Category Archives: emptiness

Open awareness

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I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

Slowly it is being borne in upon me that open awareness is not so much a state of mind among other states of mind, but mind itself. Forgive me if I quote here again a summary of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, but it may help to refresh our minds:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

  1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
  2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
  3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)

What I referred to the other day as “our normal everyday consciousness” is Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: limited, conditional and conditioned, irredeemably self-centred. The second kind of knowledge is the one we employ in thinking things through, whether how to hang wallpaper straight or the ontological argument – Keats’ “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But the third kind is a leap into something entirely different.

The third kind of knowledge is direct seeing; and in my experience, just sitting, simply aware of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight and presence, you begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This is not a matter of academic philosophy  – in any case I have no formal training in that field at all – but of plain observation. Open awareness is an overarching presence, awareness itself, objectless and unconditioned. Within awareness itself things appear – the “ten thousand things” of the Taoists, the Śūnyatā of the Mahayana Buddhists, Spinoza’s modes – but open awareness, that holds and gives rise to them all, is no thing. It merely is.

A sense of naked inadequacy

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Apophatic spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends. Whether we arrive there by means of a moment of stark extremity in our lives, or (metaphorically) by way of entry into a high desert landscape, the sense of naked inadequacy remains the same. Prayer without words can only begin where loss is reckoned as total.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.36

It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

I have observed that contemplative practice does not have about it the linear quality we are used to in many other kinds of practice: if you practice a skill, say playing a musical instrument, you will get better at it. As time goes by, if you practice faithfully and intelligently, playing will become almost effortless – you will not have to think at all about where to find a note, or how to finger a certain scale or chord – they will just be there for you, embedded in muscle memory and musical instinct; and over the years it just gets better. But contemplative practice is not like that at all. One is never an expert; things you thought you’d learned months ago suddenly leap out as real difficulties, real terror even. The simplest thing, like keeping a slip of attention on the breath, as an anchor to return to if lost in thought, will unexpectedly appear horribly difficult. One day you hardly notice a thought as you sit, peacefully and still; the next you are plagued with anxieties, fantasies, mundane recollections, until you feel like getting up and doing something useful instead.

What is going on? I think we forget that it is in brokenness, in extremity, that the the way to the bright fields of being opens, not in experiences of bliss or jewelled visions. In fact, not in  experiences at all.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

To meditate, year after year, it seems to me, is to find oneself continually in extremis: nothing is achieved – there is no ladder, and in any case half the rungs are missing, and the ones that remain are cracked and treacherous. One only practices this way if every other possibility has failed, if the easy way has turned out to be no way at all. Only this way can we hope to come across the sunlit uplands; and yet even there, the light will skin our littleness like sand in a gale. It is all we come to long for, the only place we will be at home.

Emptiness?

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Emptiness is not a denial of existence but a subtler perspective that all phenomena are impermanent and interrelated.

Miranda Shaw, “Mothers of Liberation”
Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2007

Emptiness should not be confused with nihilism, which asserts that nothing has any intrinsic value or meaning. Buddhism does not deny the conventional reality of the world nor the importance of ethical conduct; Its doctrine of emptiness simply asserts that the true nature of things is characterized by interdependence and lack of solid, independent existence. It doesn’t deny that things exist; it describes how they exist.

Buddhism A-Z: Śūnyatā, Lion‘s Roar

By these reckonings, Śūnyatā is remarkably similar to distributed causality in modern physics…

To sit quietly, though, is to observe this for oneself. Reading the words alone skitters on the surface skin of an idea. Only watchful stillness can reveal the undeniable, empty nature of conditioned things: the fleeting impermanence of the breath, and of the earth itself – even of the bright stars, so distant that by the time we see them they may no longer even be there. And yet not a thing exists without its antecedents, not even without the things that share its time. But things, truly, are not; there is only pattern, becoming, the bright ground that is no thing. What more could there be?

Belief systems?

