Emptiness as Perception

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. So they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering.

The problem with all this, from the Buddha’s perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of “I” and “mine” that set the whole process in motion.

As a result, you can’t find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, Noble Strategy: Essays on the Buddhist Path, (pdf) p. 49.