Emptiness...

What has the yoga practitioner been looking for for so many years?

To get to know the part of you which is not you. You can only say, "I am not the body, emotions and thoughts;" but before saying that you must know what the body, emotions and thoughts are. To know yourself calls for listening, being receptive, open. In this opening all refers to yourself. If you are completely open to the expressions of life, they refer to life, because they are only life and nothing else. So when you learn what you are not, you are learning what is an expression of yourself. And, pedagogically, it is better to go this way; to investigate first what you are not, to understand profoundly what it is that you are not. And it is important to do this in the moment itself. When fear and anxiety appear, when hate and all the feelings appear; see them on the field, in the moment they occur. You have to be alert and open, and at a certain moment the openness will refer to itself. Because what you are fundamentally is only openness. Openness is not an object, it is quite simply emptiness, empty of objects, a question mark. So you cannot affirm what you fundamentally are. If you do, you make it an object and it belongs to what you are not.


Jean Klein
Transmission of the Flame
Third Millennium Publications
Santa Barbara
1990