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Guided Meditation: Empty of Projections; Dharmette: Emptiness (2 of 5) Empty of Self - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 04, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Empty of Projections
Hello and welcome. This week I am discussing the topic of emptiness. For this guided meditation, I would like to mention two things.
One of the characteristics of human mental functioning is the ability to predict, assume, and generalize in order to find our way through life. We use our imagination and our thoughts. But the downside is that we sometimes project onto things what is not there. We project our values, our judgments, our bias, and our assumptions in ways that turn out to be wrong.
Part of what meditation does is give us the experience of sensing, feeling, knowing, and observing without any projections—without the extra. So, we become empty of our projections. In meditation, it's usually wise to err on the side of having less rather than more. So, even being empty of a state of consciousness, awareness, or beingness where we're free or empty of judgments and commentary.
Second, our attention is often filled with our preoccupations. In meditation, we err on the side of emptying our mind of its preoccupations. Part of the way this works is to simply recognize what is empty, how things are empty, and then from there appreciate that freedom, that peace, that ease.
So to begin the meditation, gently close your eyes. Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths, emptying and releasing ways in which you hold yourself tense. Tension in the body. Letting your breathing be normal.
Relax the thinking mind. Relaxing the tension or agitation connected to thinking. And then taking a couple of minutes here to relax more deeply in the mind and the head. The space between the ears, behind the forehead—to soften and open the area of your brain between your ears.
Almost as if you can relax your ears themselves. The ear canal deep in the ears. And then allow yourself to hear the sounds around you. So it isn't so much that you're actively listening as you are relaxing, opening, and allowing the natural functioning of hearing to hear. Hear my voice. Hear sounds. If there are no sounds, in a relaxed, maybe imaginary way, hear the silence.
Allow yourself to hear open, 360 degrees, not searching for any particular sound. Allowing whatever sounds come, whatever silence comes.
And maybe whatever sounds you hear, they arise free of your making them. Free of you intending them, making them willfully. The sounds in a certain way are empty of anything that you can identify as who you most are. The sounds are empty of self—yourself. Just sounds arising. The space through which the sounds travel is also empty of self.
Can you feel, sense, or recognize how sounds and silence—maybe space—can be empty of your projections, your ideas, your desires? You might have ideas, projections, assumptions, judgments, but those are clearly distinct. Allowing the sounds to simply be themselves, independent of any attribution. Any self-referencing. Any projections, assumptions, likes, or dislikes.
Any preferences and ideas about the sounds are clearly independent of the sounds themselves. Those projections, if they mingle or are painted on top of the sounds, on top of the silence, is like painting with watercolors on a moving river. The paint immediately disperses, flows, and disappears.
Allowing yourself to hear sounds in and of themselves. The simplest way in which they are empty of any idea of what they are in and of themselves.
Relaxing the thinking mind. Softening tension in the mind. And then in the same way that you're listening to sounds, maybe still with a metaphor of listening, listen to the sensations of your body breathing. Allow yourself to sense them and feel them without projections, without assumptions, liking and disliking. Those might still occur, but stay close to how the actual sensations of breathing are empty of those ideas. Breathing occurs independent, free. The ideas that you have about the breathing.
The experience of breathing can be empty of self, empty of ideas of self.
To sit here quietly allowing breathing, the sensations of breathing, to be free of the ideas, projections, expectations. Free of anything associated with you being the doer. You being capable or incapable. Allowing breathing to occur without the imposition of any ideas. Breathing empty of self. Just breathing.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, allow your attention, your thoughts, your imagination to spread around the community you're in, the land you're on, out across province and state, country, the whole world. The phenomenally uncountable majority of things in the world are empty of you. They are free of you. Your ideas of you, your thoughts of you, your feelings of you.
The world is empty of you except for how you project onto it, how you interpret it, your ideas of it. For a few moments, allow the world to be as it is, empty of you. Most of the world is empty of you.
Let that be a gift to the world. Let that give more space, more freedom for everything just to be simple. And for you to become so simple that you don't have to operate all the time on ideas of me, myself, and mine. It's fine to have those ideas, but they are ideas—maybe accurate enough ideas. But give yourself the great benefit of your thought streams, your awareness, your sense of beingness to be empty of those ideas of me, myself, and mine. Everything is just allowed to be as it is.
And then picking up the idea of kindness, goodwill, compassion. Picking up the idea that you can offer some degree of goodwill, care, love to this world of ours. Picking up the idea that you can spread—that you can have thoughts of goodwill, well-wishing that spreads from you out into the world. Like a gentle sound that travels through the air to touch the world and wish the world well.
Almost as if you've emptied the world of self-ideas and projections. So you're a cleaner broadcasting of goodwill.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And if you're going to have projections and judgments, ideas about this world, maybe more often those can be ones of kindness, compassion, and care.
May this practice we do support us to spread more goodness into the world.
Thank you.
Dharmette: Emptiness (2 of 5) Empty of Self
Good morning and good day. Welcome to this second talk on emptiness. It is sometimes considered to be one of the most profound teachings of Buddhism. The Buddha himself, in the suttas, referred to some of his teachings as being profound, deep like a deep ocean, and concerning emptiness.
