Urban Sadhu Exploration December 2024
Oṃ pūrnam-adah pūrnam-idam pūrnāt-pūrnam-udacyatepūrnnasya pūrnam-ādāya pūrnam-eva-vashishyateOṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ – From Yajur Veda and Īśopaniṣad
Meaning: Om. That (the outer world) is whole with Divine consciousness. This (the inner world) is whole with Divine consciousness. From the whole, Divine consciousness is manifested. From the whole, when the whole is negated, what remains is Divine consciousness, infinity. Om, peace, peace, peace. – Interpretation by Austin Sanderson
If you are a writer, you can visualize words on an empty paper or Word doc. Actors imagine the action of a play filling the empty stage. Painters can see a painting on an empty canvas. Professional de-clutterers see the clear living space under the clutter. Professional gardeners can plant a flower garden that is a lot overgrown with weeds. And sculptors of marble can see the sculpture within the giant block of marble. So are the page, the stage, the canvas, the living space, the overgrown lot, and the block of marble empty or full?
Spiritual traditions around the world speak of emptiness and fullness. This is a nihilistic concept that does not belong to any specific religious tradition but can be found in all types of esoteric teachings. In Sanskrit, "fullness" is pūrnam, and "emptiness" is Śūnyatā. Emptiness and fullness, at first, seem to be a complete contradiction of terms. How can something full be empty or something empty be full? Is full different from empty, or are the two the same?
However, fullness and emptiness are not independent ideas, they are co-dependent: one concept informs the other. To understand fullness as a conceptual idea, we must understand emptiness and vice versa. Fullness cannot be removed from emptiness, and emptiness cannot be removed from fullness. Empty and full are relative. Fullness and emptiness are interchangeable representations of the unlimited Universal Consciousness that ends a falsely perceived dualistic state of being. In true emptiness, the dreams and identification of forms that are projections by the ego personality onto the material world are diminished to nothingness and emptiness. In true fullness, the self-centered "me, myself, and I" personality that always feels it is lacking and needing is engulfed in an all-encompassing awareness of attainment and abundance.
Great spiritual teachers have always used the metaphor of fullness and emptiness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is supposed to have said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matthew 5:1-3,6). Here, poverty and thirst are figures of speech that allow spirituality to occur – emptiness allows for fullness. Later in the same sermon, Jesus says, "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks," which implies that if we are filled with this higher spirituality at the heart center, we will speak and act with unconditional love and compassion (Matthew 12:24). The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi expressed a similar thought on emptiness and fullness when he wrote, "I saw you [the Divine] and became empty. This emptiness is more beautiful than existence; it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes, existence thrives and creates more existence!" In Rumi's poetic vision, out of nothingness comes fullness; this playing with the mages of fullness and emptiness is a play on words that express an ecstasy of spirituality. Lao Tzu, a 5th-century Chinese Taoist philosopher, once said, "Become totally empty. Quiet the restlessness of the mind. Only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness."
Even in the physical world, when we assume a space is empty, it is actually full. Think of the times you have gone out hunting for a new house or apartment: the realtor may show you an empty space, but that space is filled with oxygen, a colorless gas with an atomic number of eight. The same is true of our universe: at first glance, the cosmos may appear to have vast empty spaces, but in fact, the heavens are not empty at all. Any point in outer space is filled with gas, dust, light rays, radiation, winds full of particles from stars, cosmic rays, electric and magnetic force fields of energy. What appears to be empty is quite full of things we can detect through closer observation, but space is filled with two things we can't detect: dark matter and dark energy. Even if we could take a cosmic vacuum cleaner to the universe and remove all of this, there would still be three things within the void we could not remove: vacuum energy, the Higgs field, and the spacetime curvature. We are left with the question: are emptiness and fullness only a perception, and are all spiritual traditions simply asking us to shift our perception?
Once perception shifts, we start to think, speak, and react differently. Emptiness fills itself with the fullness of awareness, the fullness of emptiness itself into the vastness of probabilities.
For yoga to happen, we must empty our minds of avidya or "ignorance," the mind full of clutter and attachments to this and that. Then, we can make space for the fullness of Self-realization, which fills the mind with vidya or "correct knowledge." Yoga is a state of being empty and full simultaneously.
Austin Sanderson, Urban Sadhu
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