Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal  For people who have experienced it, what does emptiness feel like? Speaking from the Buddhist perspective.
I think I've stumbled onto what emptiness is, by realizing that I cannot experience it, because emptiness is not an experience. And by realizing that, I seem to actually stumble onto emptiness -- I reach this kind of non-experience experience, which seems like it is nothing and outside of space/time.
However, the state doesn't persist and I have to focus on it in order to get there. I think with practice, the state will stay, and my identity will probably also shift to this emptiness. Also I felt my normal experience "merging" with this non-experience, which I think the heart sutra comments on, with "form is emptiness, emptiness is form, etc."
Is this non-experience experience what emptiness is like?
Any pointers, or information on how to correctly practice? |
Well, words can only ever be signs pointing to a more ineffable reality, but I will offer them, distorted though they may be.
Consciousness is what we are. It is eternal, and it is the container for all potentiality.
I know many teachings say there is a beyond consciousness, but from my perspective there is not. There is only awareness of existence -- there is only "I AM". I think what many teachings refer to is simply a deeper form of consciousness which is non-dual awareness of awareness. Within that awareness of awareness is EVERYTHING that COULD potentially exist. It is undifferentiated in this state however, as all things and their opposites together reveals a sort of "emptiness" or "celestial silence". This is the backdrop of existence -- the absolute.
But "emptiness" is also a poor verbal approximation, because, as I said before, it contains everything. In this oneness, the potential and kinetic are unified. They are one in the same. Duality can only occur if a division is created. And from this state of eternal unchanging-ness, this can only occur through choice, and when it does occur, is an illusory refraction of the light of consciousness. This illusion in no way affects the absolute, it remains unchanged and eternal.
When I experience what I refer to as "emptiness" (or rather, the relative symbolic approximation of emptiness, as the real thing would be to wake up from all illusion), I feel a sense of bliss and infinite creative energy, and I feel that no "effort" is required for anything to "be", it just all become automatic in a sense.
Based on what I've experienced thus far, I believe when one "wakes up" and achieves permanent "emptiness", this world no longer even appears to exist. The refraction of consciousness forming this pattern of illusion fades away. Of course, to others still en mired in this organic illusion, everything still seems the same, but the body of the individual who "awakened" is no longer conscious of this world. Of course they will appear to be, but they are so inextricably connected with the whole that all wisdom that emanates from them is a completely automatic response -- effortless in other words.