Emptiness
Practical Resources
Resources to help you embody a sense of awake and connected wisdom
It may be worth reading these posts fist:
These will give a more intuitive understanding of what emptiness is and clear-up some common misconcpetions.
Emptiness
By learning to be more present with our intuitive and felt senses of the world, we can drop out of our minds and let go of some of the fixed ideas that we have about what is going on in reality. We can learn to see and experience things in quite radically different ways.
The more aspects of reality we are able to be with directly without judgements or habit thought-pathways, the more emptiness becomes a part of our reality.
Practice
Emptiness, in this sense of the word, is an aspect of Tantric Buddhism, which means that it is an embodied insight. We are learning to arrive in our intuitive sense of the world and the direct experience of our bodies. Rather than believing that we understand what is happening we are just feeling into each moment afresh.
It’s like you’re experiencing the world without any fixed ideas layered over the top – you’re with the direct experience of life, just going with the flow in each moment and allowing things to feel how they feel and mean what they mean without your mind getting involved.
This is very hard to describe or imagine if you haven’t experienced it. This type of emptiness is not something we can get our heads around. Lots of people seem to like to intellectualise about what emptiness is, but embodying it is actually about letting go of fixed perceptions and integrating your intuition and emotions.
Anything conceptual in the mind is adding more layers to the perception that is keeping us away from our direct intuitive sense of the world. Emptiness is something we learn to embody over time as we become more able to be present with our direct experience of the world.
Embodying a sense of emptiness opens up a doorway for us to experience the world in different ways.
Rather than ‘holding ourselves together’ with the mind, we are allowing reality to be as it is and for us to start from a place of presence rather than a place of needing to keep ourselves safe.
Awakening
So much meditation focuses on our direct sensate experience in this moment, but this is only a tiny proportion of our experience.
Part of this is that a lot of meditation and philosophy creates a false duality; it takes bare sensate reality and logical perception as experience and disregards feelings, intuition and our creative way of connecting with experience as invalid.
This creates a disconnect and dissociation from a lot of experience. Intuition and emotions are our connection to the interconnected nature of reality. Unlike bare sensate reality, which is incredibly transitory, intuition and feelings have a continuity to them.
They are created in this moment based on the previous moment as well as what happened last week, or last month, or since the beginning of time. You can’t pick up one thing without picking up everything in the Universe and it is this aspect of continuous experience that ties everything together. If this didn’t exist, life would just shatter into a gazillion separate moments – there would be no beings that could function or make sense of it.
Included in this present moment are all our felt senses, subconscious thoughts and intuitive feelings about things; when we arrive in the present moment, we need to validate and include all of these aspects if we want to get an embodied sense of emptiness.
Taken to its full conclusion of bringing everything into the present moment, the present moment becomes a thing that includes all time ever because intuition and feelings tie everything together inextricably.
From this perspective every single tiny aspect of the Universe and experience becomes pure cosmic intelligence.
It’s like an understanding that your mind doesn’t know anything about anything. Getting an intuitive sense that every single thing is an expression of cosmic intelligence gives you a very different perspective and experience of life. But it’s worth saying that it doesn’t solve everything, it’s a bit like swapping one set of problems for another.
Collective Awakening
This perspective of emptiness – experiencing the interconnection of life through our feelings and intuitions, rather than our fixed ideas about what reality is, gifts us a fundamentally different way of experiencing the world that changes everything.
Rather than taking our own experience as ‘truth’ and cultivating this for our own gain, we realise that we are an inextricable part of a greater whole and naturally want to contribute to enjoying and improving the world.
Life becomes about what we can contribute and open to receiving. We know that there is more to life as a whole and even our own individual lives than we can possibly ever be aware of. Embodying this perspective allows us to open to the mystery of life, bringing it into the fold of our experience. We can embrace the knowledge that we are falling into the unknown together at every moment and enjoying the journey.
We are interested in interacting with other people, learning their stories and working together. We can realise that when we make a mistake or something unpleasant or bad happens to us, it may still be serving the whole.
We can find joy in the phase that we are in, wherever that is, knowing that we will never ‘arrive’ anywhere, we are just continuously expressing our life force – creating more and more beautiful and meaningful connections and getting a deeper understanding of life and ourselves.
Taken to a conclusion of non-duality we are no longer able to separate where each of us begins and the rest of the world ends.
My Story
This realisation and clarity came out of my experience of taking the aspect of experience that is karma or the soul, to its ultimate conclusion. Non-duality with all of karma is a strange experience, it’s like looking back at yourself through the eyes of the cosmos and seeing your life and the entire Universe as a story that is playing out by itself.
Breaking through into this took months and months of spending every moment of every day dismantling fixed perceptions and contractions around my intuitive sense of the world, which involved deep psychosis and processing the entirety of human trauma and collective karma through my body.
While there was a deeply embodied sense of emptiness throughout the whole process, this wasn’t some calm realisation. It was a terrifying and physically painful ordeal that involved a lot of blood, sweat and tears and that I barely scraped through alive.
Some of the things this involved includes experiencing hundreds of hours of rape visualisations that were processing how the feminine energy in the Universe is oppressed, processing all the human trauma that is held in our interconnected subconscious world and believing literally thousands of insane concepts and ideas like enlightened beings could embody other people’s bodies and other animal’s bodies.
The reality is that while emptiness isn’t form (there are physical laws that our lives and the Universe obeys) matter behaves in a deeply synchronistic way and life is like a continually unfolding fractal that is insanely complex and can do all sorts of magical things.