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Guided Meditation: Vast Empty Awareness; Dharmette: Emptiness (5 of 5) Emptiness of Awareness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 07, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Vast Empty Awareness

Hello and welcome to this Friday morning meditation in Redwood City. I am delighted to be here. How I'm feeling at this moment is relevant to the topic of this week: emptiness.

It feels a little bit like a dream. It is dreamlike to be getting up in the morning, coming down here in the dark, setting up all this electronics, and talking into an empty room while at the same time feeling this warm, heartfelt connection to names in the chat. Knowing some of the people who are here—some of you have been doing this for a long time—is an amazing, dreamlike experience that is very heartwarming.

The topic of emptiness is often associated with the world being dreamlike. In the teachings of emptiness in the Theravada¹ tradition, or the Insight tradition, it is really encouraging us and giving us the background to help us understand the value of not clinging to anything. We should not take this amazing capacity to be aware and have it bottled up, frozen, stopped, or contracted. We don't want it to be heavy and dense. Rather, we want our capacity to be aware to be phenomenally light and soft, as if it has no weight.

In doing so, we are not solidifying awareness. We are not tightening up around things or concepts. That lack of solidification, contracting, or clinging can give a dreamlike feeling. Unless you have nightmares, a dreamlike feeling suggests that things are kind of insubstantial, floating, or like a hologram—not exactly real, but not unreal.

I will guide you a little bit in this way.

Assume a meditation posture. First, feel the substantial nature of this body. Feel the weight of the body against your chair, cushion, floor, or bed—where the weight of your body makes contact with the surface that holds you up against the pull of gravity.

Take a deep inhale and exhale. Feel the contact and relax. Release into that support that holds your weight. You are here now, breathing naturally and normally.

On the inhale, feel places in your body where you are holding, tense, tight, or contracted. Even if it is slight—something which wouldn't usually be called tension, but is an ever-so-slight tightening of the muscles around the hands.

On the exhale, relax. Relax the places of holding. You might have something around the elbows or the shoulders. Maybe a slight softening in the face, around the mouth and the eyes.

Maybe there's tension associated with your thinking mind, the activity of thinking. As you exhale, soften, relax, and open the thinking mind. Then, lower your attention into your torso to feel the experience of breathing—the comings and goings of inhale and exhale.

Feel the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, and the rhythm of expansion and contraction. Notice that you're aware of your body breathing. There are very simple cognitive moments of recognition of breathing in and breathing out. There are shifting, changing cognitions, and shifting, changing moments of sensation.

See if the sense of being aware of breathing can be like a wide-open window. An open window is mostly an absence that allows the breeze and light to come in. Just like the openness in the window has no weight or substance, awareness—like a window—has no substance and no weight. It both is something and isn't something.

It is a receptivity and openness in which what you are aware of doesn't linger or settle. What is known and felt is almost as if it has no weight or size. The receptivity in the mind that knows and feels the experience is like an open window that doesn't resist anything. It does not hold on to anything.

Whatever you know, know it lightly. If you know an in-breath as an in-breath, know it so lightly that the knowing has no weight or substance. It's almost like a hologram. It comes and goes, with nothing there to hold on to.

Being conscious of breathing is weightless in and of itself. It is empty of substance, empty of self, empty of past and future. The simplest way of being conscious is like an open window. And what comes through the window is equally weightless in how it comes through consciousness—how it exists in consciousness.

The body might feel like it has weight and substance. The breathing might have very particular, clear sensations that are felt. But being conscious of it—being conscious of the sensations—has no weight or substance. Stay close to the lightness of consciousness. The emptiness of it is like an open window, empty of any glass interfering with what comes through.

As you are mindful of what's happening in the present, can you find your way to being aware with ease, without any effort? If you make no effort whatsoever, how are you aware?

Can there be hearing with no effort? Even with your eyes closed, can there be seeing with no effort, without a decision to see? Can there be sensing of the body that simply happens on its own—sensations that arise without a decision on your part?

Even if you are trying to do something with your awareness, notice what comes into awareness effortlessly and lightly. In that effortless way, does the feeling of effortlessness come along with being free of state and substance? Not the sensations, but how they are known, how they appear effortlessly.

Once you're aware, you might make an effort to continue being aware. Relax and look around to what arises effortlessly. Notice what is known without effort in the vast emptiness of the mind.

New sensations and experiences may appear effortlessly, perhaps very subtly. When they first appear in that effortlessness, are they empty of clinging, empty of attachment?

The way in which things appear in consciousness effortlessly can then be recruited into effortful awareness. If that's the case, relax, allow, and be ready for what next comes effortlessly. Effortless awareness has no weight, no substance. There is an emptiness of substantiality.

Then, turn that effortless awareness to notice what you know effortlessly about the people you might encounter today. How do you hold them in the same soft, empty field of consciousness so that others don't land, stop, or get caught in your awareness? They appear, and they pass through. You see others, but you don't cling. You don't get tight or contracted.

In that open space of awareness, let your tender heart vibrate and radiate. Let the warmth of your heart flow into that awareness, into that space. Let your inner warmth and care include all the people you encounter.

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Emptiness (5 of 5) Emptiness of Awareness

Hello and welcome.

The topic for this week is emptiness. This is a topic which has received a lot of philosophical analysis. There is a very good book about Mahayana emptiness called The Emptiness of Emptiness², where you can get a sense of the philosophy and complexity of this kind of teaching.

There have been many interpretations of it. Some interpretations posit absolute statements about the nature of reality. In philosophy, that's called ontology. Others point to the deep experiential ways in which emptiness is an expression of some profound natural capacity we have for awakening and liberation.

