simple awareness

taiyaki

what do you think? hate or love?

Yacababy

I like it strictly as a beginner it helped me to better understand the no self. Thanks

Yacababy

It also sparked a great convo between my boyfriend and I :clap:

taiyaki

Ha I am glad it helped. It's an interesting perspective on "spirituality" and how we can directly look at emptiness.

when we look for this "i,my,me" or sense of self. it's not really there.

the point of zen is to study this nothingness/awareness. not intellectually but by directly experiencing it during meditation and all aspects of our lives.

ThailandTom

It is still really hard for me to get my head around the concept. It sounds so simple, 'there is nothing', well obviously there are things, things exist, but what are they?

taiyaki

don't view it as a concept. don't try to understand it using your mind. the mind will never be satisfied.

look inside yourself. is there anything? there is nothingness. not the "idea" of nothingness. but that is the label we overlay onto whatever that is. it has no name or form. it's like space and there is a stillness. but again these are words. it's a place where words don't go.

so you can look. then you describe it using a word. but then you have to ask yourself. is it the word i just described it as?
and then you realize that it's where thinking/concepts cannot touch.

but the mind will try to make sense of it. it will try to look for something. thus you have to keep looking.

there's a saying in zen. to feel from the neck down. we get stuck in our heads most of the times with ideas. but it's really important to feel from the neck down. feel what the nothingness is like in our bodies.

and lastly it's important not to judge or interpret the nothingness. most people interpret the nothingness as a negative thing, but in reality if you look at the nothingness. it isn't really anything. it just is nothingness.

hope this helps.

ThailandTom

Thanks for the attempt, but it doesn't really. I just don't get it lol. I have never thought og emptiness or nothingness as something negative though, I am aware this is often a misconception.

I guess I just have to keep looking, be it in meditation or in every day life. But I will find nothing..? If I look inside myself, (assuming you mean physically) there is matter which is in constant change. If I look into myself in the conscious sense, then there is consciousness. I understand I am not independent from the world around me, but according to this there is nothing there anyway. I really am missing something, how can you gain insight into nothingness if you cannot use your mind to do so...

pegembara

I like Adyashanti

Mental Silence

fedaalis

how can you gain insight into nothingness if you cannot use your mind to do so...

It's not something you can use your *thinking* mind to gain insight into. But I would consider awareness part of the mind, and consider that experience is the product of awareness. You have to experience emptiness. From there you can "talk" about emptiness, but really when talking or thinking about it you are always going to corrupt it somehow, because you have added something that doesn't need to be there.

ThailandTom

Can anybody supple anything from the suttas for me and others on this board referring to emptiness? What did the buddha speak of when it comes to this? I really am struggling with this specific concept, but then I am supposed to not see it as a concept and think of it as nothing. How does one contemplate emptiness...

SherabDorje

Tom- there's the Heart Sutra, but it's Mahayana, and would therefore not be considered by Theravadins as the words of the Buddha...

Cloud

@ThailandTom, The Buddha taught that everything is "empty of self", which is basically just another way of saying not-self (anatta). Mahayana's usage of "emptiness" is as another word for the nature of life itself. It is combining impermanence and not-self to say "this is how life is", meaning everything changes and is ownerless. Everything is part of this "emptiness" and all impermanent "things" arise from the emptiness (to change and become parts of other things later).

There's an acorn. Now there's a tree. Now there's wood. Now there's a chair. Now there's a broken chair. Now there's ash from the chair being burned...
It was never any of these things! We just keep changing the label or the combination/form, it's empty of any kind of self nature... its only nature is to change, just the same as us. That's life. That's emptiness.

Personally I think trying to understand emptiness from sutras is going to be more confusing. Try to see that everything you are, everything anything is, used to be something else (or part of something else)... and something else... and something else... always changing, never quite stable, not ever truly a "thing" except as whatever we've agreed to call some temporary formation/combination of "stuff".
Like the chair. The chair didn't exist until we made it a chair and called it a chair, right? So when it gets scrapped, it's no worse off than before it was made, right? Same as us! Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, only changed. This is the unborn/deathless reality the Buddha spoke of.

Cloud

@ThailandTom, As a side note, I think it's not the best idea to try and understand "emptiness" all at once. When you understand Anicca/Impermanence and Anatta/Not-Self, you understand emptiness; so work on each of those first!

More importantly, don't beat yourself up if you find it hard to grasp. It's not one of the easier teachings; it's emphasized because it's the goal to see the emptiness, that's where all the teachings are leading you... so don't feel like you're stuck and can't move forward, it's a process. Like I said work on Impermanence and Not-Self (it's usually Not-Self that people do get stuck on, think that's why stream-entry is marked by the dissolution of "self view").

ThailandTom

Thankyou cloud, more recently I have gained a good understanding of impermanence that I can relate to life and often do. It has helped a lot actually, also to know that many things are beyond our control.
Anatta is something I have been looking into a lot lately also, making slow progress of sorts I guess. Like I have posted, I realise I am not independent from the world and there is no permanent tom, but that is as far as I have gotten so far

Thanks though people

Cloud

@ThailandTom, Yeah impermanence is the easier one and in modern scientific times it's not too hard for us to grasp; everything we see changes. Not-self involves changing our perspective on ourselves, on what we are, and that takes a lot more effort. It's not as easy to see what goes on inside our own heads, or to understand how the mind works. We have to undo our conditioning, let go of what we've been taught and look directly at what is there.

It can be scary to think there's no separate person, but I'd rather know than not know, so I try to be as honest with myself as possible. They say honesty is the best policy, and I say that's especially true concerning being honest with yourself!

ThailandTom

you mean with your nonself sorry, I had too!

Yea I have tried to speak to my mother about how we have been so conditioned in life to think we need that house or that career to be happy, all fueled by capitalism. But she says in the ideal world yes, buddhism works, but she lives in the real world. I tried to point out that is a world we have made and provides this negative conditioning.

I shall delve into my mind starting 2moro, I am not scared that I do not really exist separate from anything else or that there is no soul, I am just terribly curious and wish to understand emptiness. Yet, the words of Ajahn Chah remain in my head, if we strive to reach enlightenment, we will never get there..

Cloud

@ThailandTom, Right! Don't strive to "be" enlightened, as if it's something special that you're trying to "get", or to define you. Strive to see the true nature of things as they are, including yourself.

The goal is the cessation of suffering through understanding reality. To see that you are nothing special, not to try and be something special. The two are mutually exclusive.