Emptiness

Two of the most common terms we hear in the spiritual community “emptiness” & “enlightenment”, millions search for enlightenment but very few find it, if in fact there was anything to find in the first place (its empty remember). Is there a transcendent reality for the enlightened, does grasping for enlightenment deliver a unique state of freedom or existence as a reward to the enlightened one ?. Are there two different worlds that the enslaved and enlightened inhabit, enlightenment is nothing more than seeing the world from a different perspective with a new way of reacting to it. Nagarjuna says "Whatever is of the extremity of freedom and the extremity of the life-process, between them not even a subtle something is evident." , they are no different.

If they were simply declared to be identical, then there would be neither the experience of suffering nor the experience of release from it. Although the cycle of birth-and-death and nirvana are not different, then, they are nonetheless experienced differently and are not simply one and the same.

The cause of this whole sphere of confusions and misunderstandings about the nature of freedom is the human tendency to speculate and theorize. Were there not this tendency, then one would never perceive transitory phenomena as enduring in the first place, which would prevent one from developing passionate attractions and aversions regarding phenomena. Without such passions, the dispositions, graspings and cravings would not develop, and thus suffering would not come to be. Without these passions, one would not create the concepts of eternal life, identity or difference, or infinity of the universe, concepts which Buddha repeatedly refused to discuss. The notion of emptiness is an antidote to this chain, that’s all emptiness is an antidote to grasping for unrealizable concepts . For, "when all things are empty, why [speculate on] the finite, the infinite, when in reality both the finite and the infinite and neither the finite nor the infinite? can be conceptualized or understood. Why speculate on the identical, the different, the eternal, the non-eternal, both, or neither?" its all compulsive grasping its just empty it doesn’t matter what your level of intention to be enlightened, the greater the intention for anything the further you are from the ground of being.

The great eastern philosophies provided a scholarly enumeration of the elements of reality (dharmas)?, the basic causal processes observed to operate between the elements (pratyayas)?, the exact constituents of the human personality and consciousness (skandhas and ayatanas)? and, finally, they draw out the relations and correspondences between all of these factors. They very seldom speculated on things that could not be understood because the great sages saw this as a futile endeavor, they were just thought of as empty of meaning.

As I said before its this tendency to conceptualize the unexplainable, the epidemic born of the 20th century that’s the root cause here, and it is this negation of the conceptualization of the unexplainable that will allow one to see through the illusions of dualities and grasp the " true nature" of things, the tathata.