Max Highstein Helps You To Relax You With Guided Imagery Meditation

5 Vital Things about Emptiness – empti­ness is scary, until it isn’t. Once you find it as a natural state, you can then simply live

So, last week I mentioned that I’d been in dialogue with my friend Jock McKeen, regard­ing the heart (a yin organ) and empti­ness.

My initial thinking was that if the heart’s "natural state" was emptiness, then surely a logical question was "empty of what?"

In I suggested that the heart "processed" thoughts and feel­ings (the Taoists believe that thought and feel­ing happen in the heart.) The point I wanted to make was that "grasp­ing" (obsess­ing) over our thoughts and feel­ings led to a "full heart."

My poor little Western mind came up with what I thought was a plausible tale. Until Jock got a hold of me.

The prob­lem with "empty of what?" is that much of Eastern thought is "about" one-pointedness, or . We’re so quick to label and judge — we want there to be "stuff" — we want to find our place in a universe of things.

We see all this stuff around us, so it must be real, right?

Here’s the key e-mail exchange:

Wayne: No rush on this – if the heart "wants / needs" to be empty, then empty of what? Jock: Empty of noth­ing …. nada. You phrase your ques­tion in terms of "some­thing" [referred to by "what"] … but it’s not a some­thing issue. Empty … that’s that. W: I think I made another leap here, given the premise that the heart is the "seat" of thought and feel­ing. J: Seat in the passive sense of being sat on … not in being anything … centre of every­thing, which is noth­ing, which is no place, since all is all … W: And still curi­ous – empty of?? J: no object. empty of noth­ing = no thing. The "of" simply doesn’t apply … J: Had a further thought …. empty of … every­thing

At that point, my mind did a back flip.

1. Reality isn’t

We each look out through filters. Think of wear­ing red sunglasses. If you wear a pair, every­thing appears red, initially, and then our eyes adjust, and we "fail to notice" the red tint. Add to this that every single person on the planet is also wear­ing sunglasses, and each person has their own, specific colour. What appears, initially, red to me, appears green to you.

We fail to notice (this idea is attrib­uted to R.D. Laing):

This "tint" to life explains simply why siblings, for exam­ple, remem­ber common events differ­ently. Different perspec­tives, differ­ent "tints." We often waste our lives trying to persuade others that our "tint" is the "correct" one. And think about what we say: "I explained it clearly and he just couldn’t see it."

2. Emptiness is

Some are scared, some are neutral, some are comforted. The reac­tion (see point 1) is personal — in other words, empti­ness isn’t anything — it’s not scary, or neutral, or comfort­ing. It’s not a thing. It has no char­ac­ter­is­tics. It just is. "Empty … that’s that."

3. Nothing and everything are two sides of the same coin

In Buddhism, there is one real­ity. The oneness is empti­ness, which is the locus of the 10,000 things. We tend to think "real" and "unreal," but such dual­i­ties are simply labels. The things we see, and hear, and feel, are "just that."

This is impor­tant. When I real­ize that the essence of life is empti­ness, I am (curi­ously) freed to simply expe­ri­ence. In the West, the term "flow" or "zone" has been attached to this sense of inter-being. When you are in the flow or in the zone, there is no time, no space, no sepa­ra­tion. The sensa­tion is of being water flow­ing along. Whatever is happen­ing is just happen­ing, elegantly.

I’m writ­ing this, para­dox­i­cally, to encour­age you to stop think­ing about this stuff, about "who’s right, who’s wrong" and get back to being empty of the neces­sity to judge. And rather than split off into another mind game ("Boy, this mind­ful­ness is sure better than…") to simply let your­self go. To expe­ri­ence with­out the colour commen­tary.

4. Be real

I’ll likely have a few pictures for you, from Down East. We have thou­sands of photos of past trips. Here’s the point: a picture is not what it captures. Real is real, pictures are pictures.

I see some people with cameras glued to their faces — so much so that their entire expe­ri­ence is framed through a view finder. So desper­ate are they to capture the moment, that they fail to notice that they are detached from the moment. They stare at the picture on the screen of their phone or camera, and say, "Wow! What a great photo!"

And what they are photographing goes un-noticed.

Real is engage­ment. The vista is mind-blowing, if I choose to simply see. The moun­tain is there to climb, the water to boat on or swim in. The people around us can be inter­acted with, touched, danced with.

Or, we can slip into our camera-like minds, and capture mental sound bites and photo opportunities. And pretend it’s real.

A cleint was contem­plat­ing ending a rela­tion­ship. She described the entire conver­sa­tion to me (both sides!) complete with a "feel­ing analy­sis."

I suggested she go home, and start the conver­sa­tion, and see what actu­ally happened.

She cried, and said, "That’s scary!"

And real.

5. Open your heart and leave it empty.

The riski­est thing we can do is make ourselves vulner­a­ble by open­ing our hearts. Our almost univer­sal lack of connec­tion is due to resist­ing inti­macy — hiding behind protec­tive layers. Crossed arms, tight legs, closed minds, and shrunken hearts.

Opening requires doing. You don’t need permis­sion, or tech­niques, or even "the right person." You can liter­ally open your heart anywhere, any time. You simply breathe, look into someone’s eyes, and as one of Darbella’s Qi Giong teach­ers puts it, "Smile with your heart."

You don’t need a collec­tion of , or really anything at all to be open-hearted. Just a sense of the "bigness" of open­ness.

You do, by doing!

Next week, I’ll have another go at this, but for this week, let me leave you with a poem Jock wrote, that reprises his comments, above:

What …

What is full? I am full What am I ? I am noth­ing

What is empty? I am empty What am I? I am every­thing

Well, short post this week, as we’re on the road (actu­ally, on the plane coming home.) Keep in touch!

Make Contact! So, how does this week’s arti­cle sit with you? What ques­tions do you have? Leave a comment or ques­tion!