Emptiness, Everything and Quantum Mechanics

Written on January 6, 2010 by Tom Stine

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I have a good friend who often debates with me the seemingly separate experiences of “emptiness” and “everything” that arise as a part of awakening. I often take the emptiness side of the debate, as the awakening I experienced was very much one of emptiness as all sense of what I am, a “me,” a self, an “I” as an individual completely vanished. I spent a delightful 24 hours with not one shred of identity. “I” was as empty as can be.

My friend, on the other hand, got the “everything” part first. You see, awakening seems to have two aspects to it, if we can call them that, an emptiness aspect and an everything aspect. Someone who has fully realized the truth of their being knows themselves to be absolutely empty, nothing, no self, no “I” anywhere and, at the same time, everything in existence. That’s the full realization.

Recently, my friend sent me an email in which he said:

“I had my first direct experience of emptiness yesterday during an hour long
meditation. It was a shock. Still processing it.”

The discussion that follows is based on my reply to him with some additional thoughts:

Be careful with emptiness! I say that half-jokingly, but the old Zen guys used to warn about “getting drunk on emptiness.” I know exactly what they mean. I can “dive” into the emptiness at times and appear to be completely free of everything. It can be a bit intoxicating and also quite liberating. And when I come out of the emptiness? Ah, now that’s what’s curious! I’m not quite as free somehow and often seem to get a touch lost back in the mind. However, every time I spend a little bit of time in emptiness, the “problems” I have get lighter and lighter and the freedom deeper and deeper. Someday all that is going to cease.

One of the first real tastes I had of everything occurred when I was sitting one day and really looked at some things around me and recognized that the emptiness was in everything I was looking at. Then it hit me: everything I see IS emptiness. And then I got a taste of everything. A week later, I did a little more of that, and then I knew that I was the tree I was looking at, and I could literally feel the tree. “We” were nothing and everything at the same time.

That said, something I heard Adyashanti say once, and Nisargadatta used to talk about often, may be the resolution to our debate about emptiness and everything. Nisargadatta would talk about being “beyond” both emptiness and everything. Beyond all hint of manifestation. Beyond all opposites. While he would EXPERIENCE everything and nothing, he knew that what he was, in fact, was beyond even that. He would say that what he was contained everything and nothing.

Adyashanti calls this The Void. He says there’s absolutely nothing he can really say about it except maybe to say that everything, including emptiness, arises out of the Void. If you can say anything about it, it would be that The Void is pure potential. And even that isn’t it. It isn’t a state, it isn’t anything. Yet, it is what we all are and everything is.

I’ve been intrigued lately by a retired physicist, Amit Goswami, who wrote one of the most popular textbooks on quantum mechanics (for physicists, that is, so he is the real deal when it comes to science). He was in “What the Bleep.” I’ve tried reading one of his books, but he isn’t the best writer. He’s too scattered, and he really doesn’t get the extent to which the idea of “consciousness” goes. But, that said, he’s still worth reading, and he helped me construct a model of how the manifest arises. It goes something like this:

Before I go further, please note: the above diagram is a MODEL of how the apparent world might work, not Reality. It is something to play with, something for the mind to have fun with as it tries to make sense of what it will never make sense of. If it helps, great. But never, ever take things like the above as the Truth. They aren’t. That said….

The cool thing Goswami did for me was help me see where consciousness fit into the picture of how the physical world works. The key is that awareness or consciousness doesn’t arise out of the physical world, but is the generator of the physical world. I knew that from my spiritual experiences, but I was having some cognitive dissonance from all the science and psychology I had learned in the past. Now I get it. One small belief change and it all seems to work.

What’s really amazing is how the manifest world, beginning with the notion of Everything and through quantum particles, atoms and the visible world arises and subsides quite spontaneously and frequently in and out of consciousness and the Zero Point Field. Real, observable quantum particles arise and collapse back into this ground state. All of our seeming physical universe is a continuous play in and out of consciousness. Needless to say, I will have a lot more to say about these ideas in the future.

The Zero Point Field is a very interesting concept. I had heard of it, but I thought that some New Agey people had taken an idea in physics and distorted it and came up with a goofy explanation of all the woo-woo stuff out there. However, if you read the actual physics, the Zero Point Field is a very solid concept in the world of quantum physics. It is a massive, infinite background “field” of “energy” (neither term really means anything, but that’s a different story) out of which literally every aspect of physics arises. It is so fundamental that every physics equation written ignores it because they can’t do anything with it. From what I can tell from the physics, and interfacing it with the spiritual, the Zero Point Field is the first manifestation of Consciousness. Or, who knows, maybe they are co-equal. Hard to say. But fun to play with. Nonetheless, there really is an interface between the spiritual and the manifest world, and it is right there at the boundary of consciousness and this field of energy. How cool is that?

Namaste.

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