitly, believe ourselves to. That sense of I is a fabrication that comes about through having content in the mind, beliefs especially, concepts, ideas, thoughts. All of this allows the psychology to create a bubble which is the sense of one's self. I am not saying that this physical body does not exist, not at all. It exists, and it continues to exist perfectly well without the idea of itself. 

This is the end point of Zen Buddhism. We become so empty, I become so empty, that I disappear. And yet the body you still here, the experience is still here. The awareness of the present moment is still here. All that's really disappeared is the concept of I. It sounds a tiny thing put that way – just one little concept erased from the mind. From the outside, it seems nothing has changed. And yet the experience of life has suddenly become direct. Now there is no distance between the thing being experienced and the experiencer. These two have come together, and in a way annihilated each other to leave just experience itself, just this direct sensory moment. It's so difficult to put into words. Our whole language is built upon its separation, on creating a distance between the observer and that which is being observed. Our language, and for most people their understanding of life, demands that separation. And yet it turns out there is no separation, not so much as a nanometre. This is being empty.