In the Theravada world, emptiness is a topic that is closely related to practice—awareness practice and mindfulness practice. That gives us a clue that it is not meant to be philosophical or about the nature of reality, but is much closer to how we experience things. It's not exactly about the nature of awareness, which goes back to philosophy or ontology. The reality of awareness—the reality of anything—is not that important. What is important is the immediate present-moment experience of it that helps us to see and understand how we get caught, how we suffer, how we become free, and how we thrive with a wonderful inner life that can grow.

In this regard, emptiness in the Theravada tradition is really pointing back to ourselves, to experience, not to reality or philosophy.

In later Buddhism, there were some schools that posited that the fundamental building blocks of reality, which they called dharmas, had some kind of inherent nature—an essential, permanent, lasting kind of substance in the middle of them. That became the later Buddhism. The Mahayana³ critiqued that and said, "No, nothing has any essential nature." They then assumed that all the earlier schools held this belief. Our Theravada school has been critiqued for having this belief, and therefore for not really having a deep understanding of emptiness because we don't have this belief that all dharmas have no inherent essence or self-nature.

However, we just talk about it in different ways. To critique our early tradition using vocabulary that was born hundreds of years after it began is to take inappropriate concepts and assume that because a specific concept is not there, the understanding is somehow missing.

In the Theravada tradition, the word they use relates to "heartwood." There is a word, sara⁴, which means the heartwood of a tree, but can also mean the essence of something. The emphasis in the Theravada is that nothing in our direct experience—nothing in the way we experience things—has any heartwood or essential nature. So, rather than saying there is no essential nature, we say there is no sara. The later word used is svabhava⁵. Sva means self, and bhava means nature or becoming.

In our tradition, the primary ways in which we get attached to self, construct the self, and construct experience have to do with the Five Aggregates (or bundles)⁶:

1. Appearance (Form): How things appear to us. How they appear is different from what they are, though we often assume they are the same.
2. Sensations (Feeling): How things are sensed is not simply innocent sensing. We participate in the world of sensing with values, attachments, and interpretations that magnify, diminish, or affect what we sense.
3. Recognition (Perception): We are not innocent bystanders who see everything accurately. We interpret all the time. If we see a green light at an intersection, we know it means "go." A red light means "stop." A red light flashing on a car behind us suggests a police or emergency vehicle. We interpret contextually and recognize it. That recognition is a learned phenomenon; we bring in our memories and ideas to recognize it.
4. Mental Fabrications (Volitional Formations): We tell ourselves stories about life and ourselves. Humans are story-makers and story-livers. We live in amazingly abstract stories built upon one another. These mental constructions are sometimes more real to us than what is actually happening. I have certainly succumbed to making up a story or interpretation of what I thought happened, only to find out later it wasn't true. But at the time, I believed it was true, to my detriment and maybe to others' as well.
5. Cognition (Consciousness): Moments of cognition, when strung together, give the illusion or sense that there is a permanent, ongoing field of consciousness available to us.

The Buddha talked about all this and said each of these five bundles is empty. He used three different words for empty: tuccha (empty/vain), rittaka (hollow/false), and suñña (void). He offered a poem [in the Phena Sutta] that goes like this:

Appearances are like a lump of foam. Sensations like water bubbles. Recognition is like a mirage. Mental fabrications like a banana tree trunk. And cognition, consciousness, is like a magic show.

Appearances are like a lump of foam. He used the analogy of a lump of foam floating down the Ganges River. There is the river, but then there is that which is even more insubstantial than the water: the foam on top of it. How things appear to us has to do with how we construct, select, interpret, and understand. Appearance is this extra thing the mind does, and that extra thing is like foam—it has no substance.

Sensations are like water bubbles. I think what they are talking about here is rain falling on the surface of a lake, creating little bubbles or wavelets. They come and go very fast; they don't last long. There is no permanence there.

Recognitions are like a mirage. When we recognize something, we are often projecting and overlaying something on top of it. What we overlay—our projections—is like a mirage. We make it into something that is sometimes practical and useful, but it is created by the mind. When a whole society participates in that, it can seem real, but it is actually more like a useful interpretation. It is still like a mirage in how it is created by the mind.

Mental fabrications are like a banana tree. The trunk of a banana tree (or plantain tree) is not really a trunk. It consists of leaves wrapped around each other very tightly. If you cut it, it is hollow in the middle; it has no heartwood. The stories we live in might be fascinating and useful—they hold up all the "bananas" we produce—but in essence, the story-making mind and the fabrications we make have no solid core. They just hold themselves up until they don't.

Finally, cognition or consciousness is like a magic show. This refers to the way in which individual moments of cognition, when strung together quickly, give the magic illusion of a permanent, broad, ongoing field of consciousness. Sometimes people get attached to that and make grand philosophical and religious conclusions based on it. But what we do with moments of cognition is like a magic show.

What all these have in common is that the Buddha is not saying the world is empty, but that how the mind constructs, interprets, and holds onto it is empty.

The amazing, shocking, difficult, and inspiring thing about the teachings of emptiness is that it points out that it is possible to experience the emptiness of awareness, cognition, and how we know things. There is no heartwood there. There is no substance. And there, we can find our freedom.

There is no statement about reality being empty that dismisses its importance or says that it is not valuable to be present, caring, and involved in the world. It is a teaching that says we can know the world in a way that is free. We can know it with ease and peace because the construction of reality that we have in the mind is empty.

So: loosen up, lighten up, soften up. That is freedom.

That is the grand conclusion to this week on emptiness. I hope this has been interesting for you. For those of you who have some background in Mahayana Buddhism, maybe you can see some resonance or overlap between these traditions. Maybe it suggests that the big divide between Mahayana teaching emptiness and Theravada allegedly not having it is overcome, and that we are actually sharing this profound teaching.

Thank you. I look forward to being back on Monday.