Your presence has no presence. This is the same for all consciousness. Having the presence means you have to let it go every second, and then you have no presence. It means everything from your past has been hooked onto you.

Whether you want it to or not, it will still hook onto every part of your feelings. One meditation technique is to let all these hooks release. Suddenly you will feel as though your body has melted; all the tension drains away and you become empty in the present. This technique will help you be free from your past.

Your sense of self is created by many different hooks, many causations, but new causations are always being created so you never can be empty. Even if you empty one part of yourself, another part of you is creating new ideas to fill the space. You can’t become empty this way. Buddha teaches that you can achieve emptiness not through releasing, but by not creating.

All the tension which you have already created from the past is inside your body; you have to pull it out from the roots. Be in the present, let go of everything you care about, everything you’re concerned about. This concept is easy to understand by mind, but difficult to understand by heart. Even if you understand by heart, it’s difficult to do it by instinct and intuition.

So if you look around at people, you’ll see that everyone is always who they are: there’s a character, a role that is always present. Your character is made up of all your hooks from the past creating the feeling of ‘I’: that ‘I’ is an illusion.

Trying to fool yourself that you are becoming more empty will create more hooks; you will never reach pure emptiness. However, if you can become empty, you will exist in the present, no longer the result of your past thoughts, feelings, and actions. You will become a pure observer, with no tension from the past or the present. No tension from yourself. No tension anywhere.

And when you observe, you become aware of everything that makes you tense; there’s no need to hold it, so you can let it go. Eventually, you become sensitive enough to feel that your muscles are without tension, every part of your body becomes light, even your bones become joyful and your mind feels calm; then emptiness will appear. Emptiness will never come if you try to force it.

Yet emptiness is always there. It’s all the illusion and ego that you create which stops you from discovering it. When you’re empty you observe and feel everything: there’s no fear, there’s no boundary, there’s no judgement, but there is knowing. You can know that something is blue in colour, but you make no judgement that blue is either good or bad. That’s called pure observing. Empty.

Practising Emptiness

Any tension in your mind, feeling in your emotion, in your desire as wanting to be empty, in your physical feeling heavy from gravity without joy energy to make you light, will appear. Nobody can act. The light-sensitive awareness, you cannot pretend.

Mental tension, emotions, desire to be empty, and physical weight without joyful energy… things which make you feel heavy are constantly appearing. Light, sensitive awareness cannot be faked.

You’re not empty if you feel:

• heavy
• sleepy
• bored
• unsure
• doubtful
• wonder
• mental tension
• confidence
• suffering
• tension around your eyes
• tongue not placed delicately behind your teeth
• parted lips
• corners of mouth falling down
• a fake smile with egotistical intention
• pulling your lips up with muscle power
• desire to hear what is being said around you
• eyebrows pulled together
• the passage of time
• impatience
• curiosity.

You’re not empty if you don’t feel:

• aware of what is being said
• sensitive and joyful
• your body is light and sensitive
• aware of your centre being light and straight
• delicately aware of your fingers.

This is the first meditation discipline. You have to learn to observe if you fall into any of the above situations. When you can purely observe that you’re not experiencing any of them, pure emptiness will appear by itself: you don’t have to search for it.

You have to practice this discipline a lot – just as you practice Tai Chi a lot – then your body and subconsciousness retains a memory of that light feeling and pure emptiness. Once you have that memory, you can recall it at any time. Being empty, being sharp but not serious, being certain but not aggressive, understanding people without judgement, seeing through them without fear… all this will appear and become a sharply powerful awareness.