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Guided Meditation: Dwelling in Emptiness; Dharmette: Emptiness (4 of 5) Full Emptiness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 06, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Dwelling in Emptiness

Hello and welcome. This week, the topic is a very important one in the span of Buddhist traditions: emptiness. Often in ordinary English usage, emptiness is considered to be a very unfortunate thing. We speak of the emptiness of a meaningless life, empty of value or meaning. It is kind of depressing. But in Buddhism, it is the opposite. It is actually an inspiring, enlivening topic—a topic that gives meaning, purpose, and understanding in a particular way.

It is a strange, paradoxical topic because the word "emptiness" is an abstract noun. It is not pointing to something concrete, but it is also not pointing to just a conceptual or abstract idea. It points to a way of being aware where awareness doesn't grab ahold of anything. The knowing, the seeing, and the feeling are a little bit akin to coming into a great high mountain vista. You can certainly look at the mountains and scenery below and the clouds above, but you can also look into the empty space above. Or maybe at a night sky—just lots of emptiness. The eyes see but don't fixate on anything. They see, but don't take something as an object. The eyes float freely. It is very relaxing.

In this way, space can be the object, or silence can be an object, or perhaps stillness. It is something where the mind doesn't latch on, hold on, or stay. The emptiness allows the attention to stay very soft, relaxed, and open because it doesn't fixate. It doesn't pick up and it doesn't put away. It is aware of the space between things. It is aware of the space just beyond the edges of our thinking.

This space is always here. In a room where there is lots of space, maybe a big cathedral or large cavernous place, all the space and openness is inspiring. It is there, but you are also knowing other things in this area. You stay relaxed and soft. All the great space in the big room creates a context where the mind doesn't latch on. It floats or takes it all in, and it provides a sense of expansiveness.

Assume a meditation posture. Sometimes the posture is a great support for meditation; it can evoke certain things. We can sit in a confident posture. We can sit in a posture where we feel rooted and connected to the place we are in. And we can sit in a posture where we feel like we are inhabiting our full size—we feel like we are big from the inside out, independent of our size compared to others. There is space for the chest, not to puff it up, but so that we fill our space. We are large. We are certainly gigantic in relation to an ant, a squirrel, or maybe even a newborn baby.

Gently close your eyes. As we breathe in, the expansion of the rib cage, front and back, is an expansion into the fullness, the largeness of ourselves here and now. Feel that expansion and contraction of the rib cage without thinking about it, without commentary or judgments. Feel the sense of expansion with breathing in, and settling as you breathe out.

As you exhale, relax the body. Appreciate any relaxing you do that leaves an absence, some small beginning of an absence of tension or tightness. As you exhale, there is the disappearing of the inhale—the absence of inhaling. As you inhale, there is the absence of the exhale. This sense of absence is a place where the attention rests. There is nothing there to fixate on in the exhale. There is no fixation on the inhale because it is not there. You might have a sense or feel for this absence of inhale as you exhale. There is nothing to hold on to. No inhale to hold on to as you exhale. As you inhale, no experience of exhaling is left to fixate on, feel, or focus on.

As you exhale now, relax the thinking mind. Soften and quiet your thinking. If you can let go of your thoughts, in the absence of thinking—absence of particular things you thought about—the mind doesn't fixate. It doesn't pick up what is now gone.

Sitting here quietly, there is space around you and within you. Maybe with eyes closed, there is no boundary to that space, no edges. Imagine space going outward into the universe. Space is mostly an absence. Even though there is a presence of things, there is also the vastness of space where the mind does not attach or cling to anything. There is nothing there to land on for attention. Allow the mind's attention to feel, to sense what it is like to be aware without landing anywhere or picking anything up, without focusing or fixating.

While you are aware in a simple, relaxed way of your breathing and your body, a non-fixating, non-clinging awareness floats on top. Everything floats in emptiness, absence, and presence.

