Read time 6 minutes. Empty Awareness is a stand alone article in our Who Am I series.
Our last lesson on self-inquiry ended with a warning. The question Who am I? is powerful, but it is not meant to become a lifeless mantra, repeated without presence. Nor is it meant to be dissected endlessly until we obsess and overthink. The practice requires balance—a Goldilocks balance, not too much or too little—struck through a mindset of empty awareness.
We have examined the ego’s identity-center and ways to diminish its grip, shifting awareness toward Tao. We have explored poetry and language, which may have seemed a tangent, yet all threads converge here. For even the most basic practice of composure is a way of inviting presence, which itself is a step toward realizing who we truly are. To enter these waters, we turn again to the luminous words of David Hinton in China Root.
Empty awareness and transformation in harmony
Tao is transformation. This truth cannot be overstated. To accept change and remain composed within it is to emulate Tao itself. Everything arises not from nothing, but from absence.
“Absence and Presence are a single existence-tissue: the 10,000 things are not born out of Absence, never separate from Absence.”
At first, this may sound outrageous. We often say, almost casually, “everything is connected.” But Hinton insists that absence and presence are one fabric. To see this requires shifting from intellect to poetry, from analysis to direct experience.
Think of the yin/yang symbol. It reminds us that opposites are entwined, dependent, and always in flux. Nothing is purely yin or purely yang. All creation is transformation. Absence and presence merge in this endless exchange.
When does nothing become something?
“Absence and Presence are a single existence-tissue.” Absence is emptiness; presence is form. Form cannot exist without emptiness. Emptiness is not lack—it is potential. It is the fertile ground from which form arises, and into which form dissolves.
Every form carries within it the essence of absence. The yin and yang rise and fall in degrees, meaning wanes as meaninglessness waxes, yet both remain one circle. This is the true oneness of things: transformation itself.
Empty awareness and a poetic life
If meaning and meaninglessness are one fabric, then empty awareness is a way of living beyond preconception. Hinton writes of “…replacing meaning/thought with the elemental beauty of meaninglessness….”
By loosening the grip of interpretation, we encounter life directly. Experience comes unfiltered, free of the weight of labels or judgments. This shift frees us to see the world with clarity and simplicity, to feel harmony with nature and cosmos, to discover presence as it truly is: immediate, direct, alive.
Life at the hinge of Tao
Hinton tells us that empty awareness opens to a life lived “at the hinge of Tao.” Existence is dynamic, never fixed. There is no true center. Tao is perpetual flux, and so to live at its hinge is to move fluidly with its transformations.
We no longer interpret every moment through rigid thought. This helps us to cease approaching life with expectations and preconceptions. So we go from rigid to dynamic. We appreciate impermanence not as loss, but as beauty. At the hinge of Tao, we witness life unfolding with lucidity and acceptance.
The meaninglessness of meaning
“Even when words are used, they are not used for what they say, but for what they enact.”
Zen uses words not to explain but to point toward empty awareness. “For the meaninglessness of meaning is manifest in the way thoughts emerging from a generative emptiness are seen as the same… process as the 10,000 things emerging in the empirical world.”
Thoughts and emotions, too, arise from emptiness. If left alone, they dissolve back into it. Our work is not to dwell or cling, but to allow. In doing so, we accept thoughts as part of Tao’s great transformation, rather than building them into the scaffolding of a permanent self.
“It means accepting the movement of thought or life as part of Tao’s great transformation, rather than clinging to a permanent self, a stable and enduring center of identity that sustains itself in turn by clinging to a constellation of assumptions and ideas.”
Life is but a dream
Here the inquiry returns: Who am I?
“Indeed, to see things, to mirror them perfectly, requires that we forget the names of things, forget the names and ideas that package reality in our human constructions. Then things seen go mirror-deep inside consciousness and simply vanish there, eluding us perfectly as they become us, no self anywhere.”
Empty awareness dissolves everything back into consciousness. In truth, nothing was ever apart from it. Consciousness is Tao manifest as the dream we call life.
“Done dwelling on emptiness, we fathom the origin of emptiness.” To fathom emptiness is to glimpse our true nature. Asking Who am I? without chasing an answer is the same. Awareness shifts to Tao. We “die while alive.”
“Let all the delusions of a lifetime go, all the understanding and insight; and slowly, little by little, nurture the simplicity of occurrence appearing of itself.”
Absence shifts to presence, presence back to absence. Inner and outer are one fabric. “Soon, inner and outer are a single tissue… and you’re like a mute in the midst of a dream.” The false self falls away. The true self shines forth.
Explore more:
I believe that the theories and discoveries of science provide hints or pointers for us and our practice and understanding. Consider this article from Quanta Magazine regarding the physics of nothing. Scientific theories, particularly in quantum physics, suggest that particles can indeed appear out of “nothing.” Indeed, as I have just theorized in this lesson, emptiness is teeming with potential. “Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence.”
Another interesting aspect of this article is the idea that all of existence is composed of a collection of fields. Our teachings tell us that consciousness is not something that exists solely within you or within your mind. It is a vast field, theoretically as vast as the universe itself, within which everything that we experience appears.
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