In This Episode…

“Emptiness doesn’t mean there’s not a self. It doesn’t mean you’re not a person. It’s the discovery that what we really are is an interdependent web of complex processes that arise in our body, in our emotional being, in our minds and in the cultural patterns in which we are enmeshed. We tend to experience ourselves as a solid, stable, independent self. But the practice of emptiness shows us that we are part of a much greater process of interdependencies that are constantly changing, moving, evolving into something new.”
—Craig Hamilton

In “The Practice of Emptiness: Dissolving the Illusion of Solidity,” Craig explores the spiritual practice of Emptiness, examining its ancient wisdom and contemporary relevance to enrich both meditation and everyday life.

The concept of emptying out or becoming empty of self finds its origins in Christianity and Buddhism. Yet for many of us today, the idea of Emptiness might initially seem unappealing, conjuring images of a cold, meaningless void. However, in this episode, Craig dispels these misconceptions and emphasizes that the true essence of Emptiness is far from nihilistic or devoid of significance.

When properly engaged, the authentic practice of Emptiness serves as a powerful tool for breaking down our thought structures and dissolving their illusion of solidity. This act of emptying out creates a sacred space within, making way for an overflowing sense of fullness, depth, and sacredness to emerge. Through this practice, we can connect more deeply with our spiritual selves and the world around us.

This episode includes a guided meditation exploring this technique, so we encourage you to find a time to listen when you won’t be interrupted.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

In the practice of emptiness, the invitation is to have a neutral relationship to thoughts, feelings, sensations, and all phenomena. You could say that the invitation is to have no relationship to phenomena, but it can perhaps be best understood as having an equal, even, or neutral relationship to everything that occurs. We do this not because all phenomena are equal in the world – obviously, some things are really important, and some things are completely unimportant. But when we meditate on emptiness, we’re allowing ourselves for a brief period to have no relationship to anything that arises, or to relate with utter neutrality to everything that arises. We take the position that nothing is more important than anything else, which means we’re not getting engrossed in the content of our experience.

Seeing Through the Content of Your Mind

I’ve often invited meditation students to let go of the mind, to not give any attention to the mind, to not engage with thought, but this emptiness practice is a little bit different. Emptiness practice is based on the same fundamental intent to not get involved in the content of our experience, but instead of simply trying to not get involved in the content for better or worse, we have an additional tool.

The additional tool we have is to see through this content. We can actually go ahead and look at it, but not out of interest in its content or its details. We look at it as a thought structure, and allow the thought structure to break down into its pieces so that it no longer holds together and grabs our attention.

It’s the same process with a big, powerful feeling, when a feeling of fear or grief, or even elation or joy, overtakes us and captures all of our attention. With this emptiness practice, we’re simply investigating: what is a feeling? We’re not absorbed in this particular feeling, but we’re looking at it very neutrally and objectively, and seeing, “Wow, there’s a certain sense of energy, a tightness, maybe acceleration or speediness, and we’re just seeing what a feeling is really made of, and letting it fall apart. It will fall apart under scrutiny. That’s the point of the practice of emptiness.

All Phenomena are a Flow of Energy and Constructs

From the vantage point of the enlightened mind, and inviting in awakened consciousness, all phenomena will fall apart under scrutiny. I don’t mean this in a relative sense, where one thing is more significant or meaningful than another. What I mean is that all phenomena will be revealed to be simply an interdependent flow of energy, constructs, letters, words, associations, and influences from our past.

The simple practice here is to rest as open, spacious, free awareness, easefully and naturally, while also noticing that certain phenomena, thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise have a gravity to them that pulls on our attention. With the tool of emptiness, we deconstruct or dissolve anything that has a lot of gravity into its smaller elements, so that the gravitational field is broken up and we essentially lose interest.

Instead of a big, important, compelling thing pulling on our attention, there are a bunch of little things that we realize are relative and insubstantial in themselves. We let that realization take us deeper into presence. Each time we deconstruct or dissolve something that seems to be in our way, we allow ourselves to be drawn deeper into the awake presence that we’re rooted in. It did the dissolving, actually.

The Two Kinds of Emptiness

1. Letting Go of Control
I want to say a few words more about this practice and its intent, and how it generally fits with the approach to meditation I teach called the Practice of Direct Awakening.

I want to note that when I’m speaking about emptiness, I’m doing it in two different ways. In one of the ways that I’m describing emptiness, I’m describing the path of letting go, the path of emptying out, the path of liberation through something akin to negation, though it’s not just negation. So let me speak a little bit about that.

