emptiness

I think Dan Brown said somewhere that a good synonym for 'empty' in meditative contexts is 'mere construction'.

For example, practicing 'emptiness of self' is equivalent to noticing that the self is a construct, or a fabrication.

Another take, from Eknath Easwaran's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: "we never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system." It isn't possible to experience a 'thing in itself'; experience can only ever consist of mental representations, 'mere constructions'. (the mind contains the world)

NameRedacted defined emptiness as the observation that a thing is made up of parts that are themselves not the thing. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, but no amount of hydrogen or oxygen will quench your thirst. Similarly, when we break down the experience of the self we find that none of its components are inherently 'self': at finer levels of analysis, no-self becomes the reality.

NameRedacted makes the connection that the mental construction is the sense of 'wholeness' or 'thingness' that we assign to a set of parts.

One might see emptiness as relating to the realization that the map is not the territory. I think some people would take it a step further and deny that there is any meaningful way to talk about a 'territory'; all that we can ever experience are maps.Gregory Bateson: "We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. … Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum."

For something to be empty means that it is in a certain sense optional. We are saying that it is an artifact of a certain way of constructing experience. But the process by which we construct our experience is ultimately under our control. So awakening to the idea that everything is empty implies the profoundly liberating (yet ultimately very mundane) realization that everything is under our control.

I like the analogy of constellations in the night sky. We see stars, but we imagine lines between them. We tell a story that there is, say, a lion, a hunter, a bear, maybe a whole world of gods and goddesses playing out grand cosmic narratives. But when you break the lion into its component stars, none of them have lion-nature. The lion was never real; the lines were never real. In reality there are only the stars, just pure points of light,The Buddhist analogue to the stars might be something like mind-moments of experience, infinitesimal bursts of pure awareness, but it's probably best not to take this part of the analogy too seriously. and we can draw whatever lines we want.

NameRedacted describes the experiential aspect of emptiness as "the more you investigate it [a thought, sensation, etc], the more it will just be this thing that dissolves in front of your gaze. Everything's like that. It's only when you're not paying close attention that it seems to be an object. But when you zoom in, it's like it turns to pixels and then you zoom in on the pixels and there's just space between the pixels, there's nothing there."