The Enigma of Emptiness

Emptiness is a challenging matter to understand.  After all, at a high level when we look at it from a normal perspective, what aspect of life do you want to have “empty”:  Your purse or wallet?  Your home or possessions?  Your relationships?  Your bank balance?  Your stomach?  

A normal person, or one with a conventional perspective, cannot understand why emptiness is a good thing in all these practical matters.

It is this very challenge that keeps emptiness, an enigma.

Let us look at it closely.

We are like a cup.  And if the cup is full, as the cup of life is often full with anger, worry, fear, judgments and so forth, there is no room for anything to be added to it.  But when the cup is empty, there is the potential, the possibility of it being full of light, love, compassion, peace, Grace.

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill

Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt

Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench

Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back
The only path to serenity

Verse 9 of the Tao Te Ching, Translation by Stephen Mitchell

The student’s cup (mind) has to be empty, before the Master can teach them anything.

Living in the head, we have desires, we actively seek after desires, try to add to the gaping void left from the separation we feel inside (though we may not know it consciously) from the One. 

And in the course of this mind-centric living, our attachments, fears, judgments govern how we treat others.  And this is a disaster because all this does is makes the web of illusions stronger, and keeps us stuck deeper in that web that we are spinning furiously all the time.

Ceasing your thoughts
Easing from striving
Letting go your self-image
Resting in silence
Move into emptiness
Where the fullness of Reality is
As it is, unchanging

Love
Sundar.

~~–

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