Whatever you are focused on, concerned with, thinking about, or oriented towards feeling and sensing, it is surrounded by space, stillness, and silence. Beyond the edges of thought, below it, and above it. Let your attention include space. Emptiness is a way for attention to be soft, relaxed, and easy. It is like being in a vast, large, silent cathedral—a sacred space informed by all the space. Nothing to cling to. Vast emptiness.

Whatever the mind knows, whatever the mind is aware of, whatever it feels, it hangs in the space of the mind. Almost like a dream, almost like a hologram. It has no substance or weight. The experience might have weight and substance—what you see, what you think about. But if you get intimately into how it is known in the mind, how it is thought about in the mind itself—the vast spacious mind, the knowing, the registering, the deep way in which sensing travels into the mind—everything is insubstantial, soft, and empty. Empty of substance, empty of solidity, empty of a certain kind of existence. Just like a hologram is and is not, so the ways things are known arise in the mind. Is and is not.

In that emptiness of the mind, there is freedom. Freedom of not clinging, landing, or picking anything up. In the absence of clinging fixation, there is a vast open space for awareness, for attention, and for presence that can be brought into the world, into our meetings with others. Vast emptiness in which full presence without clinging is possible.

May this vast emptiness—empty of clinging, empty of contraction, empty of making things up—allow us to just be present in a relaxed way. May it be the means by which we bring our love, our care, goodwill, and compassion into this world. May it be how we hold the whole world in our hearts. A heart that is big enough and empty enough for all the suffering and all the joys.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Emptiness (4 of 5) Full Emptiness

Good morning, or good day. Now we are on the fourth talk on the topic of emptiness. The last two days have been oriented around two of the three aspects of emptiness.

First is how things are empty. The primary thing that the tradition sees is that things are empty of self. They are empty of this solidified, essentialist, permanent, ongoing, fixated, or stuck way of there being a self projected onto the world or onto oneself. Things are also empty of our projections in and of themselves. If we just live in the projections, concepts, and ideas the mind makes, those are just concepts. They are empty of solidity, substantiality, and a certain kind of real existence. They are and are not. They don't have inherent essence or inherent continuity except by how they are manufactured or caught in the mind.

Then there is the emptying. The emptying of our attachments, our projections, our concepts—especially our concepts of self that we overlay and impose on ourselves and the world. This idea of emptying in meditation is largely about emptying all the complications we have, all the ways in which we make things much more busy, involved, and complicated than they have to be. It is a process of simplification. As things are simplified, tension, stress, and agitation disappear. They are replaced by calm, peace, and subtleness. The more the mind is stress-free, the more the heart is free of agitation, the more there is a feeling of space, silence, stillness, openness, and emptiness. We are emptying ourselves.

Then there is emptiness. Emptiness is an abstract noun, meaning it doesn't point to anything concrete. In ordinary English, an abstract noun is more like a concept. In Buddhism, emptiness is certainly a concept, but that is just the surface or abstract idea of it. It is not exactly something that is or is not. It is an absence.

It is not the absence of meaning or purpose that is depressing—the ordinary English idea where saying "I feel really empty" means feeling depressed. That feeling is an absence of meaning, purpose, or what in the past has filled life and made it wonderful. A lot of people feel spiritually, emotionally, or interpersonally empty in ways which are debilitating. That is not what the Buddhists are talking about.

They are talking about something almost the opposite. It is almost as if the ordinary ways that we might feel empty in a discouraging, depressing way occur because we are still caught in the world of concepts and ideas—that things have to be this way, and now they are not the way they are supposed to be, and therefore I am discouraged. But we can begin loosening up and letting go of a life based on concepts, ideas, emotions, meaning, and purpose. This is not to reject all those by any means; some of them are important parts of human life. But we can discover that the mind can be empty of the activity of signifying, making things up, holding on to things, and relating to things as if they are so important that nothing else matters. There is a way in which the mind can soften, relax, and open.

A deep way in which this becomes very clear is the world of difference between this bell as I hold it, and the idea of the bell. The bell has some weight; right now it feels cold, parts are smooth, and parts are a little bit rough. It has a certain substance and weight. I am not going to argue that the bell doesn't exist, but it exists in some way. However, if I close my eyes, I have my memory, my idea, my concept of the bell. I can think about the bell when I am not in this room. The concept, the idea, the memory, the thought—that is empty of inherent existence.