A lot of what I’m speaking about also has an echo in Christian mysticism, or contemplative Christianity, in the word kenosis, which means emptying out, becoming empty. This is very resonant with the way I’m speaking about emptiness in the broad sense of practices where we simply let things be.

We let go of control, of trying to make anything happen, trying to be the one who knows how things should be and trying to drive them in a particular direction. We’re empty of motive or intent, empty of agenda. This includes practices of not-knowing, of innocence, where we take the posture of, “I’m going to be empty of convictions, of all of my beliefs and ideas and certainties. I’m just going to let those all go, and let them all fall aside.” The intent here is we’re relinquishing our attachment to the surface layer of things, the egoic layer of things, in order to make room for a deeper dimension–for the sacred dimension of ourselves to emerge.

It is a pretty simple, fundamental idea that our true nature is already holy, already sacred, already potent and full of meaning and significance. We don’t need to create it, generate it or make it happen. We just have to get out of the way so that it can emerge and reveal itself and express itself through our life. We simply have an orientation of emptiness or emptying out and becoming transparent for our greater light to shine through, metaphorically speaking.

2. Staying Present and Undistracted
I’m using it in this sense, and also in a Buddhistic technical sense, because the spiritual term emptiness, which is based on the Mahayana Buddhist idea of shunyata, or shunya, also comes to us from the Buddhist tradition.

The specific technical practice is a way of deconstructing or dissolving phenomena into their finer elements. Properly understood, this practice isn’t really a direct awakening practice, but it would be considered a preparatory practice for direct awakening — getting things out of the way so that we can go directly to the source consciousness, and using a “precision intervention” in our meditation to clear the way for deepening.

You could look at it as a preparatory practice and also a remedy for an affliction, the affliction being distraction. As I’m sitting in my meditation, the invitation is to be here, fully present, awake, conscious, free, open and undistracted…and yet I notice I keep being distracted by self-concern, self-judgment, self-worry. One form of emptiness practice would be to let that go, don’t give it your attention, don’t focus on it, and don’t make a problem out of it. In this practice, we don’t give it any energy; we simply stay present, even amidst that set of distractions. That would be more of a direct awakening practice.

But today I’m giving you another tool, and saying, there’s this emptiness, which is a deconstructive, dissolving tool inherent in our consciousness, which you shouldn’t have to work hard at using. When I give you a tool, I don’t mean it’s like a sledge hammer, where you’re going to have to work hard to smash these things up.

Our Awareness Has the Power to Dissolve Mental Phenomena

Awareness itself, or consciousness itself, if we’re awake and really present to it, will naturally dissolve or deconstruct those mental phenomena, the objects in consciousness that seem to have gravity to them. If we look at things in the right way, allowing them to be there without any problem or dilemma or struggle. “What is this thing in consciousness, this feeling, this thought, this sensation which seems so potent and significant and has all this gravity — what is it really made of?” We look at it, we look into its elements, and it falls apart into all the bits and pieces that make it up, and we see it’s not really a substantial thing. It’s just all these words, associations, feelings, concerns and ideas that fall apart, which then enables us to sink more fully into the deeper practice we’re doing.

Sometimes an emptiness practice like this is done as preparation for deeper meditation, in the sense that you actively deconstruct the self into its little bits and realize there’s no self in the way that we imagine. Though we experience our self as so meaningful and significant and potent, we can’t find it in one place. It’s a whole bunch of processes that are aggregated and flowing together.

We’ll do a little self-deconstruction to explore that. The idea is that in dissolving the self into the bits and pieces and the processes that underlie it, the self becomes much less of a distraction in our practice. The self is arguably the biggest distraction in meditation, and in spiritual life in general. What I mean by the self is the self-concept, the self-structure, the self-concern, the self-image — the story of self. So, this practice can be used to actively break that self-story up so it has less gravity in our practice. We can use this as a remedy in practice for anything that has a lot of weight to it and draws us in, distracting us.

GUIDED MEDITATION

I want to invite you to get into your meditation posture.

I mentioned one way emptiness practice is used as preparation for deeper meditation, particularly around the emptiness of self, is to remove the greatest distraction and obscuration to our practice and awakening, which is the self-fixation in the mind.

So I’m going to guide us through a little practice of exploring emptiness of self.

Again, emptiness in this context doesn’t mean there’s not a self. It doesn’t mean you’re not a person. It’s the idea that our belief in the self as a solid, unchanging entity is not accurate. What we really are is an interdependency of complex processes that arise in our body, in our emotional being, and in our minds, certainly, but also in the world around us, all the other people who influence us directly or indirectly, the social mind, the collective unconscious, all the energies and flows and cultural patterns that are all swirling around us and constantly changing.

