3.The Fear of Emptiness on The Eternal Path
Is the sense of emptiness just the mind’s experience of Oneness?
These numbered posts are companion pieces to my weekly meditation and self inquiry classes and are written as a natural continuous unfolding of the topic
Read post nr 1+2 first to allow this post to make even more sense.
3.The Fear of Emptiness on The Eternal Path
The fear of darkness and of being alone are some of the most common fears. And they make sense in the physical world. However, the fear of being alone in the dark seems to be mirrored inside us as a fear of mental and emotional emptiness. A resistance towards stillness.
In true emptiness, says physics, in absolute void, there is no possibility for movement because there is no matter that can move. No change can happen. No waves of appearance and disappearance. No birth. No death. No time. No directions. No path to walk.
If we are identified with the rising and settling waves of manifestation, emptiness is death, non-existence. Non-existence is our biggest fear because existence is our only truth.
We come into the world with only one piece of reliable information: I am. Everything else is unknown to us and has to be learned.
But we are. We exist.
What we exist as, what we are, must be examined. Are we the ocean or the waves? The eternal or the timebound? What we think we exist as, can either make us fearful or bring us peace.
If we imagine that we will cease to exist when the body material disintegrates, we will think of the end of the body as the end of existence. And since the only thing we are doubtless about is that we exist, death scares us. If, on the other hand, we think that our true nature outlives the body, if we think that the, I am, exists forever in some form, then our only inborn truth (I am) will not be challenged.
So, what is eternal? The only thing eternal we know of is empty space. But we don’t like emptiness.
In Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, Shuniya, emptiness or zeroness, is the true nature of everything. Zeroness can be describes as “one without a second”. Shuniya is beyond the idea of unity because there are no parts to be united. It is one ocean. Multiplicity, identification with the waves as separate entities, is maya, is illusion.
But we have the sense that we are eternal (like the ocean) as well as a sense that we are individual beings (waves), and that the individual (the wave) should not die. Not rise and fall.
As individuals, we feel separate and long for union, but we do not want to surrender our separateness because we are afraid of the “open sea of emptiness.”
This is a self-contradiction, both cannot be equally true about us.
What causes this contradiction?
The cause is identification with ego.
The ego is another word for the sense of “other than”, of “separate from”. The ego is the illusion of fragmentation.
The builder of identity on the base of the illusory ego, is the divisive power, the mind.
The mind is hunting for meaning and value to fill up the dreaded sense of emptiness that springs from believing we are separate from the whole. It’s a feedback loop. A vicious circle constructing our identities.
An identity based on the fear of emptiness will naturally feel incomplete.
The limited ego-mind does not like infinite emptiness because it sees it as death, as non-existence. The ego wants to stay small, to use the mind to initiate action, direction, attention. To walk towards fulfilment. Peace.
The mind is not able to stop moving, thinking. Just as organs won’t stop working. No thought means no mind. Stillness is the death of mind. Stillness, peace and emptiness are not the nature of the mind. So naturally the mind does not want to stop moving. The mind wants peace but fears emptiness, stillness.
Still, something in us longs for that state of bliss.
You must understand that emptiness, bliss is not a state of mind; it is beyond and before the mind. Like space is beyond and before matter.
The mind, the ego and the body are just fleeting ripples of illusion in emptiness.
Only when we know what we are, when we realise ourselves to be larger than ego-mind, can we stop identifying with the mind’s fear of emptiness. Only then can we surrender to stillness, space. To pure consciousness. To our true nature.
We will see that we, as all-permeating consciousness, as Oneness, as space, are beyond the sense of separation or connectedness. We are eternal oneness, we are Shuniya, emptiness.
Illusions ripple through us but do not change us.
The mind’s fear of emptiness is the fear of our true expansive nature.
We have always existed as emptiness.
Emptiness was first.
Vijay Shyam, 2/3-25
………………
At Vulture Peak, the Buddha spoke the Heart Sutra as a reply to Shariputra,
“Form is empty; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness.
In the same way, sensation, recognition, conditioning factors, and consciousness are emptiness.
Therefore, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness; they are without characteristics; they are unarisen and unceasing; they are not tainted and not untainted; they are not deficient and not complete.
Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no recognition, no conditioning factors, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no visible form, no sound, no odor, no taste, no texture and no mental objects; there is no eye element up to no mind element and as far as no mental consciousness element; there is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance up to no old age and death, no extinction of old age and death.
Likewise, there is no suffering, no origin, no cessation and no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment.
Therefore, Shariputra, since bodhisattvas have no attainment, they rely on and abide by the perfection of wisdom.
Since their minds are unobscured, they have no fear. They completely transcend error and reach the ultimate nirvana.
All the buddhas throughout the three times fully awaken to unsurpassed, genuine and complete enlightenment by means of the perfection of wisdom.”
— Heart Sutra
“Try Desiring Nothing
If you think you can bargain with God, offering your good works and best intentions in the hope of some reward, think again:
these are like the doves sold in the temple, whose sellers and buyers Jesus drove out so long ago. Try this instead: desire nothing
and become like the unbounded Nothing, which is neither here nor there. Only then, in the Now of this Nothing, will you find
only God who wants your works of love as an act of praise, and not your bargaining for some reward beyond this great Nothing.”
Meister Eckhart
..
“THIS WORLD WHICH IS MADE OF OUR LOVE FOR EMPTINESS
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence.
Existence: this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness, this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness. Then one swoop, one swing of the arm
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting.”
Rumi