It’s all been said, there’s nothing left. ‘Emptiness’, isn’t it?
Only then, in this mysterious silence, do you know what it was all about and what everything meant.
Or in art: no miscellaneous objects, whether they three- or two-dimensional, coloured or moving, are important. Well, of course they are, but they are there to give meaning to what is between them, to what is not: the shadows, space, air and emptiness.
Nor in architecture is the meaning in the buildings, houses, walls. Oh no, rather what is between these walls and what is going to happen in these spaces? How it will be to live, work, spend time there, just to be? How will they look, how will you go into them, pass through them? The meaning is in all that is not: rooms, emptiness, hollows and gaps.
Laozi:
Spokes keep the wheel together.
But the hole in the centre
makes it useful.
A vessel is formed from clay.
But the hollow within it
makes it useful.
Or, for example, there is a meeting, council, conference, sitting, presentation. Somebody talks, someone takes notes, and there are settlements, an agenda, moderator, manager, a tight timetable full of events, saturated data, information…
But then there will be a break. And then, during this break time, if nothing formal or matter-of-fact is happening, just at that time, if no one has to do anything any longer, to speak, talk, perform – just then, the most important events happen.
People interact with each other, comment on situations, make jokes, exchange thoughts, realise, understand, reach conclusions and conclude agreements and ties. The room is open, empty and it inspires.
Notice the emptiness.
Mind the gap.
What’s important is what isn’t.
A very good mind-development practice or meditation is to look at the emptiness, focus on emptiness, wherever we are. We see only what we are looking at, and we look at what has some significance for us, which offers interest. But we can also look in a different way and see other things.
For example, some bushes, a forest, a passage of leaves, branches, stems, where there is nothing interesting. But you can look and discover all that’s between them. This empty space, where there is nothing, but where there is air moving, which moves everything, where there are flies, mosquitos, bees, butterflies and birds flying, where the spiders are weaving their webs, the hum of insects and various smells, spreading pollen grains and mushrooms, where leaves and seeds are falling.
Right there, in that emptiness, in that air, is life; it’s real, it’s exactly that emptiness that unites everyone and everything. You also participate in it with your every breath, breathing in part of it, breathing out your part. You can’t live without breathing – no one can – and that’s why everyone is in connection through the air, through what you don’t even notice.
When we breathe, we smell, and it’s not insignificant. All the smells that we cycle through have been sent to someone, come up somewhere, and spread, including those that we may not feel, but that will affect us in one way or another. We are totally defenceless in the face of what we breathe in; we have not the slightest idea of how this affects us, how it changes our lives and decisions, our behaviour, our moves, how the almost unperceived smell can make us want something, do something, move somewhere, get away from somewhere.
But also vice versa. With everything we breathe out, we give the world a signal of what’s happening to us, what’s in us. Everything in us is flowing in our blood and getting into our lungs and being breathed out of there. We can’t hide it. Dogs and many other animals feel and understand our breath. Our loved ones are inhaling what we have breathed out; we are in touch with them, we all are in touch, and the air ocean is a common home for all of us.
And it’s not just smells. Through the air, through the same emptiness, voices are spreading. And not only sounds of the woods or the songs of birds, but also sounds with a very clear meaning to us – things people say and the words and phrases we hear – which can make us react in very involuntary ways.
In that same emptiness, the light, which lets us see everything that fills this emptiness, also lets us see the letters that make up the words and statements that have meaning for us, which may again make us react.
There come also touches from the same emptiness. We all feel clothes on our skin all the time, but there are also hugs, handshakes, pats on the shoulder, pokes, kisses, lashes, foot strokes, various tastes, variations of excitement, chills, tickles, desires and more.
All this comes from that place which is not, from the same emptiness that we sometimes notice.
Maybe it’s all empty.
Why the truth?
‘Not all people need to know all things,’ as one of my good friends and companions always loved to say, and this still comes to mind when someone speaks about honesty, frankness, pure spirit of the soul, absolute trust, and things of this nature.
Speaking the truth can cause much more suffering than not speaking. Silence about some things, or even gentle lies, may be much more appropriate and polite.
We know thousands of things that really aren’t our business. Someone’s birth secret, adoption, the personality of their past intimate partner, someone’s serious illness, etc. Sometimes somebody trusts you with secrets, and you have to promise that you won’t tell anyone about it. Same story.
But oh, how you would like to share such things. To discuss it with someone and, of course, get the promise that he or she won’t tell anyone about it in turn. It’s easy to see how secrets spread like that.
The media has, of course, greatly amplified this mentality. The private life of every single person is laid out for all to view and review. Pretty creepy. And the justification is still that people want to know…
Well, maybe that’s what they want, but there must be very few things that they necessarily need to know.
Better to live and let others be unaware than burden ourselves and others with unnecessary knowledge. Ripping off the curtain, getting the naked truth may well sell newspapers, but what does it give and where does it lead? We know where it leads: suspicion, distrust, uncertainty.
We need to use knowledge. Useless knowledge only burdens, stirs us up and hurts.
We don’t need to know all things, we can’t understand everything, and we can’t keep up with everything all the time. It’s not possible anyway. This is an illusion, a dream, temporary and transient.
Always, something remains unknown, concealed, and it all changes all the time. There is little benefit to such knowledge.
In fact, there are very few things that we really need to know, that need to be understood and considered. You don’t need to know how many crimps there are on a beer bottle cap or what is the capital of Burkina Faso or how many ångströms in the wavelength of a yellow line of cadmium. This is useless knowledge to most people.
Nor does it matter what you need to care about or worry about. It doesn’t matter what you need to have, what you want or achieve. You don’t have to find out who you really are, what your destiny is or who you might have been in a previous life, what your special qualities are or where you really belong. These are questions of faith, perceptions, wishes and desires; they all arise from self-importance, wanting to be somehow special, necessary and right. We can live, we don’t have to worry. There’s one life, to live.
This is all fine, but surely there are people who also need some secret knowledge, who believe that things are not all the way they seem, that in fact there are conspiracies and secret