What Was Left Out

I can’t quite leave this alone. I realised after writing about emptiness in the section on meditation and wisdom that I had entirely excluded anything personal and also about the experience of it. All the juicy stuff that makes a concept, particularly a very abstract concept, real. So here is the corrective …

I think I avoided the notion of emptiness for about thirty years. I knew it was at the core of the Dharma but it seemed too thinky, too overly complicated to get into. At that time my understanding of my buddha-nature - if you pressed me - was more of an image and a vague feeling. Something light and warm in the centre of my being that was not personal but rather something shared with everyone else including animals. Almost a bit soul like but not my soul. Then I had a rude awakening with this when I started an MA in Buddhist Studies. I realised that my professor and the other students, not only didn’t share this understanding, they didn’t even consider it Buddhist. It was a kind of quasi-New Age Hinduism, a product of lazy thinking about the Perennial Philosophy, or at best an heretical misunderstanding. I felt quite put out and spent the next two years searching for those Buddhist teachings that supported my original idea - and indeed they do more or less exist. What my teacher and fellow students understood was something rather scary. That when we investigate ourselves there is actually nothing but changing and interconnected sensations, emotions and thoughts that kind of whirr away like the background noise of a fridge and when these finally come to an end, the utter silence that happens when the fridge noise stops, is nirvana. It’s a nothingness, an complete absence, a flame that is snuffed out. Not at all like my warm light of buddha-nature.

I also learnt about the Three Marks of Existence that the Buddha talked about. These are impermanence, not-self and unsatisfactoriness. The three factors that are how things really are. More recently I have thought a great deal about these and have realised that the key one is impermanence. Not-self, the absence of an unchanging self in all the whirring noise, is really a subset, it’s an inevitable consequence of impermanence. And unsatisfactoriness is what we experience when we have the delusional expectation that things that continually change can provide an unchanging happiness. Emptiness, at this early stage of the Dharma is not that important, it just means that we are empty - without - a permanent self.

Had I really thought about emptiness I would have realised that I'd obliquely received my first teaching on it when I was just twenty-two. A friend at that time told me she had visited a Tibetan Lama and requested instruction. He told her to go away for a week to discover what was the colour of her mind. She came back and said green. Given her vulnerability to jealousy this was kind of right but what the Lama had hoped for (I imagine) was that she would say it had no colour. It also has no sound, taste, smell or sensation.

This looking into the mind thing to find out what’s there, in Tibetan Buddhism, is called a ‘pointing out’ instruction. It’s incredibly important because it's the first step into the most profound level of the teachings, Dzogchen and Mahamudra. However, when I heard it the first time it made absolutely no sense to me and kind of bounced off as I immediately dismissed it as non-sensical and therefore irrelevant. Pearls before swine. Looking into my own mind I couldn’t find anything there, it was just a kind of blank space, neither dark nor light, and doing so created a faintly weird sensation. What I didn’t know then, and what took probably twenty-five years to finally get, was that this weird experience was correct and that having it we are then invited to rest into it and continue doing so for as long as we possibly can. (Which at first is generally for no more than a second or two). I also missed the utterly obvious. This nothing there experience - the emptiness of the mind - was something I could be aware of. It wasn’t just an unconscious empty space, awareness pervaded it, was mixed with it, was one and the same as it. It was a kind of unfathomable mystery but it was real, a something there that is a nothing there at the same time. Now ‘emptiness’ became a sort of experience, a spacious awareness that when glimpsed seems to have no edges and extends in all directions. Something that flows out everywhere and when rested in sometimes makes the face feel like it has a blissful quiet grin. (At least in my case). It’s all very odd and of course impossible to really describe.

So where does this leave us? Emptiness is a horribly tricky and complicated concept made no easier by the many brilliant minds who have defined it over and over again in different ways. Some quite similar and related but others entirely differently. These are available for study but to do so is quite a journey. I personally have done this but there is a danger that if it becomes too thinky that we will miss the important thing that emptiness has to be personally experienced. It’s what all Buddhist meditation is about one way or another because when we experience emptiness it leads to awakening and this, end of the day, is what all the hooha is about. I would also add that it’s important to see as soon as possible what our emotional blocks around understanding emptiness are. I wasted many, many years without even recognising they were there and looking back I just wish someone had pointed out their existence sooner. In the Dharma we frequently talk about the clouds of ignorance that obscure the clear sky of buddha-nature. Some of these clouds are our thoughts and emotions around the concept and experience of emptiness. The making it a ‘thing’, the unconscious closures, the ways of thinking that make it manageable at the cost of the transformative scariness that is the essence of it. While we can never fully understand emptiness with our cognitive mind, we can with this mind notice places of certainty, places we defensively cling to, and seeing them relax and let go into not-knowing. We might then be more able to recognise the essential thing, that all these thoughts and emotions about and around emptiness are no more than the expressions, movements, of the empty space of awareness itself. This is it. There is nothing else.

NW. With thanks to Philippa Vick who pointed out to me this morning the absence of this blog.  9 December 2025