Meditation on Emptiness

Understanding Emptiness: A Core Buddhist Teaching

Good morning and welcome again. A few weeks ago, as I was wrapping up the Six Senses series, I asked if anyone had any topics they wanted me to address. Jim Infantino, in his mischievious way, said "Emptiness!". So this is my take on one of the most important topics in Buddhism.
The concept of emptiness is relatively easy to understand. I'm going to start there with a few visual aids to illustrate the points, but I don't think anyone will have a hard time with the concept.
Presentation
Link to article about particles: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-particle-20201112/
Close presentation with something like "The hard part is not understanding these concepts. This is reality as far as we can tell. Space and matter interpenetrated. The hard part is internalizing the implications of this. What does it mean to us that there is no one single bit of reality that we can rely on? That our concepts of solid and not-solid are just a matter of perspective?
To contemplate this, we have to turn to our experience.

The experience of emptiness is something that we are all familiar with, but it's rare and fleeting. It's that feeling of connectedness, of integration, of oneness with the world. Holding ourselves back, the feeling of separateness and disconnection, disappears. That experience is called a thousand things, but one name for it is "Emptiness of Self/Emptiness of Other". There is no separation. Our imagined boundaries dissolve. We find that the shell of our identity and our thoughts about the world are fundamentally empty, and it's ok. It's warm and vibrant. It's a world full of possibilities and potential. It's not that our concepts don't exist. But that they are not as solid as they seem.

In some ways, the path of Buddhist meditation is stabilizing that view. Soaking in it. Marinating in it the way you would soak a tough piece of meat overnight in soy sauce. We study concepts to intellectually grasp and test the ideas about reality. We contemplate the ideas to see if they ring true with our experience, not just our conceptual mind. And then we practice to deepen, integrate, and stabilize our understanding of reality.
Emptiness really can't be described. So we are going to practice it.

For deeper study of the philosophy behind emptiness, see Notes and Research on Madhyamaka.

So let's do a meditation on emptiness.
Let go into relaxing with the fullness of your awareness. Rest in the present moment. Not contract. Not fixate. Start to see the fluidity... the space between all these things that we see are solid.
"Their nature is not part of our conceptual framework"
What we think about things is completely irrelevant.