the word emptiness

The whole challenge of awakening

Can be found in the word emptiness

In ordinary usage, emptiness is a negative word, it has negative connotations, a sort of desolate state. And if one were to say, I feel empty inside, most people would think you have a problem. In Buddhism emptiness is a positive state, at least not negative. In fact, in Buddhism emptiness is a statement of the way things actually are. So in this sense, realising that we are empty, acknowledging it, accepting it, is really the challenge that we face if we want to awaken.

Everything that we think we are, is really something of an illusion. If we really try and pin down: who am I? Where do we turn? Do we identify ourselves with our nationality, our race, our religion? Do we identify ourselves with our position in society, or our family relationships? Perhaps by our profession, by our age, by our sex. There are many ways we try to define ourselves, but these are all ephemeral. They don't have real substance to them. But to accept this is very difficult. It really requires the ending of a sense of I, as an autonomous separate being.

I have to surrender my feeling of sovereignty over myself. I have to surrender the feeling that I have choice, that I can determine my own future. So there is a lot bound up in this. And that is why I say the challenge of awakening, of realising who we really are, of coming to live in truth, that challenge is perhaps captured by this word emptiness. Can we accept it? Can we accept that we are empty?

Normally we're aiming to do just the opposite, aren't we? We're trying to kind of fill ourselves up. It might be with money, with status, prestige. It might be with material goods, it might be with sex, drugs, entertainment of all sorts, but we're basically trying to fill a void. And if we are to progress spiritually, we need to take a different approach. We need to welcome that feeling of the void, of emptiness, and sit in that. It's not such a bad thing, but ordinarily we run away from it. We try to escape from it.

So have a look at this word emptiness, of how it resonates in you. See if you have resistance to it, a reluctance. That is where to focus the attention. And of course try sitting whenever you can, with the feeling of emptiness. That feeling that however you try to define yourself, is missing. It's fake, at best a superficial definition. Seek out the feeling of emptiness. Sit in it. And in the end rejoice in emptiness. It is the nature of all things manifest: emptiness.