Posted inHenry's Messages

Message from Henry: Emptiness

April 28, 2021

… emptiness allows all… it loves all. It generates all.

 If emptiness is really “empty,” why does tasting it generate such intense feelings of relief, beauty, gratitude and compassion? In terms of the old Buddhist formula, emptiness and compassion are inseparable: why? Why does the experience of emptiness – if it’s really empty – connect us to all things? Why is it the ultimate wellspring of joy, energy, peace, and of a sense of infinite uncompromisable love?

Firstly, you can’t see emptiness as if from a separate vantage. You can only discover that you are it. Take one step out of it, and it disappears. When we see it, we see that all things are it, and so are we. This discovery alone is often overwhelmingly beautiful, healing, relieving, and can alter the entire course of our lives in a benevolent way.  It’s like finding an intrinsic beneficence just underneath the surface of life, and suffusing all our life, all there is.

But secondly, we are all things. Emptiness unites all. But that has a flip side too: which is that emptiness allows all. Meaning, it loves all. It generates all. So it is the very heart of diversity. All the multiplicity of diverse things, all the variety of peoples, beings, creatures, are both united in emptiness, and liberated into existence by it, so to speak.

Message from Henry is from our April 26, 2021 Newsletter
Image: Stairs-Man by Tumisu, from Pixabay.com
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