So this idea of emptiness is profound. One of the entry points to this topic is the way that certain things are empty. Suññatā1—in the teachings, the representation of this experience or idea of emptiness is that of a delightful meditation cabin or hut deep in the woods. Safe, content, a good place to sit and meditate. The little hut is empty; there's nothing, just empty space. There's nothing to distract us, nothing to get caught up in, nothing to get involved in. Just sitting for the afternoon, maybe in an empty building.
The idea of inner meditation is becoming like that empty hut—becoming empty. Empty of what? Empty of distractions, empty of preoccupations, empty of reactivity, empty of preferences for and against, empty of judgments. Empty of the things that keep the mind busy, spinning, and going.
To realize, to become empty of these things is not to become "empty"—you know, stupid or something—but rather it is to allow a deeper freedom to be experienced. The freedom and well-being and all the benefits of that to come to us.
One of the things we begin realizing as the mind gets quieter—and we stop spinning, ruminating, and thinking all the time—is we start understanding how much the mind imagines things. We imagine the past. We imagine the future. To a certain degree, we're making up the past by telling ourselves the story. And even more so, we're making up the future; the future can't be predicted. Or we're living in fantasies that are made up. Or we're living in judgments of things. Some people spend most of their time judging what is right and wrong.
And we're living in our projections. Sometimes these are about ourselves. We sit there ruminating about our problems, our difficulties, our view of self. The mind is not empty of self-preoccupation. Not only is it not free of self-preoccupation, it's not empty of the painful ways in which we think about ourselves—the critical ways, the undermining ways, the discouraging ways. These just kind of keep going.
They are projections that we overlay on ourselves. They are projections we overlay on others. Probably some of you have had the experience of people projecting onto you their prejudice, their bias, their assumptions, their interpretations—projecting onto you how you were a long time ago, not realizing how much you've changed.
To begin appreciating how much we do this projection, we see through the filter of ideas. So much of what we actually touch, see, smell, and hear, to an amazing degree, in and of itself is already free of your self-ideas, your self-projections, your self-assumptions.
I have this bell here. Maybe I can say it's my bell, but there's no "me" or "my" in the bell itself. That's an idea I have. And it's not even an accurate idea, because it's more conventionally considered to be IMC's bell. But the idea of possession does not exist in the bell itself. The bell is free of that idea. It's just an object. But if I'm caught in the spinning mind of possessions and "me, myself, and mine" and greed and desires, then there's no peace.
So much of the world is empty of the projections. It turns out there's a delightful, liberating way to leave ourselves alone. To be able to not have projections onto ourselves. Not project any kind of idea of "me, myself, and mine," even ones that are accurate enough.
If I cut my fingernails, it's my fingernails I'm cutting, not someone else's. But once the fingernails are on the bathroom counter, I don't really think of them as mine in the same way as when they were on my body. They're kind of like an object there. Like the toothpaste tube which is right next to it; it's conventionally mine in some way, but I don't spend much brain time thinking about my toothpaste tube. It's a waste of my time. I don't think about the clippings as mine, but also I don't spend much of my time thinking about my fingernails being mine. I don't define myself by my fingernails, but I could. But that's kind of a waste of brain power.
We play this game of "me, myself, and mine" a lot. It can fill our minds. It's possible through meditation to quiet that and not have that projection.
In Buddhism, the idea is that some of the deeper ideas of who we are—of an essential self, an essence of self, the idea of an ongoing, unchanging self—is not really accurate. It can't be found. There's a projection of it. There's a construction of that idea. There's a feeling of that idea. But it's possible to really understand that, quiet the mind enough, still the mind, and realize that. Watch and see the projection of self onto whatever is happening. And to appreciate that, actually, without that projection there's the experience of things just existing in their simplicity without the projection of self, without the idea of self.
The Buddha was explicit about that: the world is empty of self and what belongs to self.
Why could he say that? Because he knew what happens when the thinking mind, the projecting mind, the constructing mind becomes quiet enough to see how much all ideas of self are a construction of the mind. They have some conventional role, value, and conventional truth to them. Like this bell conventionally is IMC's bell. The glasses I have conventionally are my glasses. It's a little awkward if someone walks away with them and I don't see very well. But they don't hold it essentially. I don't have to be attached to that.
So part of these teachings of emptiness is to really appreciate how things are empty. Empty of projections, empty of ideas, empty of what the mind constructs. Even the idea of self is itself empty of self. The primary emptiness that this practice is leading to is the idea that the world is empty of self.
In the Theravāda2 tradition, the primary way of understanding this is not conceptually. It is not by logic that tells you that everything is constructed, everything arises conditioned dependent on everything else and has no essence. It's not as an idea, but rather it is a deep quieting of the mind to be able to perceive how, in the present moment, all sensations, all experiences, all thoughts in a certain kind of way are flowing and shifting and changing.
It's in the impermanence, the inconstancy of things that we see so clearly that when we have an idea, a projection, an assumption, a judgment, it's like painting with watercolors on the surface of a river. It doesn't stick, doesn't go anywhere. It just kind of dissolves and evaporates or disappears.
In the changing nature of everything, there is no self to be found in anything, including in ourselves. And rather than being something that diminishes us or something that hinders us, it actually frees us to be more intelligent, to be wiser, more sensitive, more caring for this world. Intelligence, care, creativity are all things that flow within us when we don't live caught in the projections, assumptions, beliefs, and opinions about me, myself, and mine.
To know and experience oneself as free of self, empty of self, is part of this teaching of emptiness.
So thank you, and we will continue with emptiness tomorrow.