Emptiness
Meditation
by
Daniel P. Brown
Author
of the book Pointing out the Great Way
”Now
bring to mind your usual sense of self, your personal identity. You
can evoke this and use it as an object of reflection. For example I
would evoke Dan, Danness, and look squarely at Danness. The thing
about self-presentation is that you can evoke it and you can observe
it... So evoke your sense of self and observe it. Notice any personal
characteristics you associate with that sense of self. Familiarise
yourself with the target of your search... And now take your
awareness... And let your awareness roam thought the regions of your
body. See if you can find any thing in itself, any independently
existing thing that is that personal identity, anywhere in the field
of bodily experience. You have to actively search... And the more you
search anything independently existing, any thing in itself, the more
what you search for will be seen from your awareness as unfindable.
Emptiness practice... is in the unfindability of the target... If you
think you find the independent basis for that sense of self, if you
find any thing that's substantial, roam around in that area and break
it down to smaller units of analysis... OK, now evoke your sense of
self, your personal identity once again... Familiarize yourself with
the target of the search. Evoke your personal identity and notice any
personal characteristics you associate with that sense of self...
Now, take your awareness and let it roam through mental content. Do
you find any independently existing thing that is that self?... As
you continue to search at some point there is a shift in your basis
of operation. What remains right here is the awareness itself, no
longer obscured by the empty construction of the personal identity.
You open up to the level of awareness that is cleaned up of the cloud
of self. And you start operating from that instead of operating out
of self-mode.”
The
recording can be found from this
page, under: ”Meditation on Insight Training or ”Emptiness”.
