Release leads one to experience emptiness. Buddha Shakyamuni, Patanjali, and Zoroaster each taught about the natural state of existence and of Awareness. Each approached it in his particular way, yet each spoke or wrote of the essential condition or nature of all in existence and of Awareness itself. Meditation practice leads everyone to the same experience – that of emptiness, the infinite pure unlabeled and non-owned or non-personalized quality of something as it is.
The most direct way to experience what the enlightened ones of Earth and humanity have experienced and lived from is the full easy release of the breath. As one’s breath is consciously being exhaled (not slow not fast), the experience is one of divestment, of letting go and letting, and of an opening with no need to understand or describe what one is opening to.
With the full completion of the breath, one experiences a momentary emptiness: a duration of gentle ease, fullness, contentment, and voidness of mental constructs. As one breathes in again, one simply attends to the ease which is void of mental constructs, attends to the experience which needs not be labeled, and discovers that this is the natural state of things, people, places, events, emotions, and thoughts: they are empty of the personal spin that we put upon them.
This truth of being is so easy to experience and yet it rocks our world and our perceptions to the core. The first unsettling consideration is if mental constructs or personal emotions are “bad”? No, of course not. Is emptiness better or good? No, that would be to make emptiness a thing and then make it better as an idea. We would be personalizing and labeling again. Instead, the experience – like all others in meditation training – teaches through experience itself. We experience that, in fact, the natural state of affairs, people, and things is free of our concepts, preferences, and labels.
Downloadable podcast: Entry: Release and Emptiness