Emptiness

And now for a different kind of empty:

When emptiness is possible,

Everything is possible;

Were emptiness impossible,

Nothing would be possible…

…Contingency is emptiness

Which, contingently configured,

Is the middle way.

Everything is contingent;

Everything is empty.

Nagarjuna

Freeing your mind from suffering, liberation from anguish, required recognizing emptiness according to the Buddha. As Stephen Batchelor wrote in his translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center, “Just as nature or an abandoned dwelling is devoid of human ownership, so experience is intrinsically neither ‘me’ nor ‘mine.’ Recognizing mental an physical processes as ’empty’ of self was, for the Buddha, the way to dispel the confusion that lies at the origin of anguish, for such confusion configures a sense of self as a fixed and opaque thing that feels disconnected from the dynamic, contingent and fluid processes of life…To dwell in emptiness means living with the ambiguous and non-dualistic nature of life.”