Emptiness

where to find it, and how to fill it

When you think of the word “emptiness”, it seems fairly sad, depressing almost. A couple weeks ago I was at an “Introduction to Buddhism” course, and I’m sure you can imagine the general reaction that rippled across the classroom when it was announced that we would be discussing “emptiness.” But what followed was a concept that was far from sad and depressing — rather it was quite an insightful little piece of insight about life.

There are a few different types of emptiness in life, but as is the case with many of the things we discuss here, while it’s possible to view them as sad or unfortunate, I know that true pragmatists will always view them as opportunities to learn and make progress towards life goals. But let’s get back to the Buddhism classroom to start.

Buddhist Emptiness

In Buddhism, “emptiness” is an almost philosophical concept that practitioners contemplate and meditate upon in order to decrease their attachment to people and things, and to decrease their reactiveness. It is described simply as the fact that “nothing has an inherent existence”. It’s hard to get a handle on what this is without an example, but luckily a real world example immediately makes it clear.

Think about a cup, sitting on a hypothetical table in front of you. The concept of emptiness says that the cup isn’t a cup in and of itself, but rather it’s only a cup because of the label you assign to it. The cup itself has no properties of “cup-ness”. You can break it down into pieces you will find no single piece that is a cup. We only call it a cup because it’s a label that we assign to a certain collection of matter that we deem to be for a specific use. So the definition of a cup does not come from the cup itself, it comes from our perception of the cup. This is what is meant by saying that the cup “has no inherent meaning.”

Here’s another interesting related concept. There are actually no colors. Colors do not exist outside of our minds. We only see colors because our brain takes a piece of a small range of wavelengths of light and interprets each wavelength as a specific color. In reality, everything is black, and reflects light in different amounts. There is pigment, which is black, on everything, and based on the chemical composition of the pigment it reflects anything in between all (white) or no (black) wavelengths of light. The light then enters into our eyeballs, which relay the wavelength to the brain, which paints it with a color for us. The world is nothing less than a bunch of molecules floating around in the darkness, and our senses pick up on some of them, then our brain turns these signals into a colorful projection of the world. Isn’t that kind of crazy?

Emptiness is nothing more than the realization that the things we see are not of themselves what they appear to be to us. They are simply collections of atoms floating around which our senses perceive in a specific way and our language and cultural influences teach us to lend an identity to. That is to say, if an alien, or even another animal that is not a human, saw the same thing, they would see it in a completely different way. They might even see different colors. In fact, many animals can see infrared or ultraviolet, which we are unable to perceive (I wonder how they look?). And we’re not talking about only things, we’re also talking about people. Nothing and nobody has an inherent existence, only the labels and perception we project and apply to them.

So what does this mean? Well, once you realize this, and the more you think about it, the less invested and reactive you act. Someone could be acting really mean towards you, but under the lens of “this is nothing more than a floaty collection of atoms, and it’s only my own narrow perspective that is making me feel emotional about this”, it’s easier to stay calm and relaxed. When you think about the fact that things are much the same, it makes it easier to be less attached to them. Things change, and they come and go (as do people). On top of that, everyone sees them differently, and our own perspective is so narrow and untrustworthy that it’s not worth getting as worked up about things as we sometimes are.