While everyone in this world strives to get somewhere and become someone, only to leave it all behind after death, you aim for the supreme stage of nothingness. Live this life as light and empty as the number zero. We are no different from a pot. It is not the decorations outside but the emptiness inside that holds us straight. Just like that, it is not what we aspire to achieve but the consciousness of nothingness that keeps us going.
Nothingness and emptiness are enigmatic notions, which are not so easy to handle in daily life. The whole world seems filled with objects, and even when we look up, we find something there called the sky. How should we see or hear nothingness, and what should we do with it?
Only when we start to speculate, something changes: When leaving the atmosphere around our planet and move out into space, there is nothingness till we reach the moon or the next planet. Physicists tell us that atoms mainly consist of empty space. This can cause scary feelings – we standing on our comparably tiny planet speeding through empty space, and far and wide nothing and again nothing? Or how the simplest things cling together when they contain so much emptiness, and what about this emptiness inside ourselves?
Yet these are questions which just lead us on a trace without a chance to find answers for our spiritual path. The trace lies in the irritation which can be caused by such speculations. They break the cycles of activities and busyness which fill up our days in order not to encounter emptiness. They show us that the world in its self evident way is just a tiny extract of existence. And also, that all which seems so evident to us, is just a combination of information delivered by our sensory organs.
When we follow this trace, it leads us to search beyond our daily world. How is this world behind the world of our phenomena? When there is a world full of things here, could it be that the world behind it is empty?
The first form in which we internally meet emptiness is boredom. It often appears when we leave the busy rush of daily life and we have no demand to meet or no appropriate entertainment is available. Also a lack of creative impulses due to exhaustion from the necessities and pressures of business life can be the root of boredom.
We suffer from the length of time which expands ahead of us. We desperately look out for a bridge to an area with safe ground. Just now “I do not know what to do with my time”, and hopefully someone will come to save me from this emptiness, or hopefully an event will occur so I can forget about this emptiness because it offers me something to fill it. We live by filling the outside with contents, tasks, stimulations and surprises.
When there is just our inside, for instance when we close our eyes and direct our listening and feeling towards the inside, then at first we usually find only the objects from the outside world, thoughts from and about the contents of the world buzzing through our heads, from one end to the other. When we stop to be irritated by that and wait for the end of the storm of thoughts and images, we start to feel quietness, emptiness between the thoughts. This nothingness shows up without any action from our side, and the experience is pleasant and fine. It does not want or need anything from us. It shows us that we are here, and that we can be here without having to be different as we are. Everything is right and good as it is. What a relieve, what a liberation can spread out. This is the life force, which we only can find in emptiness, in the in-between, in silence. It is pure, because it is not obliged to any contents or programs but because it only serves the ongoing stream of life.
The emptier we get inside, the easier becomes our life. Worries about things which have not yet happened, burdens from the past which have already been overcome, vanish. Things to do get done without mentioning, and the times in-between stay free for the nothingness.
The things to do become less important, because the focus is on the doing itself and not on its effects. By plunging into nothingness we learn that successes we are striving for, are only adornments of our lives which have nothing to do with our essence. Equally, our failures and disappointments are insignificant; they are the less well accomplished decorations. Of importance are those experiences which we accompany with our full and clear consciousness, and such experiences do not bear any label. They are fugitive and do not leave a trace. By this, they give way to the next experience.
Maybe the whole of our existence is like that – we can see ourselves as fugitive phenomena on this planet who at some point in time will vanish in the void, and then new appearances will take the space until they as well enter the void to give space …
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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