When I wake up in the morning, I often experience a profound sense of emptiness. It’s been that way for the last few years.
It’s not emptiness in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist emptiness can be taken as absence of a real separate self inherent in reality, or absence of experience of being a separate self. (Absence of identification as a self – or with images or words which tends to create identification as a self.)
It’s not emptiness in an ordinary psychological sense, meaning an unfortunate sense of lack of meaning or richness in ones life.
It’s more of an “energetic” emptiness. An absence of movement. A deep silence and stillness. It scares my mind still, since it projects it into my human self and the future. It creates images of an inability of this human self to function in the world, and complete lack of initiative. I often take time to experience the emptiness, and sometimes meeting and feeling the fear. Thanking it for protecting me. Thanking it for it’s love. Finding love for it, as it is. As soon as I get up and start doing things, this sense of emptiness goes into the background. (Although I can still find it, even now.) As soon as I can find genuine love for this emptiness and the fear that comes up in response to it, something may shift. I suspect I may notice everything as this stillness more and throughout the day, and also that what’s noticing is the stillness itself.
Without knowing, I suspect that the Buddhist emptiness may refer to two things. One is the absence of a real separate self anywhere, and the realization of this. Another is the deep stillness which comes into the foreground as all there is. The stillness recognizing itself as all there is. (This may be what’s happening in the mornings these days.)