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A commenter on yesterday’s post reminded me that perhaps I hadn’t made it sufficiently clear that I am not advancing humanism – or anything else come to that – as an alternative belief system to take the place of organised religion. For some this may be case – although I don’t think that’s what AC Grayling was recommending in the passage I quoted yesterday – but it emphatically isn’t my own approach at all.

The Einsamkeit of yesterday’s title is a German term usually translated as either loneliness or solitude; its alternative translations, seclusion or solitariness, are the ones that interest me, (Like so many German philosophical terms, it has its own resonance which doesn’t seem to have a one for one equivalent in English.) I was using it to indicate following the course that appears, spiritually – I’m reminded of the Taoist phrase “to accord with the way” – not adopting a ready-made spirituality from either organised religion or academic philosophy. (People like Eckhart Tolle, or Jiddu Krishnamurti, are exemplars of this kind of contemplative path.)

It is of course hard to find words for all this, which is one reason that the Christian tradition of apophatic theology developed among the Early Church Fathers – although something similar already existed among the Neo-Platonists – and from the opposite direction, perhaps, Buddhist (especially Zen) philosophy and teachings often emphasise Śūnyatā, emptiness of inherent existence. The ground of being, the Tao, Istigkeit, is no thing. It cannot be described; it isn’t really possible truthfully to construct a sentence with it as its object. Awareness seems to be irresistibly identified with it: we are aware with its awareness. At the end, it is all we are; but it is all we have ever been. Our practice is really nothing more than a means of stripping away whatever stops us seeing that. To construct, or to adopt, belief systems is massively to miss the point – and that is what I was, perhaps clumsily, trying to get at yesterday.

Empty

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I’d like to talk about emptiness as a way of perceiving. The writer Gay Watson explores a translation of sunyata—first offered by T. Stcherbatsky—that is far richer than the mere lack that “emptiness” connotes: relativity. All phenomena arise in dependence, or relative to, conditions; or, per one interpretation of quantum theory, they exist solely in relation to being observed. Since, according to this interpretation, our act of perceiving is fundamental to the fabrication of our constructed reality, I wonder, could this be one reason the Buddha included perceiving (samjna) in the five aggregates as an essential constituent of our conscious experience?

The word emptiness tends to bring up an image of a dark abyss, a black hole, and people think, “There’s nothing! It’s all empty.” Or worse yet, “Nothing matters.” But relativity, as this translation suggests, means that what we perceive is relative and relies on our framework of recognition (e.g., biological, evolutionary, cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural). It also depends on all the causes and conditions that have supported its existence.

Nikki Mirghafori, Dreaming Together, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2023

When I first encountered the Buddhist concept of dependent origination (Pratītyasamutpāda, in Sanskrit) many years ago, it was one of the things about the philosophy that made immediate sense to me. Of course all things depended upon preceding causes – people aren’t born unless their parents met; they wouldn’t have met without being in the same place at the same time, which in turn relied upon chains of other events and conditions stretching back into a seeming infinity of past time – and of course everything done today has consequences far into a future of which we have only the faintest idea. And this being the case, all things and processes are empty (Śūnyatā) of independent self-existence: everything that is only is relative to something else, and will in itself give rise to conditions which we think of as “the future”.

During the long years that I was more or less involved with the Christian contemplative tradition, this was one of the things that left me constantly slightly uneasy. I knew of nothing that directly – at least in terms of orthodox doctrine – corresponded to Śūnyatā. Deep in the teachings of Meister Eckhart, of course, there is that sense of radical interconnectedness – that we are only what we are as we are related together in God – but that was beyond my pay grade at the time!

As Nikki Mirghafori points out, the relativity within which all phenomena arise is also relative to our own perception of it; there is nothing of which we can speak as if it were what it is except as we perceive it. It doesn’t make sense to think like that. We are ourselves part of the web: things are what they are relative to us, just as we are who we are relative to them. There is nothing else; no thing else. We, and all that is or has been, rest in the open ground, which is no thing at all. What matters is to be still enough to see.

Tao is empty – its use never exhausted.
Bottomless – the origin of all things.

(Tao te Ching, tr. Addis & Lombardo, 1993)