How The Eastern Concept of “Emptiness” Can Help You Live a Fuller Life

Find peace in nothingness.

In the West, feeling empty is viewed as a negative condition. Emptiness is often associated with dark terms like depression, apatheia, or nihilism. In Asia though, things are a little different.

The Chinese word for emptiness is kōng (空); devoid, the void, the space between breaths, between lines, between lives. In many Eastern religions, emptiness is associated with meditation instead of negativity. Śūnyatā, the teaching that all things are barren of intrinsic meaning, is a core tenet of Buddhism.

The Taoist sage Lao Tzu also waxed philosophical on the useful nature of nothing at all. He wrote,

“We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.”

If any of the above points sound confusing, that’s because attempting to write about nothingness is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself upon itself. Inherently mind-bending. It’s like trying to describe the taste of water, to catch morning-fog in a glass or to explain what an orgasm feels like to a virgin.

One can only get the vaguest idea of the thing, rarely the thing itself — but I will try my best nonetheless.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the Eastern concept of “Emptiness.” If applied, this concept will not just help you find inner peace, but paradoxically, help you live a fuller life.

Events Are Meaningless By Themselves

The idea that external events have no inherent meaning is the most mind-blowing thing I learned recently.

Here’s what I mean. Say something “bad” happens; you get fired from your job, lose money in the stock market or your girlfriend of three years breaks up with you.

These events, terrible though they may seem, don’t mean anything by themselves. Our minds attribute the concept of “Good” or “Bad” to these events, and our minds are fallible. Instead of looking at events in an objective manner, our ape-brains often exaggerate the facts and distort the truth. This can cause us tremendous anxiety.

In a poetic twist of fate, learning how to control our own mind — the very thing that upset us in the first place, is the very thing that can heal the hurt. Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that,

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

This thought is echoed by the psychologists of the present. “Cognitive Reframing” is a technique used in therapy where patients are taught to look at things from another perspective. This technique helps patients look at the same event with different points of view, and has been proven to help improve their self-talk and behavior. We are, after all, made up of the stories we tell ourselves.

Our circumstances can be likened to the borders of a coloring book. We have to play within its boundaries, yes, but at the end of the day, it’s up to us to fill in the blanks with the hues of our own choosing. At the end of the day, it is up to us to decide what the eventual story of our life will look like. Light or dark, bleak or sunny, grey or golden — what will the colors of your existence consist of?

You decide.

You Are Not The Player Of Life — You Are The Observer

You are not your thoughts — you are the observer of your thoughts. This is a subtle but vital distinction you need to make in order to lead a more fulfilling life.

You are not angry. You are feeling angry. You are not the emotion of sadness itself, you are merely feeling sad. It sounds cuckoo, but research has shown that “affect labeling,” the act of putting feelings into words, actually helps decrease brain activity in the amygdala and therefore reduce stress. Another separate experiment found that the mere act of acknowledging one’s own thoughts as fleeting mental events resulted in healthier eating choices, and oddly enough, even healthier sexual appetites!

The ancients have known about these benefits since time immemorial. Divorcing your Self from your thoughts and emotions is a core tenet of Buddhism, and more recently, the Mindfulness movement. Some great ways to get in touch with your observer state are:

• Reframing your language. Practice saying phrases like “I am feeling angry”, instead of “I am angry.”
• Meditate often
• Induce flow states through work you enjoy, or exercise
• Psychedelic experiences
• Being in nature (e.g long hikes)
• Vipassana retreats
• Long stretches of undisturbed time spent with yourself

Personally, I’ve had meditative experiences that, I kid you not, felt like out-of-body experiences. I was terrified, but this experience also helped me understand that my physical body is nothing more than a husk, Maya, an illusion. It helped me accept that I was molded out of the same ethereal stuff that makes up the animals, stardust, the Universe. I felt, in short, ultimate connectedness.

I came to understand that the highest level of thinking is not knowing everything, but knowing the essence of Nothingness itself. The undefeated samurai Musashi wrote,

“Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to see things in an all-encompassing sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom exists, principle exists, the way exists. Spirit is Nothingness.”

By knowing what exists, you will intuitively know what does not. And by knowing what does not exist, you will, counterintuitively, know what does.

And when you have developed the skill to separate your true self from your fleeting thoughts, to be an observer on the ebbs and flow of life, you will, instead of falling into the pits of despair every time your mood changes, be one step closer to enlightenment.

Empty Your Mind To Perform Under Stress

The legendary boxing trainer Cus Dámato also thought that emptying one's mind can be a very helpful thing.

Cus thought that the hallmark of a consummate professional is someone who can control or even suspend his emotions when needed. He used to tell a young Mike Tyson that,

“There are no emotions in this game.”

To paraphrase Cus, a professional can come from his mother’s funeral, go straight to the stage and still give the best performance of his life. He could be dying and still rise to the occasion. A perfect example is Freddie Mercury nailing “The Show Must Go On” in one take while he was ill with AIDS. The same thought is echoed by Arnold Schwarzeneggar, who in his bodybuilding days said,

“When I’m training for a competition, I can be what some people call inhuman, but really I think it’s more like being superhuman.”

This sounds like a cold thing to say, but some jobs simply require the suspension of feelings to get done. This theory is not limited to entertainers or athletes. Think about our front liners; the paramedics performing CPR to save lives, the surgeons giving emergency heart surgery, the (good) police officers running straight into the line of fire to serve and protect.

People think that fighters fight best when they are angry, that singers, actors and musicians perform best when they are high on emotions. This cannot be further from the truth.

Studies show that in high-stress situations, we perform when we separate ourselves from our emotions. Like how a cup is only useful when it’s empty, it is only when we empty ourselves that we can become a conduit for our art, transcend our mortal shell, and perform at the highest levels.

So learn to separate yourself from your emotions when needed. Find that empty spot inside you, the spot beyond malignant or benign thought, beyond all feelings and the touch of men. There, you will find a state of flow, a flow untroubled by the trappings of logos nor ethos. There you will find the peace you need to get the job done.

This is how you can use emptiness to be the master of your emotions — and consequently your life.

Death Is Nothing To Be Feared

This is our last and most important point.

Death is the shadow, the great unknown, the ultimate emptiness. It is also the one singular guarantee of life, and therefore nothing to be feared. Epicurus, the premier philosopher of happiness, wrote:

“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?

Alan Watts, the British philosopher responsible for bringing Eastern philosophy to the West, agrees. Watts didn’t believe life has a beginning nor an ending. He believed that the body dies, but that your energy is immortal, and upon your passing will survive as part of the energy present everywhere.

Sounds, once again, like new-age hogwash, but the first law of thermodynamics is literally “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just transformed from one form to the other.”

Lao Tzu also concurs, writing:

“Attain complete emptiness, Hold fast to stillness.

Understanding the ordinary: Mind opens.

Mind opening leads to compassion, Compassion to nobility, Nobility to heavenliness, Heavenliness to Tao.

The Tao endures. Your body dies.

There is no danger.”

According to these wise men, the oblivion that we so fear is merely an absence of consciousness. And is that such a terrible thing? Think back to the time before you were born, when you were floating in a vast ethereal Nothingness, no thought, no form, no feelings; nothing to be feared.

But enough with the doom and gloom. Regarding the Afterlife — who really knows? The only thing we can do, then, is to make the best of the one thing we do know we have — the here and now.

So instead of obsessing over death, live! Live, laugh, love, and be merry. Take chances, live your life the way it is meant to be lived; with joy and wonder and gratitude, as one eternal Present.

That’s how we triumph over death and nothingness. That’s how we live life full and ripe, a life worth dying for.

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