Emptiness...

In discovering this dimension of true nature we realize that this selfessness is the ultimate nature of everything. The absolute turns out to be the final ontological status of all things, the ultimate status lit of existence of all forms of manifestation. When we inquire into this final ontological nature we find nothing, no object of perception. We simply feel light and empty, free and unencumbered. And everything in manifest reality has the same quality of lightness and emptiness.

All forms appear as diaphanous forms, empty of substance. It is as it forms are holograms, forms of light,empty of any solidity or heaviness. Everything is transparent, with no opaqueness anywhere. The manifest forms—houses and furniture, mountains and rivers, trees mid animals, men and women, thoughts and feelings—appear as particulars of a dynamic unfolding multidimensional field; but it is a field of lightness, as if it is an emptiness that luminates and its lumination is the forms of appearance.

Such realization challenges our normal perception of the opaqueness arid solidity of forms. When we perceive a rock we do not only see or touch a form. We see a totally opaque shape, and touch a solid and substantial object. By realizing the absolute nature of the rock—by perceiving the form of the rock while simultaneously recognizing its final ontological mode—the rock seems to lose both opaqueness and solidity. Loss of opaqueness does not mean we can see in physical objects behind it; it means we can see through its appearance to its deepest nature.

We see through the color and shape, as if its appearance suddenly becomes thinner, so thin it is transparent. We can look inside, so to speak, but then we simply see nothingness, infinity of space. This shows that the normal opaqueness is due to cognitive filters, whose absence makes all objects transparent to their inner nature, their final constituency. We do not necessarily see the atoms and the elementary particles, for these are merely the smaller constituents of physical appearance, which also become transparent iii reveal ultimate nature.


A.H.Almaas The Inner Journey Home
pp. 391-2