Empty is the world

“It is, Ānanda, because it is empty of self and of what belongs to self that it is said, ‘Empty is the world.’ SN 35: 85


M: All you need to do is to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.

Q: Within the field of consciousness there is your body ...

M: Of course. But the idea "my" body as different from other bodies is not there. To me it is "a body" not "my body", " a mind", not "my mind".
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Q: When you say: clear and empty, what do you mean?

M: I mean free of all contents. To myself I am neither perceivable nor conceivable; there is nothing I can point out and say: 'this I am'. You identify yourself with everything so easily, I find it impossible. The feeling: 'I am not this or that, nor is anything mine' is so strong in me that as soon as a thing or a thought appears, there comes at once the sense 'this I am not'.

Q: Do you mean to say that you spend your time repeating 'this I am not, that I am not'?

M: Of course not. I am merely verbalizing for your sake.

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You are not of the world, you are not even in the world.

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Once you realise that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from outside, as you look at play on the stage, or a picture on the screen.

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Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and it's contents, not even knower of the field.

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Discover all you are not. Body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, time and space, being and not being, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract you can point out to is you.

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Do understand it clearly - whatever you may perceive, you are not what you perceive.

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As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase ...

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You are nothing that you are conscious of.

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Realise yourself as away from all that can be pointed out as "this" or "that". You are unreachable by any sensory experience or verbal construction. Turn away from them. Refuse to impersonate.

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It is your idea that you must be something or other, that binds you.

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See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all strength at your disposal against the idea that you are namable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that.

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All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you don't think yourself to be " this" or "that", all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused be desire and fear can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a life-time and volume of a body and this created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.

M - Nisargadatta Maharaj

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 I sit down in a room, quiet and half dark and watch the act of breathing - the bodily sensation of air touching the tip of the nose: I experience sensing the bodily sensation at an interval of space. I can place the bodily sensation in space as sensed from the direction in which I am. But when I follow that direction back and look for the "I", then I am no longer there, but in another place, I have no place in space. I see and sense space and the "things" in it from a place where I am not. Space is complete without "I" and there is no room for "I" in space at all. This I call the inner vertigo.

Nanamoli Thera