This bell can melt and no longer exist, and I can still have the idea of the bell. If I was really attached to the bell, that attachment could be triggered by the memory. Or I could be aware that it is only a memory. It is only a thought. The thought itself has no real existential existence; it is empty of existential existence. Do I want to hold on to something that is empty of existence? What does it mean to hold on to it when there is nothing there to hold on to? It means that there is a lot of tension around nothing. A tightness grasping around nothing. It is like a hologram in the mind. You put your hand into a hologram and you end up with nothing.

All these thoughts and ideas are empty. But what is important is not that they are empty. What is important is how that teaches us how to be aware without clinging, without holding on.

In the Theravada¹ tradition, in the early teachings of the Buddha, emptiness has two primary meanings or reference points, and they always have to do with deep, mature meditation practice.

One is that emptiness is a mind that is in deep samādhi², called the samādhi of emptiness. Samādhis are always a feeling of tremendous well-being, of unification, connection, and wellness. We are not talking about a philosophy or reading a book and understanding something. We are talking about a deep, unified experience. The samādhi of emptiness is a state where the primary reference point—the primary characteristic of the state—is that it does not refer to anything as a self. It is not involved in the whole project of self. It is not involved in debating, arguing about, defending, or asserting the self. It is not concerned in any way with this concept, idea, or hologram we have about self. It is radically empty. That emptiness is almost akin to an emptiness of all clinging and all attachments.

The second reference point for emptiness is the emptiness of the mind free of all attachments and clinging, where the state of emptiness is equivalent to liberation itself. Full awakening, full liberation, is defined as the radical, complete, thorough absence of greed, hate, and delusion—absence of clinging and craving. It is not just the absence of self-preoccupation, but something deeper. So, there are two deep states of emptiness.

In the Mahayana³ tradition, emptiness has other meanings. There are many things that the word emptiness refers to. In the Mahayana tradition, the most common is the teaching that nothing has inherent existence. Nothing exists in some kind of inherent way where it is continuous, permanent, and solid. In the early Buddhist tradition, you get to the same place. That Mahayana idea helps the mind relax, let go, not cling to anything, and have a kind of intimacy with life—a very deep connectivity to life because there are no ideas and concepts that get in the way of intimacy with all life at the moment.

In the Theravada tradition, that experience comes from something called not emptiness, but "signless" (animitta)⁴—absence of signs. This means the absence of signification. The mind usually takes something in to recognize what it is. If I pick up this striker for the bell, there is something about its shape, its color, and the leather for hitting the bell that signifies it is a striker. But there are times when the mind is so still and quiet that it is not assigning signification. It is not using memory to look for the things that tell me "this is what the thing is." It leaves things radically alone. Without this extra work of signification, of looking for a sign, of fixating on the sign of what something is, things inherently in themselves are not the sign or the signification. Again, the mind loosens up and lightens up.

So, where does this emptiness, the signlessness, this idea of letting go really deeply leave us? It leaves us with freedom. Emptiness and liberation. Emptiness and freedom. Where does that leave us? It does not leave us with nothing whatsoever. It leaves us without the attachments, the solidification, and the reifications that interfere with being fully present here for this experience now—the fullness of our life.

I think there is a deep kind of faith, understanding, and experience that both Mahayana Buddhism in its emptiness teaching and Theravada Buddhism in its emptiness teaching share. It is that there is deep human functioning still going on. There is functioning of the heart, functioning of the depths within us, in which there can be love, in which there can be compassion, care, kindness, and goodwill. Not because we have to, not because we should, and not because we are practicing to do it. But because when all attachments are released—at least enough, at least temporarily—the best of the non-conceptual world of who we are shines forth.

So: emptiness, empty, emptying, and emptiness. We have one more talk tomorrow. Thank you very much, and I look forward to emptying out maybe all I have to say on this topic tomorrow.