Encountering Emptiness
- Eric describes his experience of Emptiness 10.16.21
This Emptiness cannot be understood as anything being absent, or missing. Emptiness is before anything existed.
This feels very difficult to even point at but the experience has been with me ever since. I notice a recurring shift from my normal awareness to a transcendent Emptiness. My personal self loses relevance as everything is experienced as empty. Today it also took the form of not being inside my body or not defined or limited by my body, no inside/outside difference, only emptiness. This emptiness beyond personal, everything arises as usual but from the ground of emptiness the me that I usually orient around is subsumed in emptiness along with all of existence. Could this be pristine Awareness, Rigpa?
I’m observing my usual internal dialog, (resisting almost constantly) when suddenly the view from Emptiness takes me beyond witnessing. Emptiness is aware of the witness and all existence from beyond existence.
As represented by ‘The gateless gate’, when we pass through or transcend the previous orientation the view and self is transformed, the orientation we left behind no longer defines or limits our experience. In observing the observer another gate is passed, a more pure elemental awareness is revealed, quite beyond the previous orientation, this is simply the emptiness from which all things arise. All the other levels of awareness are still available; deeply identified ego, Witnessing the ego, Presence beyond time, resting in Awareness itself, Emptiness is all.
Each new level subsumes the previous orientation. Each next level does not negate the previous level, it subsumes or includes and goes beyond. Each next level is more simple, more elemental, more singular and increasingly non-dual.
I am certain I could not have conceived this Emptiness from that which I have previously experienced and I wonder; what could be more simple or beyond this? Is the next level always unimaginable to the current orientation?
We are so absorbed and blinded by phenomenal existence that we are unaware of the emptiness from which all existence arises. Without Emptiness nothing could exist, Emptiness is primary. All existence is born from emptiness and we can know that directly (beyond concept), because we are that!
Pure awareness is emptiness, awareness precedes consciousness and all existence; all physical and mental phenomena. All existence is emptiness, we are emptiness itself. We are not apart from emptiness, there is nothing but emptiness.
Phenomenal existence is an expression of Pure Awareness, but not the only expression of Pure Awareness. We are aware of this reality but there could be others. Other expressions of Awareness could be beyond the limits we take for granted, beyond what we think of as possible, is that the source of yogic powers and miracles?
Before the big bang there was Pure Awareness, pure potential beyond existence and non-existence.
(Eric Sucher 10.16.21)
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- Eric describes his experience of Emptiness 10.16.21
This Emptiness cannot be understood as anything being absent, or missing. Emptiness is before anything existed.
This feels very difficult to even point at but the experience has been with me ever since. I notice a recurring shift from my normal awareness to a transcendent Emptiness. My personal self loses relevance as everything is experienced as empty. Today it also took the form of not being inside my body or not defined or limited by my body, no inside/outside difference, only emptiness. This emptiness beyond personal, everything arises as usual but from the ground of emptiness the me that I usually orient around is subsumed in emptiness along with all of existence. Could this be pristine Awareness, Rigpa?
I’m observing my usual internal dialog, (resisting almost constantly) when suddenly the view from Emptiness takes me beyond witnessing. Emptiness is aware of the witness and all existence from beyond existence.
As represented by ‘The gateless gate’, when we pass through or transcend the previous orientation the view and self is transformed, the orientation we left behind no longer defines or limits our experience. In observing the observer another gate is passed, a more pure elemental awareness is revealed, quite beyond the previous orientation, this is simply the emptiness from which all things arise. All the other levels of awareness are still available; deeply identified ego, Witnessing the ego, Presence beyond time, resting in Awareness itself, Emptiness is all.
Each new level subsumes the previous orientation. Each next level does not negate the previous level, it subsumes or includes and goes beyond. Each next level is more simple, more elemental, more singular and increasingly non-dual.
I am certain I could not have conceived this Emptiness from that which I have previously experienced and I wonder; what could be more simple or beyond this? Is the next level always unimaginable to the current orientation?
We are so absorbed and blinded by phenomenal existence that we are unaware of the emptiness from which all existence arises. Without Emptiness nothing could exist, Emptiness is primary. All existence is born from emptiness and we can know that directly (beyond concept), because we are that!
Pure awareness is emptiness, awareness precedes consciousness and all existence; all physical and mental phenomena. All existence is emptiness, we are emptiness itself. We are not apart from emptiness, there is nothing but emptiness.
Phenomenal existence is an expression of Pure Awareness, but not the only expression of Pure Awareness. We are aware of this reality but there could be others. Other expressions of Awareness could be beyond the limits we take for granted, beyond what we think of as possible, is that the source of yogic powers and miracles?
Before the big bang there was Pure Awareness, pure potential beyond existence and non-existence.
(Eric Sucher 10.16.21)
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Video: Eric encounters Emptiness (26 minutes)
- Eric and Tom discuss the experience and nature of Emptiness
- Eric and Tom discuss the experience and nature of Emptiness