Emptiness's treasures?
It is said, that the root of all addiction is the inability to sit with emptiness, not just the big hitters like alcohol and drugs, but the small ones, checking your phone a hundred times, playing with your hair or worrying and gossip. They are all activities to make you feel full, distracting your attention from the stillness, avoiding that moment when there is nothing to do except be, which considering all the effort we put in to get to a place where we can finally relax and stop working, doing, so it is strange that the moment we have it we immediately distract ourselves from actually being at ease. Emptiness have a force that repels us with the strength of a magnet, it pushes us back into thought and action, never letting us settle into it's presence despite it's attraction at distance, and it takes a strong force to overcome that final distance, it takes real work, time and practice, but once you cross that final boundary, you get to have a real intimate experience with yourself, when you sit with emptiness, you get to sit with yourself as you truly are.
Sometimes we forget how difficult it is to sit with no distraction, we can lay in the grass on a warm day, watch the clouds and lose ourselves in the act of observation following the imaginary bull cross the sky until it turns into a ship and sails away, we lose ourselves when we become one with a flow activity that completely absorbs our attention, we get into the zone. However being in the flow and sitting with emptiness are different beast, in the first we are doing and our emptiness is a by product, with the second both sides of the equation are empty, we are empty and our attention is empty, we stop doing and just are. Indeed meditation is divide between paying attention to a single object in concentration work and emptying your attention in insight work. Though they merge at the end of the path, you can have real stable attention but if you never pay attention to the emptiness by looking past the rising and passing of the self, you never get to enlightenment, and you can not have the insight of a lack of self if you can not stabilise your attention (at least momentarily), otherwise the insight is ready for you, you just never get to see it through all the distractions.
The mind is creative in the manner of it's distractions, it will take on any disguise, it will pretend to care or be beastly, harsh and unkind, it will lie, exaggerate, insult, give you an itch where ever you would least like it, complain, it is too dark, light, cold, hot, it will always seek a better place, not let you rest until you reach it and tell you everything that is wrong with it when you get there. The worst of it, is that you are a co-conspirator in this crime, you help it look for some else to do rather than sitting with emptiness, and because it is painful to get anywhere near it, whatever feeling you have whether conscious or subconscious will emerge in emptiness like sharks under calm water. To be clear there are no feeling in emptiness except for those that you take with you, but that is not to say that they are not real and serious, they are things to be deal with, you might need to heal from the past, need to integrate your shadows or have fears for the future, it is just not the place to deal with them.
Emptiness is the place where you drop everything, all the processes of life, all the planning, feeling, the normal stuff of life, this is where you get to change your point of view not the facts on the ground, it is like walking through a refugee camp of starving people and then complaining that your dinner is not hot in the evening. You do not get to change yourself with emptiness, you just get to be what you are, which is impermeant, uncomfortable (sometimes called suffering) and non-self, all the problem are still there, they are just not personal any more (at least that is the theory). Your relationship with emptiness does not change overnight, that is what practise is there for, to change slowly, one piece at a time, and it is the intention that is important combined with time of course.
Setting that intention gives you a chance, if only to notice how difficult it is to do it, that is progress, despite all evidence to contrary, most people think that it is the easiest thing in the world, they even have a word for it, being lazy, if only it was. If it just happened by doing nothing, everyone would be at it, you could not move for enlightened people falling out of tree and occupying every park bench in the country. No sadly, easy is not the word for it, it is one of the most challenging things in the world, so every time you sit, remember you are being a hero, you are facing the greatest fears that a person can have, your own personal demons and they are amplified in the emptiness, and they are all there, the whole wardrobe full of them, everyone you can imagine and some more that you have no idea you had and could have only emerged from a childhood fever dream. It is also not just for you, it is not self-indulgent, you are part of the ultimate passive army, the only one purely for the self-defence of humanity, we are not fighting demons or evil, we are fighting our lesser natures, we are working towards a higher consciousness for all of us and the benefit of civilisation.
When early people invented the fire, they did not just tame fire, they created the concept of fire, it became a tool, it was more than burning wood, it cooked, warmed us and changed our minds and physical brains, they became larger, quicker, capable of complicated language, concepts and the birth of stories around the camp fire that carried wisdom through the generations, and it did not make us happier, it made us more adaptable, increasing our chance of survival, it saved us from extinction. It came with problems, that is the privilege of complexity, it has more options, being able to hold concepts such as time, sharing of feelings and our experience of consciousness, tribal loyalty and co-operation beyond our nature instincts, a moral landscape of shared values. However it also cut us off from our basic nature and the reality of our existence, whilst giving us a higher appreciation for it, before language there was just being, react to what is front of you, and being able to lower your gear and existence at lower speed, allows you to love where you are, what surrounds you, you have a greater depth to each moment, because that is all that is there, there is no past, future, worries, regrets, fears for the future.
Outside of the current moment, there is just the emptiness, and you are able to be ease with it because you are empty, you bring nothing into that space with you, you just sit with the sense doors and you allow space for the moment to flower into exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less, there is no self to put in-between your view of the moment and the moment. It allows you to witness what is happening, the cause and effect of actions and the processes of the mind and body that arise and pass, you stop your reactions and instead act with precision, the right effort at the right time, and you act with mindfulness of the effects of your action, the future does not cause fear, it just guides your actions, and your past does not dictate your current needs and wants. The empty centre allows the world to spin around it, it can never be destroyed or lost, it creates the space for events to flow for your benefit and those you care for, you stop taking things personally, winning and losing is just a matter of framing, and it frees you up to be grateful for everything you have, even if it is your last breath. Nothing matters, and yet everything is important in the current moment, and if you are lucky enough to have control over what you are feeling, you get to chose to be joyful every time, as everything comes from nothing, you get to decide what you pull from it, so chose what is best for you, and it is all there in the emptiness.