We tend to experience ourselves as, “I am me, I’m this person, I believe these things and I have these values,” and we think we made them up. We think we are the way we are because of a choice we made or something we did, as opposed to realizing that we are simply part of this much greater process of interdependencies that’s just moving through time and space.

The emptiness of self practice is really meant to help us dissolve some of that solidity, some of that calcification around our fixation on the self — our self-concept, our self-image, our self-sense — to loosen it all up and get it more aligned with reality.

For this practice, I’d like to invite you to close your eyes. You can close your eyes for any of the practices, but some of them are also fine to do open-eyed. For this one, though, I suggest just closing your eyes. I want to invite you to bring to your awareness, your sense of self.

For once, I’m asking you to focus on yourself, to really connect to that strong sense of me, me in the world. Now we’re going to go on a little hunt or a little expedition to see if we can find where that self is and what that self is.

First of all, let’s look at our emotional sense of self, our felt sense of self. Let’s look into it in our inner eye, in our mind’s eye, and see what it is really made of. Is there a solid, separate entity there, or is it a collection of feelings? If so, what are they made of, the feelings and the sense of self? Is it just energy, a variety of different feelings clustered together? Allow that felt sense of self to deconstruct into its component parts. Is that feeling that you have your self, or is it just a feeling? Is there really a “self” there?

Allow this feeling to dissolve into awareness, and simply bring your attention back to awareness, to the consciousness that’s aware of that feeling of self.

Now let’s look to the body. Invoke that sense of self again, the sense of me, and notice the ways in which it tends to be anchored in the body. Now, let’s look around in the body to see if we can find the self. Is it in your chest, your torso, somewhere? See if you can find a sense of self that’s in your torso. If you do, just look into it. Is that a self, with all the things you think of as a self? Or is it just sensations in the torso?

Any time during this body scan when you find something that feels like a sense of self, simply look more deeply into it and dissolve it into its essential components. Now, scan your legs. Is there a self somewhere in your legs or your feet? Are there a complex of sensations that make up your awareness of legs and feet? Scan your arms and hands and shoulders, noticing that whatever the self is, it’s not your arm. How about your head? Surely the self must be in the head. So invoke your sense of self, and notice if it seems like it’s in your head.

Whatever that sense of self in the head is, look deeper into it. What is it really comprised of? Feelings, sensations, the sense of location. Just allow the light of awareness to break up that sense of the self in the head into all the little movements and processes that make it up, and then allow yourself to come back to resting in ever present awareness.

Now invoke your sense of self one more time, and notice if it is in the mind. Is the self a mental process? Is your mind your self? If it seems that way, look more closely at the mind and how the mind works. All of these thoughts that flow one after another through the mind – some meaningful, some significant, some meaningless, some repetitive, some conditioned, some creative – go one, to the next, to the next; and memory and imagination occur in the mind, but is there a self there?

Just look for your self and let the mind dissolve into its myriad component parts and processes, allowing yourself to fall deeper into awareness, into consciousness.

Allow yourself to rest again in the open, spacious, free awareness that you are, with no idea who you are or what you are, allowing the meditation to just happen naturally on its own, without anybody doing anything.

If anything arises persistently as a distraction from the practice, simply turn the light of awareness and attention toward that, penetrating it and seeing through it, allowing it to break up into its elements, and sinking deeper into presence in this moment.

Simply remain open to any invitations into depth, aware of any stirrings of a deeper being, and allow yourself to be drawn in. By not trying to make anything happen, you are being vulnerable to being moved by a mystery.

I want to invite you now to let go of any further technical intervention in your practice. Just allow yourself to rest in the momentum and notice the meditation that’s already happening in your experience.

Allow yourself to continue being present, awake, and available for this moment as it arises and falls into the next moment. Realize that nothing is an obstacle to being free and present. Nothing is an obstacle to letting go completely.

We Discover Fullness, Depth, and Innate Meaning

Through this practice, we discover that emptiness is not empty in any sense of being cold or void or lacking warmth. We discover that emptiness is fullness. As we let go of the surface of things, as we relinquish our fixation on the self and the mind and our feelings and the need to control this world, we discover an innate significance, meaning, depth and fullness that are non-separate from emptiness.

We don’t have to do anything to make that happen. We don’t have to do anything to make that the case.

Allow your consciousness, your mind, your whole being to function naturally, easefully, freely, without imposing any idea on it and without imposing any agenda on this moment. Let the moment be. Let the moment happen.

Allow yourself now to gently begin to ease out of the meditation.

This has been quite a journey into emptiness, from several different angles. I hope that it has helped to illuminate this practice for you and take you deeper into its meaning and essence.