Enlightenment & The Power Of Emptiness

OK, gangster punks, rebels and revolutionaries, free spirits and seekers of truth, hear this:

People don’t understand the power of emptiness. With all my heart, I wish they did. And I wish I were more firmly grounded in that awareness. I merely have a knowing, a deeply felt and directly seen knowledge, but not a continuous awareness. Yet, I can honestly say that I have seen directly the non-dual nature of being and reality, and not merely theorized about it, speculated, or read about it in books. It is real. It is the ground of being, the very fabric of reality itself. It is worth thinking about, and exploring. But don’t take anyone’s word on anything. As the Buddha also said, Examine things for yourself. See for yourself.

Emptiness is the greatest power in the world. The greatest power in existence. There is nothing that can remotely compare to it. It is not understood, even intellectually, by more than a few, and fully realized by no more than one in millions, but it is real, and it is the ultimate power. And by emptiness, of course, we must clarify what is meant: it is the non-duality of being, the fundamental unity of being.

(See Allan Wallace, Joanna Mcy, Einstein and Bohm if you want a secular, scientific discussion of non-duality, or Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Spinoza, Nagarjuna or Meister Eckhart, if you are not afraid of a religious or spiritual approach to the ultimate nature of reality, or if you insist on a theistic discourse on the unnamable ultimate reality.)

Realizing emptiness means realizing that there is no self. That may sound frightening, but it means realizing that you are truly one with the cosmos – and there is nothing to fear, nothing to grasp upon, nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose or defend. With the realization of emptiness, one viscerally, and not just intellectually, realizes, as Einstein said, that, “The perception of a division between self and other is a kind of optical delusion.”

And with that realization, comes tremendous fear, generally, at first, as all that we had clutched at falls away like dust, like a passing dream upon awakening. But after some time, after aclimatization, or familiarization – which is what meditation is all about – you slowly begin to realize that not only is there nothing to hold on to, but there is no need to hang on.

Thus begins the ultimate freedom – and the ultimate power. It is not the power of the ego and all its confused and deluded grasping, but the power of the universe, or Life, itself. And it is unstoppable, and unvanquishable. This is the death of fear.

As the Zen saying goes, “Men fear that in the abyss they will lose themselves. But it is in the abyss that they will find themselves.”

Have no fear. Plumb your depths. They are the very depths of all life.

Know thyself.

JTR,

May 2, 2021