X Ahau

I can understand how this can be confusing: You look into an empty jar, for instance, and see empty space. Then, perhaps, you think that you understand what emptiness is, and you try to intellectualize this understanding and apply it to the real world around you. Or, you might try to perceive the empty space in the environment the way you perceive it in the jar.

But the perception of true, resplendent emptiness is very different from what you see in that empty jar. The perception of emptiness, on the human scale of things, is much more visceral and tactile.

For instance, you hear the emptiness of the space around your body; you sense the emptiness within the body. You hear these as clearly and dynamically, as you would hear someone speaking, or hear any other sound.

And, when you hear sounds, you hear them traveling through space to reach your ears. You perceive them entering your ears; and, in some cases as with deep base sounds, echoing inside the inner ears within your head.

It is in this visceral experience of space that you hear sounds coming though space with an almost echoic quality as you hear them emitted from the sending object, and then travel through the emptiness of the space between you, and then reach your ears - where you hear your ears hear them (And, this is just in the context of sound, mentioned here as an example of what one of the senses would perceive).

This very vivid experience of space, again on the human scale, can perhaps be perceived a little bit by concentrating on it with your attention. But, if a human were to try to grasp and process all of this information in the rapidly dynamic time frame in which this is happening, it would forever be trying to catch up to the next “frame” of reality, in which the next set of realizations would already exist.

By the way, this human scale of the awareness of emptiness is just barely getting up to the doorway of experiencing the Great Emptiness of true Thusness.

The path to emptiness is through clarity. Trying to know emptiness by concentrating on emptiness is like trying to catch light with your hand. All you see is a reflection. Sure maybe it can be done, I won’t say that it can’t.